This is the first of twenty-five blog posts to celebrate my twenty-fifth published novel, A Skye Full of Stars.
How on earth did I get to twenty-five?
If you could see my younger self battling to get even a short story accepted, you’d know how far away twenty-five published novels then seemed. They were in dreamland … but I suppose so were the hundreds of short stories, features, writing how-to, columns and serials I’ve also published.
Here are 25 fun facts about my journey down Publication Road:
- I wrote two novels, laboriously typed and re-typed on paper with an electric typewriter. I cheerfully sent them out to publishers, who instantly sent them back. One day, I took them outside and threw them in the wheelie bin, and that’s the best place for them.
- Beginning to suspect that I needed more than my English O Levels and my RSA III in English had taught me, I embarked on what we now call ‘distance learning’ but was then a correspondence course.
- By the time I’d finished the course, I’d earned three-times what the course had cost me.
- A writer’s guide stated that if I could sell twenty short stories to newsstand magazines, editors of novels might look on me more kindly. That’s what I concentrated on.
- I sold my first short story to The People’s Friend on April 1st, 1996. I spent the fee of £65 on a new desk chair, which had wool in the cover and gave me a rash.
- As The People’s Friend didn’t publish my story for a while, my first published story was in My Weekly.
- Loosely speaking, going down the short story route on the way to publishing novels worked – except it was eighty-seven short stories and a serial before I got The Call from my then agent to say she had an offer for my first novel, Uphill All the Way.
- It was actually my eighth novel, but I went back to some of the others and sold them later, so that’s immaterial.
- That night, I declared that novelists didn’t cook (I’ve since found this to be untrue) and my husband took me out to dinner.
- Uphill All the Way went out of print four years later and I self-published it. Later I rewrote it for Avon Books, and it did really well as A Home in the Sun, including being #1 in Malta for most of a summer.
- My second book, Family Matters, was later rewritten to become Want to Know a Secret. Love & Freedom became No Strings Attached. I’ve counted each only once, regardless of how many titles or launches each has had.
- I also wrote a writing guide, Love Writing, which I haven’t counted in the twenty-five as it wasn’t a novel.
- The Christmas Promise went to #1 in the UK Kindle chart. I laughed and cried and got in a state. Then followed five days of compulsive checking of Amazon rankings.
- The Little Village Christmas was my first Sunday Times bestseller. There have been several more since, but when my editor first stated this as a goal, I laughed and said, ‘Good luck with that.’
- A Christmas Gift was my first UK hardback.
- Love & Freedom (now called No Strings Attached)won a Readers Best Romance award.
- A Summer to Remember won a Romantic Novel of the Year Award. And I’d wanted one of those for ages.
- I’ve also won two HOLT medallions (Honouring Outstanding Literary Talent) and the Katie Fforde bursary.
- The bursary allowed me to attend the conference of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in a year when I didn’t think I could afford it.
- I’m now president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association.
- My books have been translated into fourteen languages. It’s weird not being able to read my own work. I like a copy of every edition, and keep them on a huge set of shelves my husband made me. [Image]
- My novels have sold well over a million copies in the English language.
- The Skye Sisters is my first trilogy of which A Skye Full of Stars is the second book.
- The third book will be called Over the Sea to Skye.
- I have no plans to stop writing.
