And So It Goes

Or part two of how a would-be professor stumbled into becoming a novelist

Last week I shared a bit of my “origin story” of how I became a novelist. Like many writers, my story is long and winding. This week I’m picking up where I left off, so if you haven’t read that first post called “How It All Began,” please do go back and read it to catch up.

To say that Fifty Shades of Grey was a phenomenon feels like a vast understatement. In 2011, it was everywhere. I saw it while commuting on the subway. Local news stations ran segments on it, interviewing women who had spiced up their sex lives thanks to the book. Speculation about who would play Christian and Anastasia in the films ran rampant. Everyone was reading it, and it sometimes felt as though if you said you weren’t you were probably lying. 

This…was not the environment to launch a historical romance career. My new agent Emily took the book she’d signed me on out on sub where it did virtually nothing. We did get a couple of nice responses to the submission saying that they liked my voice and writing, but editors just weren’t buying debut historical romance at that time.

“Historical romance was dead. Long live erotic romance so long as we can package it up like Fifty Shades,” was what the publishing industry seemed to be saying to us. 

I was terrified that Emily would drop me.¹ Instead she told me to go write another book. I did that, and it was awful. (It was a contemporary romance that will never see the light of day, and rightly so.) Emily was kind about my sophomore attempt, but it was clear I needed to go back to the drawing board.

I kept chipping away, trying my best to find something that I wanted to write. I wrote a contemporary romance novella about a sports agent and a sports reporter that went on to win a prize—a big boost to my ego when it needed it most.² I wrote a brace of short contemporary romance novellas for an anthology series that three authors and I self-published, teaching me a lot about self-publishing and the discipline needed to do it. 

I tried a lot of different ideas and pitches in that time, some good and some very bad, until I struck on something that seemed to stick. I was waiting for the Bx5 bus outside of the Hunts Point Avenue 6 Train stop on my way to work when I wondered if I could write a historical romance series about three friends who were all London governesses. I scribbled down the idea and, after much back and forth with Emily polishing the pitches, we went out on submission with publishers.

That series, simply known as the Governess Series, got picked up by the now-defunct Pocket Star (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) in 2015. Pocket Star published ebook-first books which meant that the chances of me realizing the dream of seeing my books on bookstore shelves were slim, and the advance on that three-book deal was tiny, but I didn’t care. I was going to be published. 

I worked like crazy to finish books two and three, and then I followed on with more pitches. Another historical romance series followed. Then Emily and I dusted off that contemporary romance about the sports agent and reporter and sold it too.

However, despite all of my work, I was beginning to see the writing on the wall. Ebook-only publishers were folding right and left across the industry. The romance genre was contracting, and I didn’t know if my sales would justify another deal and advance even at my extremely modest numbers. 

While I was mulling over what my next move should be and also editing the books from my second historical romance series in preparation for publication, I moved to London. Mum, always an excellent recommender of books, gave me The Shell Seekers to read in my first month living with my parents while I found my feet in a new country. I had never read Rosamund Pilcher before, so I gave it a go.

The Shell Seekers, I would learn, was a dual timeline historical and contemporary novel. (It is often classed as women’s fiction, although I am not a fan of that term.) I gobbled that book up, and immediately started thinking about writing a historical novel.

As fortune would have it, I was due to go back to New York for my best friend’s wedding four months after moving to London. Emily and I had already been chatting about me transitioning into historical fiction and away from romance as my interests as an author evolved, but we didn’t have solid plans to pitch my editor anything more soft than a, “How would you feel about Julia writing this type of genre now?” over our planned lunch.

In my experience, publishing lunches typically are 95% chat about everything under the sun except business and then 5% business. Over that lunch my editor, Emily, and I chatted about my upcoming role as maid of honor in the wedding I was over for, my move, how I was liking the UK. When the waiter cleared our plates, my editor leaned forward and said, “You should order dessert,” in that way that tells you that the subsequent conversation is either going to be either a) very good or b) very bad. 

And so, I sat there at lunch, bracing myself for the news that my publisher was going to drop me. Instead, she started pitching me. The publisher was looking to bring over a small number of writers from the ebook-only line I wrote for over to their more prestigious (and well-funded) commercial fiction line. They wanted historical fiction, preferably the first half of the twentieth century or maybe really just World War 2, and they wanted it to be set in Britain. Would I be interested?

Emily and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. We told my editor that I already had a pitch for a historical novel featuring a female protagonist set in World War 2 Britain. It was the truest case of serendipity I’ve ever heard of in publishing.³

My initial pitch wasn’t quite right for what my editor wanted, so when I returned to London from the wedding—with a cold because I always get sick when I need to be in someone else’s wedding for reasons I still don’t understand—I took one day to rest and then wrote a pitch in a fever dream. My editor loved it, and two months later I finished the draft.

That book became The Light Over London, my first historical novel and the book that changed my life. I owe my current historical fiction and historical mystery career to that book, but I also owe my career to the book that never sold, my romances, and all of the writing in between. 

At my first signing for The Light Over London before it got re-covered for publication. Please enjoy the terrible hotel ballroom lighting, but very good hair.

My mother once half-jokingly said, “You’re an overnight success ten years in the making.” I think about that all of the time because the road to becoming a traditionally published author is a long and winding one. Almost no one writes a book and has it picked up for publication straight away, and if they do there are still countless hours of work in the background that no else one witnessed except maybe their partner and a particularly observant pet. Writing books takes time. Publication, whether you are published by a publisher or independently published, takes time. 

If you are a reader, thank you for the time that you’ve taken to read and enjoy all of that work. If you’re a writer, I encourage you to find a way to fall in love with the work because the space between successes can feel very long indeed, but they are the sweetest when you reach them.

1. Many years later, I confessed this to Emily and she told me in her kind, gentle way that essentially I was being ridiculous, but such is the anxiety of being an unpublished but represented baby author.

2. An expanded version of that book was later published under what would become a one-book pen name for an ebook-only imprint that, unfortunately for me, ceased to be shortly afterward. 

3. If you are looking for career advice, this is not the story to turn to. The circumstances around me moving from ebook-only historical romance to historical fiction with hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook editions are mad and truly one-in-a-million. I have never heard of this happening to another author in this way, and I do not think they are replicable. If you would like writing advice on other things though, please do leave a comment and I will help where I can.

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