It's always rewarding to wander into a bookshop and see one's own book on the shelf! It brings home the sense - finally, after all those years of writing with no hope of publication! - that miracles can indeed happen. If, like me, you had no experience as a writer and no profile in the literary world, then it's all the more special. I confess that I wrote for about 15 years before my first commercially published novel, The Housemaid's Daughter, hit the shelves. My family, seeing me beavering away, would smile and give encouragement but no-one ever imagined that anything would emerge from my scribbling.
What was I doing in those 15 years?
Well, I completed a full length novel that became a "practice" for the real thing. It would never be published but it gave me the experience of writing something longer than a two-page business report! I also enrolled in a weekly Creative Writing class. This proved to be less about technique and more about the response of my classmates to what I was writing. If their gaze wandered, then I knew I had work to do. After the practise novel, I started in earnest on Housemaid. In the end, including the research, the book took about 6 years to complete. When no agents or publishers were interested, I self-published in the hope of getting noticed, and was lucky enough to be spotted by an agent. A commercial publication followed, with the book making its way around the world not only in English but many other languages, too. My second book, The Girl from Simon's Bay, took about 3 years, so I was getting more efficient both in the research and in plot/ character development. The latest, The Fire Portrait, took about the same length of time. And it turns out that the lessons I've drawn from each book have been crucial to writing the next.
People often ask how one manages to get published as an unknown, and I always reply that you need 3 things in your favour:
A great story
A dose of luck
And good timing... i.e. hopefully your book captures the zeitgeist!
Zeitgeist:
the defining spirit or mood of a particular period, as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time. The spirit of the age!
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