Part 2: From Unpublished Author to New York Times Bestseller – How it Happened

It's time for Part 2, where I talk about a manuscript I threw in the bin and how it turned out to be the best failure I've ever had. And the one word I believe in as a writer - endurability.

A couple of weeks ago, I started to tell the story of how I went from a first book that sold just 1,500 copies to a New York Times bestselling author, a journey I still can’t believe has happened to me, a journey I hope continues for many more years to come.

From Unpublished Author to New York Times Bestselling Author – How it Happened (Part 1)

It’s time for Part 2 of that series but first a few things that might be of interest:

• The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre won an award this week! And for Best Historical Novel, no less!

• If you live in North America, Goodreads is giving away 25 copies of The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre so you can see for yourself if you think it deserved to win! Good luck!

• My last online event for the book tour is coming up at the end of the week, just in time for Women’s History Month. It’s free and you can register here.

• Next week’s post is the monthly Bijoux List for paid subscribers, my favourite post and yours too judging by the comments. I’ve been watching Daisy Jones & the Six and I have many thoughts about adaptations, so I’ll be covering that amongst lots of other topics – as well as sharing the blurb for the first time for The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard. Yay!

Onwards!

It’s almost impossible to distil a thirteen year writing career into one post so this series is going to end up being a three-parter. It’s been an eventful thirteen years, which I’m glad about because it’s taught me that writing is an uncertain business and there will always be highs and lows. I think perhaps if I’d started out achieving the highs straight away, the lows would have been harder to continue on through because I wouldn’t have understood that they’re just a part of this life. Resilience might be an overused word these days, but it’s a quality every writer needs.

Sometimes we cry and sometimes we laugh but the lows make the highs all the sweeter, I promise. We just need to hang on until we finally make it to the highs. So, let’s rewind to around 2012-2013.

Me at the time of these events. Yes I’ve always been a hand talker!

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That time when I threw a manuscript into the trash …

As I said in the last post, my first two books were literary/contemporary fiction rather than the historical novels I write now. After they were published, I began to write a third book that was also squarely in the literary/contemporary genre. And, strangely, I hated the process of writing that book. I had to force myself to sit down at the desk every single day. When I reached the end of the first draft, I knew I didn’t have the heart to rewrite it multiple times like it needed. So I threw it in the trash. All 85,000 words of it.

It was a sobering experience.

In hindsight, the trash was the best place for it. But at the time, it felt like my writing career was at an end after just a couple of years. I didn’t know how to write my next book, nor what to write. I was a person who rarely failed at anything, but I’d failed to produce a third book.

Creative sulking

I didn’t write anything at all for the next month. I sat in a chair in my office with my favourite books piled up beside me and I reread them all. About halfway through that pile, I realised most of them were historical fiction. And it was the lightbulb moment I needed.

If I loved reading historical fiction so much, then why wasn’t I writing it?

I wasn’t writing historical fiction because I’d written my first book as part of a Masters program at university. And there was an expectation about the kind of book you were supposed to write in one of those programs. It needed to be weighty and serious, sad and grim, and nobody in the book was allowed to have any fun. So that’s the kind of book I wrote, because that’s what was expected.

My realisation made me ask myself another question. If all along I’d been writing the kind of book I thought I should write, then why not sit down and write the book I really wanted to write? And if I did that, what would it be?

Changing genres, changing agents and changing publishers

In the back of my mind, I’d been storing an idea for a historical novel about a woman trying to become one of the first female obstetricians in New York City in the 1920s. Not consciously, but there was something planted back there that was worth exploring. I’d been ignoring it, because I didn’t write historical fiction. But what if I did?

So I sat down at my desk, ignoring the voice in my head that said writers didn’t change genres because that meant I’d need to change agents and publishers too. It was hard enough to get an agent in the first place, let alone get a different one just because I suddenly decided to started writing in a genre my agent didn’t represent.

But I wrote the book anyway – another part of being a writer is learning to ignore the multitude of doubting, negative voices in your head – and it was the most wonderful, joyful experience, so very different to the experience of writing the book I threw in the trash. This time, I couldn’t wait to sit at my desk every day and keep writing.

I made it to the end of the first draft and I still loved it. I loved it enough to redraft it six or seven times. And then, miraculously, an agent picked it up. She made me rewrite the book one more time before she pitched it out.

Never become a writer unless you’re prepared to rewrite your book more times than you think is possible, and unless you’re prepared to work harder than you’ve ever known.

Even more miraculously, when my agent pitched the book out to publishers, we received multiple offers, which is every writer’s dream! It was the most exciting moment in my writing life up to that moment.

I eventually chose the offer from Hachette Australia and I’ve been with them in Australia ever since. That first historical novel was published under the title A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald. It sold reasonably well, but it certainly didn’t hit any bestseller charts. And it was only published in Australia at that time, not in any other country.

The original gorgeous cover for A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald – it’s still one of my favourite covers!

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My moment of crisis – when I nearly gave up

I then wrote my second historical novel, which I loved writing every bit as much as the first. That was published as Her Mother’s Secret. It also sold reasonably well too, but it didn’t set any charts on fire either. And it’s really hard to make a living from selling your books only in Australia. We just don’t have the population size. But no overseas offers had come in, even though I really, really wanted them.

And so came another of those huge moments of doubt, just like when I threw out that entire book. This time, I was sitting at my kitchen bench. It was school holidays. My three children were running around the house screaming, and I was trying to work on a copy edit. I couldn’t concentrate. I think I was still wearing my pyjamas, and I suddenly wondered if it was all worth it. It was the school holidays – shouldn’t I be playing with my kids rather than wishing they would be quiet?

Then I thought about all the time and all the effort I was putting into writing. So. Many. Hours. I hardly had time to talk to my husband. Anybody looking at the situation from the outside and calculating the number of hours I worked vs the return would say I was wasting my time. I knew I would definitely be earning much more money if I went back to marketing – and I’d certainly be wearing nicer clothes!

So I thought that maybe I should just quit.

Except that I loved writing so, so much. I couldn’t imagine my life without writing in it.

I decided to give myself just a little bit more time, to wait and see what happened when the next book came out. That was a book called The Paris Seamstress, otherwise known as my life changing book.

The book that changed everything … in a good way!

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Thank goodness I persevered …

It was lucky I decided to persevere. Because The Paris Seamstress was my first book to be picked up by an American publisher. I don’t know why. Maybe because it was set during WWII back at a time when there weren’t many books about that period. Maybe because it had the word Paris in the title! Or perhaps it was because I’d changed who handled my foreign rights – these are all the significant but intricate details of being an author that nobody tells you about and that you learn through trial and much error on the job.

I was so excited to be published internationally. But I didn’t have very high hopes of my US publishing career. Why would anybody buy a book written by someone who lived all the way over in Australia? I wondered. I thought it would probably sell only three or four copies, the rest would be sent back to the publisher, and my American publishing career would be over within a month.

But to my surprise (and maybe everyone else’s too!) the book started to sell reasonably well. It went into reprint. Not just once, but twice.

And then came the luck. The moment you can never predict or plan for, one that quite literally changed my life.

I’ll tell you all about that moment, and also the moment when my book hit the New York Times bestseller list in the next post in a couple of weeks time.

To finish off this post, I’m going to leave you with some words by Dani Shapiro, whose book Still Writing is one of my favourites about the writing process and the writing life. To endure in writing is key. Sometimes we think about enduring as something we do with gritted teeth, but to endure doesn’t only mean to simply tolerate something.

To endure is to outlast, to outlive, to keep the faith and keep going. To be the one still standing, like a column tall and proud. xx

Let me know what you think!

I’d love to hear from you in the comments! Any questions about my writing journey so far? Does some of it resonate with the rollercoaster of your own life, even though you might be doing something completely different to writing? What are your thoughts on endurability? And are you looking forward to Part 3?!