I didn’t know I was going to write a book – until I did. Sounds a little weird, yes? But despite entertaining thousands every day with my tales of family life, I never considered myself a writer. This is the story of my unusual path to publishing.
Back in 2020, I was shielding from the dreaded COVID – stuck in one room for four months, thanks to being more vulnerable than your average bear. With no daily commute to consume the hours, I threw myself into my Facebook blog, Growing Old Disgracefully. I fully credit my followers with what followed. Had it not been for their persistent ‘you should write a book’, I’d never have had the confidence to take things further. Without lockdown, I’d never have had the time.
My first book, The Big Blue Jobbie, was a quirky, diary-style take on lockdown life. I should stress that I knew absolutely nothing about publishing. The cover was homemade using a blue poo emoji, crocheted by my friend and photoshopped by my husband, who also took on the task of researching how to get a book published. I suspect the research wasn’t particularly in-depth because, ten minutes later, he said, ‘I’ve googled it, and you just need to upload it to something called KDP on Amazon’ – so that’s what we did.
There really was no plan here, other than a vague notion that I’d sell a few hundred copies and then fade away. Yet I’d unwittingly hit the zeitgeist, and the book sold steadily. I had nothing with which to compare the numbers and knew no other authors, so when The Big Blue Jobbie landed at forty-something in the UK Kindle charts, I assumed this was normal. I was more delighted to find myself sandwiched between James Patterson and Bill Clinton than I was aware of the significance.
That first book sold more than 10,000 copies. Beginner’s luck? Definitely, but it gave me the oomph to write another one. And another. And loads more. I briefly flirted with traditional publishing for what I grandly termed ‘my first novel’, sending my rom-com, Frock in Hell, to five agents and a digital-first publisher. It made it out of the slush pile but was ultimately rejected, leading me to question why I was spending time on queries when I could simply publish it myself and move on.
It’s fair to say that Frock in Hell didn’t set the world alight, but that didn’t matter because I had a new story in mind: a murder-mystery called Losers Club. I was rather annoyed that, just before I clicked the publish button, some upstart called Richard Osman came out with The Thursday Murder Club. Yet I needn’t have worried; his coat tails were a grand place to be. Suddenly, the world loved a murder-mystery. Although, confession – when Mumsnet recommended Losers Club as a best summer read, and this time I found myself sandwiched between Marian Keyes at number one and Mr Osman at number three, I might have gloated.
It was 2022 by now, and I was working two full-time jobs: managing project managers by day and spending every other waking minute writing the next Losers Club book. During a career-development course at work, they asked us to visualise where we’d be in five years. I’d expected to visualise myself as a very important boss doing very important things, yet found myself typing by the pool somewhere in Italy. At the end of the course, I walked away from the day job. I still haven’t been to Italy, but what happened next convinced me I’d done the right thing.
Authors receive a ton of spam, but something about this email was different. The producers mentioned that they followed my blog and hadn’t realised I wrote books (I have a separate author page for that). They’d read Losers Club and was it available for film and TV? In a surreal twist, I found myself on a Zoom with Hollywood. Oh. My. Days. Things like that don’t happen to people like me. Yet it was real, and Losers Club was optioned for a TV series. They asked who I’d like to play the male lead (who very much fancies the female lead), and my menopausally-fogged brain spat out Neil Tennant. ‘From the Pet Shop Boys?!’ everyone exclaimed, thoroughly confused. David Tennant! I meant David Tennant! I didn’t get him. Beaten to the punch again by Mr Osman.
Well, here we are. It’s 2026, and I’m still scribbling away. Game of Trust was shortlisted for the Comedy Women in Print Prize last year, and publishers came knocking, which was flattering. I have an agent now, who is wonderfully supportive of my self-published work but would like me to hurry up with the police procedural I promised her, and I’m about to do my first author panel at Newcastle’s iconic Lit & Phil.
Someone senior in the business once told me, ‘We don’t cover self-publishing because it doesn’t succeed. It would be raising false hope for new writers.’ All I can say is that I may have initially stumbled into self-publishing, but it soon became intentional. I expect to reach half a million copies sold this year, so I’m okay with being a failure.
