This week on The Book Diner, we look back at when Jane Davis – whose first novel, Half-truths and White Lies, won The Daily Mail First Novel Award – visited our cyber red banquette. Jane was hailed by The Bookseller as ‘one to watch,’ but rather than taking the traditional route, Jane decided to self-publish, winning herself a loyal readership which her next five novels, combining her creative talents with the business savvy she learnt in her previous career. In a world where writers have ever more options available to them in terms of how to distribute and sell their work, Jane offers a very inspiring example of how to make self-publishing a success.
Welcome to the Book Diner!
Thank you for inviting me.
Can we take your order – coffee, tea or soda? Eggs sunny side up or over easy? Home fries, French toast or biscuit?
A medium skinny latte and blueberry pancakes, please (seeing as you asked)!
When did you realise you were a writer?
There’s an enormous leap from writing your first novel and having the confidence to call yourself a writer. I think it’s best left to others to hold the mirror up to you. The agent who first signed me up said to me, “Jane, you are a writer.” For four years, my 90,000 word manuscript had eaten up all of my spare time and obsessed me (it remains unpublished). Finally it seemed I was getting somewhere. And being a writer sounded so much more glamorous than being an insurance broker. Then, after I won The Daily Mail First Novel Award, Joanne Harris called me a writer and so did one or two very nice newspaper reviewers. Very much later, adjectives appeared in front of the word writer, such as ‘phenomenal’ and ‘extraordinary.’ I found that uncomfortable, almost too much to live up to. As someone who left school at the age of sixteen with a handful of O’ Levels, I have a nagging fear that at any minute I’m going to be found out. I don’t think the doubt ever goes away, but you have to find a way of channelling it to become that other self. Rather like making use of nerves when you speak in public.
Can you tell us about your latest project?
I have just released my sixth novel called An Unknown Woman.
What inspired you to write it? Where do you generally draw your ideas from?
I began to write what I thought was a simple story about a family placed under the microscope when a crisis brings them together.
I wrote it in a year when my income had dropped to a level that I hadn’t earned since the late eighties and so I chose to explore the nature of our relationship with material possessions. I also wanted to write about a character who is like me, but is not me. A woman in her late forties who has chosen not to have children and is living with a long-term partner, but is unmarried. Although she’s happy in her relationship, there is a nagging sense of alienation that she doesn’t like to acknowledge, sometimes from her friends whose time and energy is taken up with young children, sometimes from the life she imagined for herself when she played Mummies and Daddies and was bridesmaid at an aunt’s wedding. In many ways, her life lacks milestones. And so she has ploughed everything into her relationship, her work – which she loves – and her home. And then her home and everything in it are taken away from her.
I have to hold my hands up. I am a scavenger of facts. There is nothing more flattering than when people tell me their extraordinary stories and say, ‘I’d like you to write about it.’ An Unknown Woman is based very loosely on my elderly neighbour’s experience of what happens when the bond between mother and daughter is absent. In my neighbour’s case, he spent his married life guarding his wife’s secret by being both mother and father. It was only when I sent my manuscript to beta readers that I realised, far from being a ‘small story,’ this issue is more common than I could have possibly imagined. But while the subjects of post-natal depression and delayed bonding are discussed, the sense of shame that a mother experiences when she can’t love a child – sometimes a child who was very much wanted – precludes that same openness.
How do you deal with autobiographical elements in your work? Do you worry about offending people or baring your soul too much?
That first unpublished novel I mentioned? There was a contract for it which fell out of bed before it could be signed. I’m quite glad about that now.
Most authors are familiar with libel, but few are aware of its partner in crime, the Right to Privacy. Recently, an author called Maria Bento Fernandes was ordered to pay 53,000 EUR to her husband’s family (including her mother-in-law), after she revealed intimate details of their family life in her novel The Palace of Flies. The fact that she hid behind a pen name didn’t protect her. When she appealed against the original charge of libel, the European Court of Human Rights disagreed that hers was a work of fiction. In fact, they found that a number of characters in her book were ‘exact replicas’ of her in-laws. But rather than uphold the original decision, they ruled that the award should stand as the author had ‘failed to respect her in-laws’ right to a private life.’ Christmas at the Fernandes will never be the same again! [A chilling tale for us writers who are all innately life vampires!]
The problem with baring your own soul is that none of us live in isolation. Other people feature in our stories. I do try to channel my emotions. I think you always have to make it personal. The house that I burn down in the opening scene of An Unknown Woman isn’t invented. It’s mine. I imagined standing in the road, watching the destruction of my house and everything in it.
That said, things do happen that are outside your control. Six months after I began writing An Unknown Woman, my sister and her husband lost their house and most of what they owned to the winter floods of 2013. What had been an imagined scenario became only too real. My relationship with the characters changed as I saw what my sister and brother-in-law were going through. I steered Anita and her family in a slightly different direction to the one I had planned, not imagining for one minute that my sister’s life would still be on hold months after release of the novel. As of last week, she still didn’t have permission to demolish the shell, let alone planning permission so that they can start rebuilding. If you asked her, I expect she would stay that she is living in a state of limbo.
Is there a particular theme or message you’d like readers to take away from this book?
I’ve never shied away from big subjects. Sex addiction, religious visions, prostitution – they’ve all featured in my fiction. But all that I can ever do is to try to make these issues accessible by exploring them through the eyes of one or two characters. I agree with Samuel Johnson that an author only begins a book; it is the reader who finishes it.
I used to hate the way English Literature lessons focussed on what the author was thinking when he wrote such and such. Aside from the historical context, it’s irrelevant. It’s what the reader understands that is important.
I agree with Samuel Johnson that an author only begins a book; it is the reader who finishes it.
I used to hate the way English Literature lessons focussed on what the author was thinking when he wrote such and such. Aside from the historical context, it’s irrelevant. It’s what the reader understands that is important.
For what it’s worth, my own feeling is that before the fire Anita had felt that the path of her life was fixed. Afterwards, any number of possibilities open up to her.
What kind of writing process do you have? Are you very disciplined in terms of having a set work routine and doing a lot of planning, or are you more of a pantster? (You fly by the seat of them – Zinkologism.)
A writer only has the luxury of focussing on writing of the next book when they are unpublished. As soon as one book is out there, a mountain of tasks descend. Marketing, promotion, blogging, maintaining a presence on social media, the 350 emails that arrive in your inbox every day – not to mention the day job. It’s all too easy to get to the end of a fourteen-hour day and find that you haven’t touched your work in progress. 2000 words a day is not undoable, but 1000 words will result in a novel over the space of a year.
I think it’s really important to stress that there is no one way to write a book. John Irving doesn’t put pen to paper until he has the last line! Although I research extensively, I don’t plot. I subscribe to the idea that you have a clear idea about your characters, put them in a scenario and take the idea to its natural conclusion. If you’re lucky and you’re characters are right, they will take control and do the hard work for you.
Sometimes the correct structure for a novel might not reveal itself until I have completed several drafts. When you know your material really well, a single line might leap out at you – something that you thought was quite inconsequential when you typed the words – and you realise that it is the one line the whole novel pivots on. It’s how Howard Carter must have felt when he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb.
When you know your material really well, a single line might leap out at you – something that you thought was quite inconsequential when you typed the words – and you realise that it is the one line the whole novel pivots on. It’s how Howard Carter must have felt when he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb.
How do you approach research?
My current project is very research-heavy. My main character is an Edith Sitwell/Vivienne Westwood hybrid who, having been anti-establishment all of her life, is horrified to find that she’s on the New Year’s Honours List. I have already read five biographies and now I’m working through the letters of Nancy Mitford and diaries that the government commissioned during and just after the Second World War. But my starting point is never from scratch. Over the years I have compiled what I call ‘timelines’ so that, decade by decade, I have a record of all of the main news events, together with what people were listening to on radio, what they saw at the cinema and on the stage, what they would have been reading. I find it very useful in pinpointing where I want the timeline of a novel to begin and end.
Over the years I have compiled what I call ‘timelines’ so that, decade by decade, I have a record of all of the main news events, together with what people were listening to on radio, what they saw at the cinema and on the stage, what they would have been reading. I find it very useful in pinpointing where I want the timeline of a novel to begin and end.
What’s your editing process?
I self-edit my manuscript to within an inch of its life. That process can take as long or even longer than the writing. Then I send it out to beta readers.
The importance of this stage in the process is clear. The aim is to road-test the story by giving it to people with a wide range of life experiences. I seek out perspectives that I lack. A Funeral for an Owl involved many medical details so I used someone with medical training to correct any inaccuracies. An Unchoreographed Life told the story of a ballerina who turned to prostitution when she became a single mother. One of my two narrators was the daughter who ages from six to eight during the telling of the story. Although I researched child psychology and developmental stages carefully, I don’t have children of my own and so I put specific questions to those beta readers who did. Was the speech age-appropriate? Had I captured a child’s priorities and fears accurately?
If more than one beta reader pinpoints the same issue, I know that something needs to be addressed. I work through the changes one by one, making sure that I feed them through the whole novel. Each change may have a knock-on effect that could change the direction of the story.
By the time I present my copy editor with my manuscript, I hope I have thrashed out all of the major flaws.
Name one book you wish you had written and explain why it’s fabulous.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It is a multi-stranded take on how humanity muddles its way into the future and every story in it is totally engrossing. Egan just gets what it is to be essentially flawed, but to remain in the business of seeking out truth and beauty in a baffling and often ugly world. It’s an incredible piece. When I reached the final page, I headed straight back to the beginning and started again.
What advice would you offer to writers just starting out?
Don’t procrastinate. Just do it. Writing is one of the few hobbies where you need very little equipment. I just had a computer and a few spare hours a week. There is a school of thought that tells you that must have a clear idea of where the plot will take you before you start writing. If that was the case, I would never have put pen to paper. I choose to take the advice of authors who say exactly the opposite. And get your hands on a copy of On Writing by Stephen King.
How do you handle the rejections and bad reviews all writers experience?
I have a fairly consistent average of 5 star reviews from readers, but I recently received my first 1-star review. It was for my least commercial and most challenging novel, These Fragile Things, which is about a teenager who suffers a near death experience and then believes she is experiencing religious visions. Before I stumbled on the review (it was posted on Amazon.com), several of my readers had jumped to my defence, saying that the man could not possibly have read the book or that, if he did, he obviously hadn’t understood it. That’s when I realised that I had a fan base that went beyond family and friends. It’s a wonderful feeling to have people fighting your corner.
What are your feelings about the growth in self-publishing? Would you advise emerging writers to self-publish or pursue a traditional book deal?
I don’t think we can talk about self-publishing and trade publishing as two separate entities any more. A recent survey of 2,500 authors showed a surprising overlap: 25% of those who had traditional deals had also self-published and, of those who had self-published, 89% said that they will do so again. This new breed of hybrid authors look at each writing project and decide if it is one to submit to their publisher or one to ‘go it alone.’
I don’t think we can talk about self-publishing and trade publishing as two separate entities any more. A recent survey of 2,500 authors showed a surprising overlap: 25% of those who had traditional deals had also self-published and, of those who had self-published, 89% said that they will do so again. This new breed of hybrid authors look at each writing project and decide if it is one to submit to their publisher or one to ‘go it alone.’
The Society of Authors Chief Executive, Nicola Solomon, gave self-publishing the stamp of respectability when she said on record that traditional publisher’s terms are no longer fair or sustainable. “Authors need to look very carefully at the terms publishers offer, take proper advice and consider: is it worth it, or are you better
off doing it yourself?”
That’s the only advice I can offer. It’s said that it takes five years to get a publishing deal and six months to lose it. If you have something that is timely – either in terms of subject-matter or if it’s on trend – you can’t wait. After I lost my publishing deal, I waited three years before making the switch. I wished I’d done so earlier.
A recent survey commissioned by Harry Bingham and Jane Friedman found that over two thirds of authors who responded were unhappy with their current publisher. That echoes the thoughts of authors I met on the speaking circuit last year, several of whom told me that they were going to self-publish when their current contracts ended. It’s my belief that the predicted growth – that 70% of all books will be self-published by 2020 – will come from authors who are currently under contract.
But we will continue to see movement the other way because it’s hard to deny that a traditional deal provides the sort of validation it’s difficult to place a value on. In the run up to London Book Fair 2015, three best-selling self-published authors signed major publishing deals. One of those deals was for 7-figures. Let’s be very clear – that is not the sort of advance that debut novels normally attract, but with proven track records, established fan bases and media savvy, self-published authors have a lot to bring to the table.
Who has offered you the most encouragement and support in terms of your writing career?
I joined a local writing group but, sadly, you won’t find members of my writing group among my ‘A’ team. I am not a novelty to them. ‘What, you’ve written a book? Who here hasn’t?’ But I found huge support among my keep fit class, several of whom beta read and proofread for me. I’m also a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors and I find it incredibly useful to have a group of like-minded people with a wealth of experience I can draw on. The person who has most surprised me is my mother. I thought that she would hate my writing. The subjects I have chosen have taken her out far outside her comfort zone. She says to me, ‘Jane, you do write about the most unpleasant subjects,’ but she loves the writing. I should have trusted her more.
Where can people find out more about you and your work?
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Really pleased you featured Jane on your blog Sharon. She is publishing an interview I did for her website/blog on July 18th so that was a great bit of sister networking. Thank you.
I look forward to reading that interview!