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Success Story: Nine Hints From A Best-Selling Novelist

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Best-selling novelist Alex Marwood’s psychological thriller The Wicked Girls, a sharp and unsettling portrait of children who kill, has sold over 90,000 copies in the UK and has been acclaimed by critics and readers alike. Marwood has just published her second thriller, The Killer Next Door, another cleverly constructed, tightly paced read (I’ve read it, it’s great). She has previously published four novels under the name Serena Mackesy, including The Temp, her fresh and funny first book, and began her career as a journalist.

So: how did she achieve those significant sales?

Don’t be a dilettante

“Writing is a profession, not a hobby. To succeed, you have to prioritise your work over other things. That’s really difficult before you’ve been published – but writing, and writing well, takes so much time and frustration, you have to have the guts to stick it out.”

Hone your writing skills – and your appetite for deadlines

“Journalism made me as a writer. I learned to spell, use grammar and type. It taught me how to write in a way that no amount of sitting there trying to write a novel would have done. It taught me how to be professional, how to meet deadlines, how to get on with writing whether I was in the mood or not. It took me out of my comfort zone time and time again. I’m not a naturally gregarious person but with journalism you have convince people to talk to you, find questions – and listen to the answers. It was totally the making of me.”

Be organised – in your own way

“I know lots of writers who have a specific word count every day, which works for them. I am more prone to staring at the screen and speeding up as time goes on. The first few hundred words are agony, then every 10,000 goes twice as fast as the previous one. I have a big magnetic whiteboard where I scrawl characters and draw maps. I get lots of file cards, bung plot lines and ideas on them and pin them to the whiteboard with magnets. Then I can move them around, following one person’s thread all the way through, seeing how other people I’ve invented will affect them – then switch over and do another person. Then you move all your bits of paper around and suddenly you’ve got a plot. It takes months.”

Be nice

“In both of the businesses I’ve been in, personal relationships are key, remembering one is likely to come across people more than once. I’ve seen people come crashing down as the result of an act of arrogance or unpleasantness when they were younger.”

Let your editor do their job …

“It’s amazing what a good editor can do for your work. There’s a great deal of debate around whether self-publishing is the way forward, but I would always go with having an editor. The editor I have at the moment is amazing: her eye for what works and what doesn’t and the way she can straddle thinking like a writer and thinking like a businessperson leaves me quite breathless. I think a lot of people who want to write don’t realise the degree to which it’s a team effort.”

… but don’t assume the ‘experts’ always know best

“My first book, The Temp, a 20-something rites-of-passage novel, sold really well, about 150,000 copies and got to number three in the charts – with Bridget Jones at number one and two above it, I think. I got quite a large two-book deal but the seeds of disaster were already sown. I was so grateful to have my first book published, I allowed myself to be packaged as full-on chick lit. I have nothing against chick lit but I don’t write it and this was a problem. My agent at the time didn’t put up much of a fight over the branding and the jacket for my second novel was possibly the worst ever – a dreadful cover image and a blurb so aimed at the lowest common denominator that people would come to signings, read the blurb, look at me with pity and walk off. My sales plummeted, I was dropped by major retailers, but I had to finish the contract.”

Keep your work to yourself until the right time

“Don’t show any of your work to anyone who doesn’t have a vested interest in making a profit from it. Everyone will have an opinion but a lot of people don’t know what they’re talking about, though they might have lots of ideas about how they would write their own book. There are also people who are competitive and delight in undermining other people’s confidence. I show to my agent, I show to my editor, and that’s it.”

Invest time and effort in social media

“I invested years into becoming good at social networking and understanding how this new world was going to work. I am very much in love with e-books, for many reasons. I think a lot of writers believe that what matters about a book is what’s inside it rather than its physical form. Sphere, my publisher, didn’t have much budget for marketing The Wicked Girls so they were very imaginative: they put it out as an e-book ahead of publishing it in paperback. That’s only a tactic you can use with a book you think people are going to like. It was published as an e-book in February 2012 and took off by word of mouth; by the time it was published in paperback in June, it had already sold 20,000 copies and had 50 five-star reviews on Amazon, plus a lot of buzz on the internet. I set up an existence for Alex on the internet, on Facebook and on Twitter and, more importantly, I’d been on Facebook as Serena for about five years. My online network were all just wonderful and the value of that is incalculable. It’s not something you can do overnight. So many people mess up the social media thing: they go on Twitter and put out endless Tweets about their books. You have to humanise yourself, join in, not just sit there broadcasting. We’re all used to a bit of advertising, from the television, but nobody would watch an entire channel of adverts.”

Focus on the big picture

“One of the most useful pieces of advice anyone’s ever given me was: ‘You have to remember it’s the body of the work that matters at the end of your life, not how an individual thing has gone.’ You have to learn how to let go of stuff, particularly if it hasn’t gone well.”

Alex Marwood’s new novel The Killer Next Door is available now as a Sphere e-book and is published in paperback in June

Like Alex Marwood, tech entrepreneur Kathryn Parsons mentions the power of personal relationships in her Success Story