Margaret's Success story

First, Find Your Publisher!

I was writing for nigh on twenty years before I was published, and possibly longer – can’t remember exactly.

 Have you heard of these crazy people who write all the time? They weave stories and then after editing and re-writing, they hide them away in a cupboard, a drawer or a suitcase under the bed. That was I – my hiding place was an old battered suitcase.

 I was, and I guess still am, a compulsive writer. I couldn’t stop. I could write anywhere, on the top of a bus, in a train rattling along at speed, secretly at my desk in the various offices I used to work. Nothing came between my imagination and me. What happened to me? Now I have to have my trusty computer and have to be sitting at my desk. Madness.

 Then I met John. We met on a blind date and I remember the very first thing he did was make me laugh. He carried on doing that for almost thirty-eight years. If anyone could get me to laugh, it was the man I married.

 Truthfully, from other boyfriends I hid my secret passion for the pen and ink but it’s hard to keep such a secret in a marriage. “What you doing?” he asked me. We were living in St Tropez at the time (that’s another story). He was out working all day; I was never sure what time he would get home so I hadn’t time to hide my scribbles away. “Writing,” I said.

“Writing what?” he asked.

 You couldn’t lie to John. He couldn’t tell a lie, even a white one, so it’s very hard to do that to someone so honest. I fessed up. “So what you going to do about it?”

“Nothing.”

“Let’s see about that.”

 John read my stuff, considered it good enough to be published. But no, I didn’t write something publishable straightaway. I kept putting it off, but John nagged. Eventually, three years on I started to go into it seriously. But first off, I realized what I had to do was “find a publisher” Not any publisher but the type of publisher who published the kind of material I wanted to write.

 That’s how I discovered Robert Hale. I studied the local library shelves and saw that Hale  published the kind f book I wanted to write, so I set about writing a novel. It was a contemporary romance. It was away from me for six weeks and then it came back. Lots of chewed nails happened between the novel going and its return. Oh dear, my heart sank. That blinking John, I thought, I knew I would never be a “published author!”  However, there was a letter, not just a rejection slip. The publisher wrote that the book was not quite right but if I had anything else…

 Well I made it my business to have something else. Changing track I wrote an historical romance and guess what…Bingo…yes please, they would buy it. Delirium. I am not sure who was the happier, John or me; let’s say it was neck and neck!

Now I have written twenty-three novels – and my latest, due out in October, will round that up to twenty-four. Does it feel different now from when I was first published? No, of course not, the excitement of someone wanting to buy my work is still there. It never goes away. Only now it’s tinged with sadness because John died in January. No more bottles of champagne and toasts before a candlelit dinner but I know that somewhere, somehow he is celebrating with me.

 So there you have it – the best advice I can give is first find your publisher. Make sure you are sending your novel to the publisher who is publishing that kind of material. No good sending a super thriller to a publisher who only publishes biographies.  Do your research and then…go on you know you want to mail it off.

 Margaret Blake

http://www.margaretblake.co.uk/

www.myspace.com/authormargaret

Beloved Deceiver

Eden's Child

Fortune's Folly

Published by Whiskey Creek Press.