hi simon here from the national center for writing before we get into the episode i wanted to give you the heads up about our new creative writing online courses this term we have historical fiction crime fiction creative non-fiction script writing poetry and fiction courses so there is something for everyone these courses are co-designed with the university of east anglia and take place over 12 or 24 weeks depending on which one you go for and a mixture of exercises resources
zoom sessions and you get personal feedback on your writing from the tutors the courses begin in january 2022 but places do tend to sell out ahead of time so if you're interested don't wait too long it's a great way to kickstart your writing in the new year find out more at dot org nationalcenterforwriting.org uk forward slash cwo and now on with the episode you're listening to episode 175 of the writing life podcast from the national center for writing a weekly podcast for
anyone who writes i'm simon jones and i'm steph mckenna and it's the 3rd of december 2021 here in norwich as we're recording and we have a big christmas tree up in the great hall we do yesterday we finally got our lovely festive tree up in the great hall so i'm feeling i'm finally feeling a bit christmassy it's been a while since we've seen a lovely big tree up in the great hall at dragon hall and it's looking very cozy and lovely yes absolutely um what are you reading at
the moment steph i've just finished a book actually i finished a book last night it is the the latest book by taylor jenkins read who wrote who i think i spoke about taylor jenkins read and reading her book daisy jones in the six a little while ago on the podcast and i've just finished her most recent book malibu rising which was a bit of a different read for me because i read a lot of serious dark things this was a bit more sunkissed sort of big family drama on the beach the house getting
trashed that sort of thing very sort of california dreaming in a way and so i've just finished that and i'm doing a complete flip and i'm now reading the lottery and other stories by shirley jackson which is completely other end of the spectrum but uh it's for some reason one of the the collections of charlie jackson's writing that i haven't read before so i'm dipping into that at the moment how about you simon like you're just creating like reader whiplash for
yourself there i do all the time i got my spotify wrecked the other day and that every year it's like you're the only person in existence who moved from this pop act to this extremely loud band yeah i contain multitudes nice yeah well i'm currently reading neon magazine which is something that flow introduced me to and i just received my first issue and this is a it's a literary magazine but it kind of specializes in speculative and science fiction and that kind of stuff and it's
a mixture of poetry and photographs and artwork and short stories and yeah really interesting and lovely production quality as well and what i didn't realize when i ordered this one that the theme of this particular issue is uh city and it came with a cool fold-out map oh yes you were you were showing me this on camera it looked amazing i know yeah so i've not had time to dig into all the contents of the magazine yet but i'll report back once i've read more on
that note actually i should probably give a special shout out to the latest issue of hinterland which is the best new creative non-fiction and in the the latest issue issue nine there is a non-fiction essay by our very own former colleague alice kent who has been on the podcast before interviewing writers and she's written a wonderful piece in there which again is quite dark so i'm learning more about her through her creative writing now um but yes that's hinterland's absolutely wonderful and
people should pick it up if they're interested in creative nonfiction we highly recommend it so many brilliant little magazines full of amazing stuff i know and one day steph we're going to talk about fanzines on here as well i would absolutely love to it's uh it's a nice little passion project of mine and i think it's yeah zines are something that are i have been around for a very long time but people were doing amazing wonderful innovative things with them all the time so yeah
let's definitely have a chat about that one day yep early 2022 stay tuned okay on the podcast today we are talking with nicola may nicola is fascinating in that she's had a very successful self-publishing career but this year has published the first two books in a trilogy with hodder and stauton so it's a very unusual mixture of self-publishing and traditional publishing and kind of going back and forth between the two nicola specializes in romantic comedy so
you might have heard of her cockleberry bay series or more recently the work she's done with hodder is the fairylane market stuff yeah so there's loads of tips in here for people who want to try self-publishing but also who want to find out how to get in with a publisher as well and it kind of proves the point that these days it's not an either or thing you can actually kind of jump between the two depending on what suits particular projects wonderful so let's hand over to nicola
nicolette thanks very much for joining us on the podcast today absolute pleasure i was very nearly late for this interview talking with you because i foolishly checked twitter and then followed your link to millie johnson's blog about women's fiction that then led me down a rabbit hole which very nearly delayed this and it reminded me actually of the recent new york times kind of similar issue where instead of women's fiction and romance it was science fiction where
they uh credited jules verne as creating the genre and kind of forgot about mary shelley and some of some of the earlier female writers and yeah it was an interesting topic i mean presumably that's something that you you've bumped into a lot in your career yeah i've bumped into it a lot and people don't like the term chiclet i mean i don't even mind it i say that i write chick-lit with a kick because it isn't all fluffy and i think people do have this generalized opinion
that people who write um the coffee shop on the corner or in my example the corner shop in coca-cola bay that it isn't going to have substance and um a line that was said to me the other day was it's actually really hard to write an easy reading book and i concur with that we still have to do we write a good book start to finish middle end keep people enthralled um it's no different i mean yeah it's not ulysses but who actually wants to read ulysses so yeah a good book it's hard to write
regardless of the style or the genre isn't it yeah later on we're going to talk about how you've changed your publishing approach this year but first i kind of wanted to rewind back to the start and uh just find out kind of when you first decided to become a writer i suppose yeah i mean i'd love to have some great story that from four years old i've had this massive dream to become a writer but um actually i started late it wasn't until my thirties um still didn't really
have an urge i was there to run a half marathon and i was a real party girl and i thought you know what i'm gonna really try and run this marathon but i'm gonna write a diary about the training and i wrote this diary and it actually was really quite funny and it kind of gave me the bug for writing and i'm i always say i didn't finish the diary but i finished the marathon but then i started writing and yeah and i literally kept writing i just thought i've got to get some books down
i'm really enjoying this and it was sort of way back in like the early 2000s when nothing was really there wasn't self-publishing then there was everything was via manuscript to agents and things there wasn't any email even so um yeah i i was lucky in the fact though i found the right as an artist yearbook which i guess is the bible for everyone starting out with writing and anyone listening if they haven't got it i insist you do and i went through all the agents that
liked romantic comedy and i sent 18 letters off and i got 17 rejections and all of a sudden with this first book i'd written i got a yes from this agent and i couldn't believe it and the book was called starfish about a piscean woman who couldn't find love so dated each sign of the zodiac luckily enough the reader at the agency was a piscean absolutely loved it and the story goes on and her name's joan ditch and she stayed as my editor since then all those years so i just think
i i fake whatever you want to say you do make your own luck but it kind of that was such an in for me but that agent literally two years um tried to place me and couldn't and then let me go but i didn't give up i did keep writing i decided to self-publish and literally just went on the internet and i can't remember the guy's name but there literally was one post telling you how to self-publish and i followed it word for word and i managed to get my books printed and i got my lovely
upload ready for amazon and um yeah just did it all by myself yeah so what year would that have been oh gosh i'm trying to think now it must have been kind of when was it all kicking off was that sort of mid 2000s i guess that's when it started to become possible yeah as a thing yeah i mean it wasn't until 2011 that i did sort of get everything properly up and running and started my twitter profile and everything seriously um but still then i was only sort of selling a couple of hundred copies a
month and thought that was amazing and then in 2013 after i sort of set that up a publisher did approach me they were a small publisher and they said we want you for a seven book deal i was like this is it i was literally screaming i was running around the room um [Music] and i thought this is it but a lot of writers don't know that when you're with a publisher they take 90 of paperback sales 75 of ebook sales so even if you're doing averagely well you're not making enough money to just
be an author and i think because my site was always to be a number one bestselling author i had this inner drive and ambition i was not happy with being with a publisher so i managed to get my rights back and then i kind of thought what am i going to do i need to sort of get out there again but i don't like being with a publisher and then i think by that time it was a lot easier to be on amazon and i happened to go to the london book fair that year and again unlike some
authors i i'd go out to everything even though the london book fair isn't really for authors i don't think unless you're speaking or kind of sort of a higher echelon and um i missed the talk on the amazon kdp stand and i really wanted to hear it it was the managing director and i happened i thought oh i've missed it my train was late i thought i'm going to go on their stand anyway and as it happened the guy who'd done the talk was there and i said you could you give me 10 minutes of your
time anyway he gave me half an hour of his time and he carefully explained the best ways to promote myself on the platform i boldly gave him my book and said this is just coming out the corner shop in cocabre bay i'd love it if someone could have a look i think there's no way anyone would anyway i don't know if he looked at it but the tools that i was given and that chat i had that day um kind of saw me going up the charts slightly and then that was in april 2018 and then in
january 2019 i got to number one on amazon and as a self-published author it was a bit of a phenomenon and i kept checking my platform and i was selling 2 000 books a day i kept phoning my sister going oh my god it might be wrong there's 2 000 a day and it was like an electric meetup of books and now because i haven't got to number one since then i realized how extraordinary it was and what a success and achievement it was yeah i haven't looked back since so from kind of
three months after that i was able to give up my day job and now i do write full time that's amazing and so the book that uh really took off that was the first in the cuckleberry bay series is that right yeah and that was my ninth novel so it's kind of i just didn't give up yeah so it sounds like you were kind of coming into self-publishing at kind of the exactly the right time as it was all maturing and and becoming something that you could do seriously essentially writing
those initial nine books what was your kind of writing routine like so at that point you still had a day job by the sounds yes how are you balancing like the marketing and the business side and the writing and doing everything else i mean my right my work career um was marketing and pr and i think i'm lucky in that way as well because a lot of authors don't have that skill but i would write before work if i was in a boring contract i'd write during work behind my screen
um i would take holiday to edit and things like that because i thought i needed a sort of big chunk of time yeah i would just write whenever i could and i'm a real early bird so a lot of early morning writing somehow managed it and also i used to travel with my job so i had a lot of sort of airport down time you can write a lot when you're on a plane and and with the corner shop in cockleberry bay which i think is the first in the series what do you think like what was the
difference obviously you'd been uh trying all these different promotional marketing tactics and yeah over the each book you presumably learned stuff but yeah was there something specific about that book or was it timing or did you do something different what do you think i think i did what i never really wanted to do and as i went i went with the market and i was thinking because i'd written love me tinder about the dating i thought what an amazing title that's going to just rock the world um
the dating with the star signs somebody did 12 jobs in 12 months i was thinking these are amazing clever ideas but i didn't need that amazing clever idea i needed to look in the top 20 of rom-com and what was working and there were all these three books and the good thing about self-publishing is you can turn yourself around and say i can write a book in three months have it on the shelf in six i thought i'll do that and my dad's actually an artist he's 84 now and he still designs my covers even
now i'm with hodder and he'd actually bought a picture of a corner shop round which was a little sweet shop around the corner and it used to sell shops when i was a little girl in suites in the 70s and he handed me this picture i said dad thank you for the picture and you give me the most amazing idea i'm going to write a book about a corner shop i thought of chocolate and all the wonderful magic with that and then i thought i know devon and cornwell quite well i'm going
to throw it down there and it was as simple as that it was the market but also i i made it more about community i bought characters in that were old young damaged i didn't put um a typical chiclet heroine in i don't think she was 26 she was a foster girl she was a swearer she was a little fighter she wasn't a typical heroine and she turned her life around um it's really hard to pinpoint why it went to number one but something caught the magic and the reviews started coming and
when the reviews start coming you know that people are gonna buy it and also once it's in the amazon chart even if it's top 50 you sell books and that's what i try and say to people i talk to outside of podcast things is if you can get that book into any amazon shop and also and people don't want to hear this always just stick with amazon kdp it's a no-brainer if you're starting out yeah you can go to cobo and sell a few on itunes but if you're unknown amazon have
that platform where you can do all your promotions um they look after you basically if you are just with them they give you the tools to to be successful yeah so your experience of working with that platform sounds extremely positive oh 100 and it's so easy to use i mean i'm a complete technophobe and um it's just so simply laid out and then if you have problems there's the help and there's the forums and there's like a little university section to learn more
um the only thing i can't get my head around is amazon advertising because it's just so bitty and this click to whatever and i've tried for years and i'm yeah i'm not very good at it well it sounds like you maybe don't need to do it um i was going to ask actually about because you know your books this this was the big shift wasn't it in self-publishing which was all of a sudden you could self-publish a book that was largely indistinguishable from a traditionally published book um
and would come across you know it was a professionally produced product essentially and i was going to ask how you went about doing that and you mentioned that your dad actually creates the front covers yeah so did you have other people that you worked with while producing he only created the covers from the coca-bras actually the others i literally would go on to like an eye stock which for people listening it's like an image library and i would just pick an image and buy it for say 10-15
pounds and then i was lucky that a friend of mine was a graphic designer so i used to throw in the image i said let's sort out a brand sort of font for me and he used to put it together so if you haven't got a huge budget um you can play a graphic designer and just get stock images they kind of work for me for a while um but i didn't ever have a big team of people around me um weirdly the graphic designer's wife um she worked for a printer which was local in woodley and i said i want my book to
look exactly like this one i want it the same size because a lot of self-published books are that little bit off i also read up that so it looks professionally self-published you must put a logo on the spine that's how i can often tell self-published books even if you make up something i my little null publishing is my and i put the word noel um it was just i wanted to make it as perfect as possible i think heaviness now books are so light it was quite heavy to post and that's
something else people don't think of and also envelope size you want something that's standard because postage and packing adds up if you're selling a few and it's little things like that um also with covers etcetera you look at your genre you're not going to put some pink pastel thing on a thriller and i think another massive thing is genre if you're not in a set genre even if you're a little bit off that your thriller with romance or something that isn't going to work on amazon either you
have to separate your genre because of all like the charts and i think stick to your genre because the more that you write the better you get i can honestly say that my last book is obviously a lot better than the first one i wrote because you learn your craft yeah so as well as doing presumably the digital ebooks through kdp you also had the books available in print as well so how how was that managed was that did you have big uh big stacks of books in your house or yeah so i used to get
probably do a print run i think the most was probably about 300 at that time yeah so in my spare room i had boxes of books and i was on like the amazon seller program where they send you an email and it's wonderful because they pay you the postage as well and then yeah i was just tripped to the post office or i also boldly had walked on the um bertram stand at the london book fair many years ago and just chatted up someone on there and i said i want to be stopped by you and he said it's not as
easy as that i said can you give me a chance they did so then i had orders coming in from berkshire's and sometimes they'd have to send 50 books to them and um so i'd just get a courier to pick them up so yeah it was a proper little cottage industry and it wasn't until um cocabre started going mad that um scott pack approached me because he'd kind of been a real supporter right through my self-publishing career and said to me he's written something on his blog me
and my big mouth saying if somebody doesn't pick up this girl they're mad kind of thing it's such a good book he came he said i said do you want to have a coffee i want to say thank you for all your help and we sat there and he was working for ibooks then and he said look can we have your paper back so you can keep your ebook rights absolute gold to me i didn't lose those rights which are obviously big for me and someone would manage all of that printing and process
and yes of course i don't make as much as doing it myself but being honest i only ever drew even on paperbacks when i did it myself because people don't realize that say you sell by a distributor they will give you three pounds something for your 799 book it's percentage even if you're going to an independent bookshop they're going to take 35 off you so it's really hard and i can see why bookshops struggle in a way as well because the margins are so tight yeah everything everything gets squeezed
with the the cockleberry bay books um you're looking on amazon now for example the the books you published prior to that series have you know several hundred reviews and then you look at the ebay books and they have seven thousand reviews and i'm just curious that yeah how did you what was it like having that sudden level of kind of public scrutiny and people being very loud and open about your books at first um when i get horrendous got horrendous one star it would affect me
and i'd want to reply because you can reply to every review i had one that was saying um oh i bet she's sitting in a cafe in chelsea patting herself on the back that she's done so well for writing such trash and this part me going actually i'm sitting on a you're in the south of france thanks mate not that i am but i i it was difficult but i quite like it now because the most the concurrent theme that runs is that i swear too much in my books and the american audience are really a
lot more prudent than the uk audience so note that um but i'm not going to change the way i write it is in my mind sometimes but then sometimes i throw a real swearing into just to annoy people yes yeah i mean obviously i mean it presumably helps because you know glancing at the reviews they're they're overwhelmingly positive that makes it easier yeah but i'm still terrified that the next book is not going to be good and there's suddenly going to be one where those reviews
aren't happening and even though with hodder a huge publisher you'd hope to think they wouldn't let anything out that's not good um the third in the series rainbow's ending fairly market is out in april and i've kind of written a book i've really wanted to write so it'd be interesting to see if people like it as much as the others yes no i guess even after doing it for years and you know many many books uh no author ever really knows what people are going to think until it's out in the world
well i so have the fear every time before one comes out yeah what kind of connection do you have i mean when you're a self-published author in particular but what kind of connection do you have with your readers so i think this is what's helped as well every single person who messages me i respond personally whether it be instagram i've had some lovely emails through lockdown saying thank you so much you've helped me through in fact april 2020 i sold more books than i've
ever done in a singular month i think it was something like 82 000 books in a month oh wow because of lockdown and i myself was reading more and a lot of the audio books as well so it made a huge difference yeah i think because i am so accessible and i think for other authors who are starting out and anyone listening here if you want to message me i will happily freely give advice i don't think anything is competition in writing even sort of the girls on my level in romance we all support each
other because the person who's going to buy my book is probably going to buy their book too anyway yeah yeah there's no shortage of readers is there there's enough to go around i mean that's the thing and that's what i think about i've saturated my readership of course you haven't there's like however many million people in the uk and i have only just scratched the surface obviously not all of them are going to read my genre but no and actually you've translated a lot
of your books as well uh i noticed how yeah how did that come about so lorella belly is my foreign rights agent and now my main agent as well um
i knocked on her door in 2010. i said hello i'm nicola may i've just started writing and i want my books to be translated please and she said thank you so much but you haven't got any record and then i knocked on the door again when i was with accent press and she said sorry anyway when the book got to number one she knocked on my door she said i'm ready you um so yeah so she's amazing she she gets the way i work and yeah she's now signed the fairly lane market trilogy already to estonia in
holland and again i do think with foreign rights as well i think once the country sees maybe someone else is doing it is quite a snowball i mean because russia is one on my list it's not actually been printed yet but i just think corner shopping coca-cola being translated into russian but then fundamentally my books are about relationships and love and that translates worldwide we cover a lot of translation at the national center for writing it's a big part of what we do
and and talking about how you translate cultural references and that kind of thing when it goes to different markets it's always fascinating so yeah i'm curious about how some of yours would be translated yeah and i have that in mind now um if i actually say sort of english sort of ant and deck or something like that would that translate but then i sometimes think i don't want to change it because my british audience are my main audience so and i just hope because i'm in the hands
of all these people that they are doing a good job yeah you'll never know yeah but then again also going to the the beast that is amazon and the magical beast in my eyes amazon published in germany have translated um two of the corner shop and they're doing extremely well because it's amazing germany and sort of they and amazon went once they published you they can put you on their deals and things as well interesting so with those ones amazon actually handled the translation to german
yes looking over the the publication dates of the of the cockleberry books in particular you clearly write very fast and publish quickly as well yeah in terms of i mean a lot of writers that we work with you know writers who are not yet published you know it's often a challenge to complete one book you know that first book could be so difficult um so what's i don't say what's your secret but you know how do you approach uh just getting the words down to the quality that you want them to be
i think and people are going to cringe at this don't aspire to perfection i think just just get it down and then have a good editor because they're going to pick up any bloopers but i just think i think sort of organic writing that comes from the heart i think people worry too much is that sort of structured i've never been to a writing course in my life my edits just came back from hodder and it's like you you've done this from a pov what's pov look all these things up a point of
view of someone else in a chapter and this shouldn't happen and whatever and i just think i i think because i write completely ignorant of any structure i just flow with it i think if i had to think about all these different things i probably wouldn't be so good also i think set time if i mean a lot of i was i'm not married i haven't got kids and i wrote obviously i had more time i think if you don't have so much free time as that do allocate an hour to to get things down and stick to that
hour we all say oh we haven't got time well don't sort of watch your favorite program that night right if you're really dedicated to the cause we have so much more time than we realize in life and it's like people haven't got time to go for a walk and actually if you set your alarm for six i know it's dark you could do it six to six thirty um i think i have been very dedicated to get where i am and and i think yeah you have to be uh it's amazing how much time you can carve
out once you start paying attention to all the all the little bits and pieces you do during the day that are not really necessary that you can swap for writing i know and i get the time i've used my um phone for sometimes it's four hours where i've been scrolling i think four hours it's like i wish i had like a little alarm i wonder if you can set one where you've looked at it for 10 minutes you'd get pushed off it i'd quite like that yeah i know i've got something on
my phone if i if i'm on twitter for more than like five minutes it starts hassling me yeah i mean i do have to say when i started out i was on twitter for hours a day and i built up a lot of personal relationships with people and i wonder if that helped me as well um where almost people become friends and they help you and that kind of thing um but i've also been very bold it's a bit like getting a bertram's contract is pretty out there i also walked into waterstones in winds on my local
waterstones when my very first book came out and i handed it to a woman who was serving there i said can you stop me and she laughed she said no but i'll read it well anyway she contacted me two days later via twitter because i've spoken to i hadn't she found me she said um come and do a signing on saturday you know what she said yeah come bring your books so anyway all friends all family i rang them up said you're coming i said you've got to buy books i sold 42 copies on a
saturday winds of waterstones she then emailed every south branch said this girl's good get her in she really helped me carol dixon smith her name is um but again you've got to be bold to do that and i was very lucky waterstones don't do signings like that for unknowns now no you handed it to the exact right person by the same who liked reading she was obsessive with reading yeah it's difficult isn't it because you know in terms of carving out time to write at the same time particularly as a
self-published author but regardless really of what you're going down like juggling you know you how much time do you spend going into places and and you know being bold like that how much time do you spend networking on social media you know how how do you know what's useful and what's actually yeah you can be wasting time you could be writing yeah i mean i do have to say i think for the last 10 years there's not been a day gone by but i haven't promoted sent a promotional tweet in the
morning maybe and people probably get sick of it but actually again it's different audiences and um that's what i've done i've never sort of been out of the public eye even though i'm known as the invisible author not many people have heard of me because i'm mainly an ebook success yes no i think there's still you know you don't encounter self-publishing when you're watching cultural shows on television or reading newspapers and you know all those kind of traditional forms of
where you find out about entertainment yeah are kind of blissfully ignoring or unaware yeah and that's what millie was saying on her in her article that i mean she was saying would you be interested in a program and i thought gosh you've commissioned something where it's normal books with with normal writers who aren't on this pedestal that it is our job and we write books for a living and we're not these people who are unapproachable that's what we do we put words in order and people read them
yeah no it's it's strange isn't it but i mean i suppose some of the slack's been taken up a little bit by um like booktubers and and online communities of of readers who are kind of you know covering and reviewing books that don't get the attention yeah definitely and book bloggers are amazing and another thing i found that for my success is i always do a blog tour i use a lady called rachel gilby rachel's random resources and if people aren't aware of a blog tour
literally i go to rachel i said this is my new book coming out and she will get say 50 bloggers on board the first two weeks of publication they will either write an article or i would write an article for them or they review and then it gets retweeted and the snowball then of how many people reach i am sure that's how corner shopping cockery bay did get its first massive reach um without a doubt yeah um so to to come up to date after yeah we spent half an hour talking about your
massive success in self-publishing and how it's gone extremely well and you you went that way because the the normal traditional publishing contracts even if you do very well you're still not gonna be making enough money to be a full-time author all this kind of stuff um and then this year you've signed with hodder and have two books out with them so what happened there what changed i'm sorry all self-publishers so i said i'm staying indie um what happened was that laurella went for
lunch with um an editor from hodder and they discussed me obviously and then laurela came back for her lunch and she said um hodder want to sign you for a three book deal are you interested oh well you know i was like moaning i said i don't think i want to do it i don't want to give up the control i i in any way this carrot was dangled in my face i'm not going to lie to you and to write three books and also i think they realized i liked to write fast and that i wouldn't wait a year a
book and so they wanted these three books that were coming out six months six months six months and i had 18 months to write these three books so i kind of looked at it as um an arm to my business that i would keep all of my rights and that i would see what happened because i really wanted to get into bookshops and um even my lovely publisher ibooks they're a small publisher they're not they're not looked at so much to get into supermarkets it's really hard for smaller publishers and
give hodor there do i am in tesco's and i was in tesco's and sainsbury's with the recent books but i'm not gonna lie um it was the financial angle because i thought okay it's quick and they said i could still write my self-published books so when i signed the contract i quickly in five weeks wrote christmas in cockery bay i wrote it in october and the week into november i literally i don't know how i did it so i thought at least i'm hanging on to some self-published income that
will come out at christmas and for next year because i knew i'd have to wait for royalties um even though i'd got an advance so yeah it was that really it was let's try something new let's get into let's get my name out there with paperbacks and try and get my name out there as an author really um and i suppose because you write quickly and it sounds like that's what hodder was after as well yeah getting the trilogy out uh nice and quick but because of that you knew
that this was going to be something that would be like a year and a half two years of your time you know a contained thing it wasn't like you were signing away a decade of writing no exactly and yeah and i am denied right up until the final minute of signing i'm not going to lie to you and um yeah it's done now and i can't believe it i actually sent the final edits back last week for the third book so it's been intense i'm really tired actually to actually write for somebody else for that amount
of time i think when you're writing for a publisher i obviously was my for that this has got to be great there are going to be things in my cockery bay books that aren't probably politically correct and things like that that i've got away with but yeah it was um yeah and there's some words i've used that have been cut oh no i wanted to say that but the editors are great obviously it's still my book but they suggest things and i did think at first this was my
fear that things would be suggested that i would really hate but actually a lot of the suggestions have been very good so on a positive to have a different editor's eyes on it from the editor i had before it's yeah it's great and i think the books have been very much improved but when people haven't worked with editors the the fear is that they're going to like tear your book apart and turn it into something else when a good editor will actually help you make your book the best it can be
yeah and place to make suggestions and you don't have to go with them all um for example in this one she wanted me to add in a scene because i'm doing life drawing classes and she said think maybe you should add an extra one but my character had enough and she'd stop them and i thought no that doesn't make it right so because i know the book inside and out and i think obviously you write as well you do i know every single bit of my book it's really weird it's like
you climb in it and you kind of know what's going to work whereas anyone external reading is never going to feel that book like you do yeah no yeah when you're writing it it's a slightly strange thing that can happen in your brain where it feels like you're visiting a particular place and when you finish the book you're like oh i don't get to go there again yeah absolutely totally yeah um so yeah presumably i mean you've touched upon it but like working with a a team and a kind of external team
must be quite different in terms of the day-to-day writing so did you feel that kind of added pressure did it help did it get in the way did it not really make a huge difference um i mean i think to be honest because it was locked down i was allowed to get on with it and the editor only gets involved when it is editing time um so i guess it didn't really make any difference i found the writing process completely torturous with these three because i've kind of usually it's
my idea and my timeline but this was wow these would set deadlines in stone that i had to hit and i did feel that pressure um and i'm the person that even if maybe you could have asked for a bit of an extension i never would because i just i'm committed to delivering on time so a big part of this was getting books into places that previously had been tricky so because although you had print versions of your book yeah that was presumably on a relatively small scale and a very kind
of manual process of you trying yeah and ibooks ibooks have got me in amazon and they've got me in um in blackwell and in smaller bookshops but i mean i just kind of had the conversation and i said oh wait until i withhold a hodder will get me in there because they are hotter and and it's it's it's wrong in a way because it's still my books which were obviously good books and the cocker bridge should have been up there on the on the shelves as well but because just because it's a smaller
publisher but that's the way the publishing industry is it's people look to the name but even then i think this supermarket slots i've been told are still really few and far between so there's still a struggle even with the big five and this is another thing i think celebrities and people who are going to sell the massive number of books are always going to be represented because why wouldn't they be because it's a commercial industry and that's when the independents come in
who are amazing because they support their local authors yes they want to make their bucks as well but i think it's a lot more of a personal service yeah and absolutely we're based in norwich and norwich has an amazing selection of independent bookstores which you know all have slightly different personalities and the staff that work there love books and can recommend anything you could possibly want and things you don't expect and yeah yeah which is lovely but then again i do think
as an author you need to be friends with these bookshops and you need to sort of make yourself visible to them because obviously people buy people and if you want to be serious about it is it is a business and people think oh they probably cringe at me saying that because once somebody way back a really successful businessman he said when i wasn't sort of selling as many he said keep putting the products on the shelf your books are your products the more products you've got the more chance
you've got of selling more and he's he was so right because now obviously i've got 15 even if you're selling not so many of each you're still earning an income yeah it's a cumulative thing isn't it i mean everything i've read about self-publishing is very much that you know if you if you write the kind of stuff that suits a series which which has multiple books then that's the way to actually turn it into something that is kind of supportive of your lifestyle yeah and funnily enough
though the corner shopping cocaine wrote it was completely as a standalone it's beautifully tied up at the end so so much so i had to i thought oh goodness me it's done so well i've got to write a sequel and then obviously the sequel did really well and then so it was the trilogy and then i added the christmas book and now i'm even thinking because i'm sort of thinking what to write next do i put another coca brew bag out there because everyone's asking me for one and scott pat going back to
him had always said to me that could go on forever for cocabre bay because people love the setting they love the characters you just almost like a soap opera you just different things happen yeah so how do you i mean any author that kind of has a long running series you know do you do you as a writer start to want to go and do other things but you know the business side of it and and demands of readers kind of pull you back towards the series how do you balance those two
kind of creative impulses this is the thing now because i've written the four cockle breathers and now there's three in the fairy lane market series i am in this situation now as in where do i go next what do i do and part of me wants to write a standalone exemplary novel now that is like another number one best seller um i'm also in talks with a screen writer as well uh yeah to maybe turn cockaby bay into a screenplay i mean i'd love to see it on the on the screen um
but yeah this is it what am i going to write next answers on a postcard please yeah i mean that yeah because i'm not sure if i want to carry on fairly market is done because that's the hotter three book deal i could dip back to cockrellabree would i want to start writing another series i don't know actually um are you attempting to go back to some of your earlier books the ones that came out prior to the kind of sudden massive success of cockapoo i am actually i mean i wrote one called
the schoolgates which at the time won an award at the festival romance and it's a really good book and i kind of was thinking it is coming out again as a paperback via ibooks um because they're bringing them out and recovering them to be honest but maybe yeah to do another push on those because and that that is it does show you doesn't it or my cochlear is fairly market doing so well those other books are still good but because i'm not doing anything to promote them they are just
sat on the shelf so you're right that's it i've got enough that i could keep marketing what i've got and maybe yeah you've triggered me to think yeah that i could do it's been at the back of my mind that i'm like oh no but yeah it would make sense and just going back to you know millie johnson's blog you know as a writer of romance and you know romantic comedies i think readers absolutely adore that genre but it's a it's one of several genres that quite often get short thrift
elsewhere do you think uh particularly over the last couple of years with with everyone in stuck in lockdowns you know do you do you think that your books in particular have struck a chord you know is it the kind of you know is it kind of a reassuring place to go for readers yeah i i definitely think so and it's a bit like christmas films i watch christmas in the castle brook shields i've never split in it's just slushy not much happens but it's just admire you it takes your mind away yeah
and i really do think that and quite a few men i've got um reviews from probably you never would have picked my book up but locked down and they've seen the reviews i'll give it a go yeah and and it's a bit like millie would say this as well we write about death i i've written about um infertility um yeah early bereavement i wrote about um dating i kind it's all about issues that happen to everyone in everyday life they're not just like oh boy meets girl mines certainly are there's always a
troubled um heroine and she overcomes things and she doesn't necessarily have good relationships with the people around her they aren't just fluffy so and did you think there's any potential particularly self-published books i suppose you know do you see any potential on the horizon for more mainstream coverage of self-published books and and romance and you know the the the more entertaining side of books i suppose do you think um and i think maybe millie saying it's
kicking that off i wish i'd kicked that off um i'm gonna have a chat with her actually because i'm an everything is possible kind of person and i think it would make for good tv i'm not sure where it would fit in this broadcasting schedule but people are looking for content now look how many channels we've got and i think readers would love it so looking look into the future and what you're up to next i mean it sounds like you've got lots of options in terms of specific books but
one thing i was curious about before we started talking is whether traditional publishing was your thing now but it sounds like that was a very kind of precise project and that self-publishing is going to still be a big part of what you do i mean never say never basically with my contract my next book i show to hodder and if they want it they can offer me um it's my decision i always used to see myself as a penguin author that was my dream um i don't know what i just did because
i used to read loads of penguin books as a kid penguin was one of the main publishers wasn't it when i was younger um i'm not gonna never say never with going with a publisher again um but i do love self-publishing i love the control i love the lack of pressure with deadlines i like being able to check my sales figures every day um i like to put something out there that comes completely from my heart it sounds like you're in the best possible position really being able to
select that and presumably you're going back to that early multi-book offer you had right at the start of your career if you'd gone down that road um a lot of what has subsequently happened would have been closed off that wouldn't have been possible completely and i think everything that's happened in my writing journey has been for a reason like i do think with life and i always say persistence um over resistance to everybody because wherever wherever you're from you yeah
you if you've got like the passion to be a writer yeah you can do it thank you very much nicholas lovely talking to him fascinating insight and yes your books are all available on amazon including the two new ones that come from hodder and when's the third book in that trilogy okay so starry skies in fairly market is out now and it's got a christmasy theme so it's a good christmasy book and rainbow's ending premiere market is out in april next year amazing thank you well yeah thank you so
much i think there's gonna be lots of people who are now gonna be debating whether to go self-publishing traditional publishing do one then the other or yeah okay and if they want to ask me any questions yeah i'm at nicola maywan on twitter fantastic all right thank you very much no thank you thanks for listening and thanks to nicola for joining us on the show if you have any questions or you want to get in touch you can find us on twitter and instagram at writer's centre
national center for writing on facebook and don't forget to head over to nationalcenterforwriting.org.uk to find out about all of our programs our events and to sign up to our newsletter as a uk registered charity we do rely on the generosity of our supporters to make our work possible you can make a donation over on the website by going to the support us page and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and wait and review it if you get a chance as well thanks again keep writing
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