The First Twenty Years...
Happy New Year everyone. As I enter my third decade as a professional writer (blimey!) I think now is a pretty good time to look back over the first twenty years of my career, to plot the ups and downs and assess how the world of publishing has changed.
My first novel, Toady, was published in September 1989. I was 26 years old and living on £40 a week in a draughty bedsit in the centre of Leeds. I had no job, no house, no car, no kids - in short, no responsibilities. All I possessed was a desperate, at times overwhelming, yearning to be a writer.
I graduated in 1984 and sold a handful of stories before my big breakthrough in 1988, the most notable of which was to the late Charles L. Grant for his excellent anthology series, Shadows. I had written one novel before Toady, called The Winter Tree, which I submitted to around a dozen publishers. Four of those publishers had really liked The Winter Tree, and one, Sphere, had even come within a whisker of buying it.
When I finished my gargantuan (250,000-word) second novel, therefore, I submitted it to the four publishers who had shown most interest in my previous book. One of them was a small hardback publisher called Piatkus, and on 29th September 1988 I received a letter from the founder of the company, Judy Piatkus, offering me a royalty advance of £2000 - a fortune to me back then.
That year was a bitter-sweet one for me. In January my dad dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 49 whilst playing golf, and I subsequently spent most of the next six months living back at the family home with Mum, cut off from my friends in Leeds and crushed under a huge weight of shock and grief - both Mum's and my own.
When Toady was accepted for publication eight months after Dad's death, therefore, I felt euphoric, but also guilty for being so happy, as well as desperately sad that my dad had not lived to see my success.
And Toady was a success, particularly when paperback rights were snapped up by Transworld, who released the book in such a blaze of publicity in September 1990 that it shot into the bestseller list at number 7 in its first week of release.
Suddenly, after half a decade of plugging away in my little bedsit, I was living the dream. I was being taken out for expensive meals in fancy London restaurants by my publishers; I was being interviewed on TV and national radio and in magazines; and I was being invited to appear at swish 'meet the writer' events with the likes of Anne McCaffrey and Joanna Trollope.
The problem was, by the time my second novel, Stitch, was released in 1991, horror was already on the skids. Despite the book getting great reviews, Transworld didn't put as much oomph behind Stitch as they had behind Toady, and although it sold moderately well it didn't hit the dizzy heights which Toady had achieved.
My third novel, The Immaculate, received even better reviews, but by now Transworld were telling me that 'the book would have to find its own market'. It was no surprise - though it still came as the first body blow of my career - when Transworld passed on my fourth novel, The Secret of Anatomy, in 1994.
Despite this setback, however, the first ten years of my career, with hindsight, were more or less plain sailing. Piatkus continued to make me generous offers for each of my novels, usually tying me in to 2-book deals, which meant I had a measure of financial security. And although Transworld had passed on The Secret of Anatomy, it was not long before it was snapped up by HarperCollins, who had enthusiastic ambitions to promote me as the 'new Clive Barker', and even secured a very generous quote from Clive himself to plaster all over the very striking paperback cover.
With my fifth novel, Mr Bad Face, I kind of shot myself in the foot to some extent. Unfortunately I've done this a couple of times in the course of my career, as will become apparent. The thing is, as a 'horror' writer I like to diversify, to explore all aspects of the genre, and after writing the big, apocalyptic, multi-viewpoint narrative that was The Secret of Anatomy, I felt an urge to get all small and intimate again, to pull back on the phantasmagoria and write a dark, gritty psycho-thriller, which contained only the most minimal and ambiguous supernatural content.
Sadly HarperCollins didn't go for this at all, and after a dispiriting and somewhat heated discussion it was decided that we would part ways. And so sadly my potentially glittering career with HarperCollins was over before it had even really begun. But c'est la vie. Onward and upward.
It was around this time, 1996, that Piatkus decided to launch their own mass-market paperback line, and so in the end they themselves published the paperback editions of both Mr Bad Face and my next novel, Longbarrow. However the writing was on the wall. Neither of those books sold particularly well, and although I signed a contract for my next (and as it turned out, last) Piatkus novel, Genesis, to be published in both hardback and paperback, the paperback edition, after much prevaricating, never appeared.
By now horror as a genre was in the doldrums. After the market saturation of the late 80s/early 90s, sales were dipping alarmingly, horror imprints were disappearing and those working within the genre were finding that either their royalty advances were shrinking or their contracts were being cancelled altogether.
I had had a number of ups and downs by this point, but my first real 'dark night of the soul' came in 1998, when Piatkus decided, in the light of poor sales, to stop publishing horror altogether. As the last of a clutch of Piatkus horror writers which had once included the likes of Dean R. Koontz and Ron Chetwynd-Hayes, I was told that my services were no longer required. After ten years I was suddenly out on my ear.
For the first time since receiving the initial offer from Judy Piatkus in September 1988, I felt utterly washed-up, cast adrift. Ironically, the news that Piatkus were dropping me came on the same day that I attended Stephen King's incredibly lavish launch party for Bag of Bones in London. King - a huge inspiration not only to me, but to almost every other horror writer of my generation - was making one of his rare visits to the UK. For the first time in my life I was in the same room as the great man - and I felt crap. In fact, his incredible and well-deserved success only seemed to exacerbate my own failure. Needless to say, I got very drunk and very maudlin that night. My agent, who was also at the party, assured me that all would be well, but in the throes of my depression I found it hard to believe her.
She was right, though. Well, kind of. The book which Piatkus ultimately passed on was a novel called Fiddleback. I think I was on holiday in Cornwall when I received a call to say that Fiddleback had been bought by an editor at Pan MacMillan, who loved the book enough to throw a great deal of publicity behind it. As a result, Fiddleback became my highest-profile novel since Toady. One of the very highest points of my career came one morning when I took a call from the foreign rights girl at MacMillan. She asked me if I was sitting down and then told me that US rights to Fiddleback had been sold to Random House for a huge amount of money. What was more, a German publisher had matched the US offer, and smaller offers had also been received from publishers in France and Holland. Not only was the money great, but it was also the first (and only) time translation rights had been sold for one of my books. I eventually earned enough money from Fiddleback to put a substantial deposit down on a new house, buy a car and live comfortably for the next couple of years.
But what the universe gives with one hand it takes away with the other. Having enjoyed huge financial and critical success with Fiddleback, I then proceeded to shoot myself in the foot once again. The trouble was, Fiddleback had taken several months to sell, by which time I was 30,000 words or so into a new novel called Nowhere Near An Angel. This book was shaping up well - in fact, I thought it might turn out to be the best, and most mature, thing I'd ever written - but when I presented it to Pan MacMillan as my proposed next book, their collective face fell.
What Pan MacMillan had liked about Fiddleback was that it had been written (very successfully, I'm told) in first person from a female point of view. Therefore, in order to attract a female readership, MacMillan had elected to market the novel as a psychological thriller under the inscrutable pseudonym, J.M. Morris. What I wasn't told was that they wanted the follow-up book to be female-orientated too. But the protagonist of Nowhere Near An Angel was a male ex-punk, ex-con anti-hero in his early forties. I was given two options: turn my male protagonist into a female protagonist (impossible, given the nature of the story) or scrap the book and write something else.
In the end I - perhaps unwisely, perhaps with a certain amount of integrity, depending on your viewpoint - decided to go for a third option. I would finish Nowhere Near An Angel, try to sell it elsewhere (possibly as a one-off to an independent publisher) and then come up with an idea for another book featuring a female protagonist.
So that's what I did. I finished Nowhere Near An Angel and sold it to Pete Crowther's excellent and multi-award winning PS Publishing, and then I drew up plans to write a new novel featuring a female protagonist, which I submitted to Pan MacMillan.
It quickly became evident, however, that Pan MacMillan had now gone cold on the whole deal. It had been three years since the paperback release of Fiddleback, sales of the book had clearly not been as good as they had hoped for, and the general consensus was that I had now 'missed the boat'. Another publisher down, another potentially glittering career nipped in the bud.
So, five years on from all of that, where does that leave me?
Well, in a pleasingly healthy state, to be honest. The publishing industry has changed beyond recognition since I signed my first contract back in 1988, and writers have to be far more versatile and flexible to survive these days. Gone are those halcyon days (for most of us, at least) of living on the proceeds of one novel a year. Now I (and most of my peers) take on a variety of work, I write faster and more assuredly than I ever did before, and I feel very optimistic about my current career path. I have made a good living this past couple of years, writing mostly tie-in books and audio scripts for the likes of Doctor Who (which is a labour of love, as I've adored it ever since I was a kid), Torchwood and Hellboy. As well as helping to pay the bills, this work has won me awards, allowed me to enjoy hugely successful, all-expenses-paid publicity trips to various events up and down the country, and enabled me to meet a huge range of new and interesting people, many of whom have gone on to become great friends. In the past year or so I've been privileged enough to have had dinner with my favourite Doctor Who companion, Elizabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith), to have written scripts for such renowned actors as Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Keith Barron and Liza Tarbuck, and to visit the Doctor Who and Torchwood sets in Cardiff (a bit of the TARDIS console even came off in my hand!).
And aside from the tie-in work, I have also edited a book of horror movie essays called Cinema Macabre, for which I received the British Fantasy Award, have had a new novel, The Deluge, published as a mass-market paperback in the US, and have had my first three novels re-issued - Toady and Stitch as handsome hardcovers by the now sadly defunct independent publisher, Humdrumming, and The Immaculate as a mass-market US paperback.
As 2010 dawns, I am completing work on a new novel entitled The Black, am co-writing a YA novel with a very good friend of mine, am editing a follow-up volume to Cinema Macabre called Cinema Futura, and am working on several further TV tie-in commissions, both in book and audio form. Later this year, PS Publishing will release my new short story collection, Long Shadows, Nightmare Light, and there are also several other potentially very exciting projects in the pipeline, none of which I can talk about yet.
As ever in this writing game, the future is forever shifting and largely unknown, but one thing I can say with absolute certainty is that, whatever happens, I'm really looking forward to it.
My first novel, Toady, was published in September 1989. I was 26 years old and living on £40 a week in a draughty bedsit in the centre of Leeds. I had no job, no house, no car, no kids - in short, no responsibilities. All I possessed was a desperate, at times overwhelming, yearning to be a writer.
I graduated in 1984 and sold a handful of stories before my big breakthrough in 1988, the most notable of which was to the late Charles L. Grant for his excellent anthology series, Shadows. I had written one novel before Toady, called The Winter Tree, which I submitted to around a dozen publishers. Four of those publishers had really liked The Winter Tree, and one, Sphere, had even come within a whisker of buying it.
When I finished my gargantuan (250,000-word) second novel, therefore, I submitted it to the four publishers who had shown most interest in my previous book. One of them was a small hardback publisher called Piatkus, and on 29th September 1988 I received a letter from the founder of the company, Judy Piatkus, offering me a royalty advance of £2000 - a fortune to me back then.
That year was a bitter-sweet one for me. In January my dad dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 49 whilst playing golf, and I subsequently spent most of the next six months living back at the family home with Mum, cut off from my friends in Leeds and crushed under a huge weight of shock and grief - both Mum's and my own.
When Toady was accepted for publication eight months after Dad's death, therefore, I felt euphoric, but also guilty for being so happy, as well as desperately sad that my dad had not lived to see my success.
And Toady was a success, particularly when paperback rights were snapped up by Transworld, who released the book in such a blaze of publicity in September 1990 that it shot into the bestseller list at number 7 in its first week of release.
Suddenly, after half a decade of plugging away in my little bedsit, I was living the dream. I was being taken out for expensive meals in fancy London restaurants by my publishers; I was being interviewed on TV and national radio and in magazines; and I was being invited to appear at swish 'meet the writer' events with the likes of Anne McCaffrey and Joanna Trollope.
The problem was, by the time my second novel, Stitch, was released in 1991, horror was already on the skids. Despite the book getting great reviews, Transworld didn't put as much oomph behind Stitch as they had behind Toady, and although it sold moderately well it didn't hit the dizzy heights which Toady had achieved.
My third novel, The Immaculate, received even better reviews, but by now Transworld were telling me that 'the book would have to find its own market'. It was no surprise - though it still came as the first body blow of my career - when Transworld passed on my fourth novel, The Secret of Anatomy, in 1994.
Despite this setback, however, the first ten years of my career, with hindsight, were more or less plain sailing. Piatkus continued to make me generous offers for each of my novels, usually tying me in to 2-book deals, which meant I had a measure of financial security. And although Transworld had passed on The Secret of Anatomy, it was not long before it was snapped up by HarperCollins, who had enthusiastic ambitions to promote me as the 'new Clive Barker', and even secured a very generous quote from Clive himself to plaster all over the very striking paperback cover.
With my fifth novel, Mr Bad Face, I kind of shot myself in the foot to some extent. Unfortunately I've done this a couple of times in the course of my career, as will become apparent. The thing is, as a 'horror' writer I like to diversify, to explore all aspects of the genre, and after writing the big, apocalyptic, multi-viewpoint narrative that was The Secret of Anatomy, I felt an urge to get all small and intimate again, to pull back on the phantasmagoria and write a dark, gritty psycho-thriller, which contained only the most minimal and ambiguous supernatural content.
Sadly HarperCollins didn't go for this at all, and after a dispiriting and somewhat heated discussion it was decided that we would part ways. And so sadly my potentially glittering career with HarperCollins was over before it had even really begun. But c'est la vie. Onward and upward.
It was around this time, 1996, that Piatkus decided to launch their own mass-market paperback line, and so in the end they themselves published the paperback editions of both Mr Bad Face and my next novel, Longbarrow. However the writing was on the wall. Neither of those books sold particularly well, and although I signed a contract for my next (and as it turned out, last) Piatkus novel, Genesis, to be published in both hardback and paperback, the paperback edition, after much prevaricating, never appeared.
By now horror as a genre was in the doldrums. After the market saturation of the late 80s/early 90s, sales were dipping alarmingly, horror imprints were disappearing and those working within the genre were finding that either their royalty advances were shrinking or their contracts were being cancelled altogether.
I had had a number of ups and downs by this point, but my first real 'dark night of the soul' came in 1998, when Piatkus decided, in the light of poor sales, to stop publishing horror altogether. As the last of a clutch of Piatkus horror writers which had once included the likes of Dean R. Koontz and Ron Chetwynd-Hayes, I was told that my services were no longer required. After ten years I was suddenly out on my ear.
For the first time since receiving the initial offer from Judy Piatkus in September 1988, I felt utterly washed-up, cast adrift. Ironically, the news that Piatkus were dropping me came on the same day that I attended Stephen King's incredibly lavish launch party for Bag of Bones in London. King - a huge inspiration not only to me, but to almost every other horror writer of my generation - was making one of his rare visits to the UK. For the first time in my life I was in the same room as the great man - and I felt crap. In fact, his incredible and well-deserved success only seemed to exacerbate my own failure. Needless to say, I got very drunk and very maudlin that night. My agent, who was also at the party, assured me that all would be well, but in the throes of my depression I found it hard to believe her.
She was right, though. Well, kind of. The book which Piatkus ultimately passed on was a novel called Fiddleback. I think I was on holiday in Cornwall when I received a call to say that Fiddleback had been bought by an editor at Pan MacMillan, who loved the book enough to throw a great deal of publicity behind it. As a result, Fiddleback became my highest-profile novel since Toady. One of the very highest points of my career came one morning when I took a call from the foreign rights girl at MacMillan. She asked me if I was sitting down and then told me that US rights to Fiddleback had been sold to Random House for a huge amount of money. What was more, a German publisher had matched the US offer, and smaller offers had also been received from publishers in France and Holland. Not only was the money great, but it was also the first (and only) time translation rights had been sold for one of my books. I eventually earned enough money from Fiddleback to put a substantial deposit down on a new house, buy a car and live comfortably for the next couple of years.
But what the universe gives with one hand it takes away with the other. Having enjoyed huge financial and critical success with Fiddleback, I then proceeded to shoot myself in the foot once again. The trouble was, Fiddleback had taken several months to sell, by which time I was 30,000 words or so into a new novel called Nowhere Near An Angel. This book was shaping up well - in fact, I thought it might turn out to be the best, and most mature, thing I'd ever written - but when I presented it to Pan MacMillan as my proposed next book, their collective face fell.
What Pan MacMillan had liked about Fiddleback was that it had been written (very successfully, I'm told) in first person from a female point of view. Therefore, in order to attract a female readership, MacMillan had elected to market the novel as a psychological thriller under the inscrutable pseudonym, J.M. Morris. What I wasn't told was that they wanted the follow-up book to be female-orientated too. But the protagonist of Nowhere Near An Angel was a male ex-punk, ex-con anti-hero in his early forties. I was given two options: turn my male protagonist into a female protagonist (impossible, given the nature of the story) or scrap the book and write something else.
In the end I - perhaps unwisely, perhaps with a certain amount of integrity, depending on your viewpoint - decided to go for a third option. I would finish Nowhere Near An Angel, try to sell it elsewhere (possibly as a one-off to an independent publisher) and then come up with an idea for another book featuring a female protagonist.
So that's what I did. I finished Nowhere Near An Angel and sold it to Pete Crowther's excellent and multi-award winning PS Publishing, and then I drew up plans to write a new novel featuring a female protagonist, which I submitted to Pan MacMillan.
It quickly became evident, however, that Pan MacMillan had now gone cold on the whole deal. It had been three years since the paperback release of Fiddleback, sales of the book had clearly not been as good as they had hoped for, and the general consensus was that I had now 'missed the boat'. Another publisher down, another potentially glittering career nipped in the bud.
So, five years on from all of that, where does that leave me?
Well, in a pleasingly healthy state, to be honest. The publishing industry has changed beyond recognition since I signed my first contract back in 1988, and writers have to be far more versatile and flexible to survive these days. Gone are those halcyon days (for most of us, at least) of living on the proceeds of one novel a year. Now I (and most of my peers) take on a variety of work, I write faster and more assuredly than I ever did before, and I feel very optimistic about my current career path. I have made a good living this past couple of years, writing mostly tie-in books and audio scripts for the likes of Doctor Who (which is a labour of love, as I've adored it ever since I was a kid), Torchwood and Hellboy. As well as helping to pay the bills, this work has won me awards, allowed me to enjoy hugely successful, all-expenses-paid publicity trips to various events up and down the country, and enabled me to meet a huge range of new and interesting people, many of whom have gone on to become great friends. In the past year or so I've been privileged enough to have had dinner with my favourite Doctor Who companion, Elizabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith), to have written scripts for such renowned actors as Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Keith Barron and Liza Tarbuck, and to visit the Doctor Who and Torchwood sets in Cardiff (a bit of the TARDIS console even came off in my hand!).
And aside from the tie-in work, I have also edited a book of horror movie essays called Cinema Macabre, for which I received the British Fantasy Award, have had a new novel, The Deluge, published as a mass-market paperback in the US, and have had my first three novels re-issued - Toady and Stitch as handsome hardcovers by the now sadly defunct independent publisher, Humdrumming, and The Immaculate as a mass-market US paperback.
As 2010 dawns, I am completing work on a new novel entitled The Black, am co-writing a YA novel with a very good friend of mine, am editing a follow-up volume to Cinema Macabre called Cinema Futura, and am working on several further TV tie-in commissions, both in book and audio form. Later this year, PS Publishing will release my new short story collection, Long Shadows, Nightmare Light, and there are also several other potentially very exciting projects in the pipeline, none of which I can talk about yet.
As ever in this writing game, the future is forever shifting and largely unknown, but one thing I can say with absolute certainty is that, whatever happens, I'm really looking forward to it.
posted by Mark M at 3:12 PM
7 Comments:
Bravo, Mark, on 20 years! I'm in the same boat. Best wishes with Cinema Futuro and the new story collection (instant buys for me!).
Yours for the long haul, Mike Arnzen, http://gorelets.com
Wow, Mark, thanks for the inspiring tale. I've had some definite highs and lows and as I gear up to hit the bloody slopes again, I feel more in control than ever before, precisely because I've now realized there are so many factors beyond my control that all I need to embrace is the day's bayonet charge...
Scott Nicholson
www.hauntedcomputer.com
What a splendidly honest and absorbing post. It's always frightening to shy away from the harsh, uncaring world that can dash any writer's hopes and just never take those first steps into the big, scary writing world, however you have obviously kept going through all those difficult and bad times, no matter how hard it must have been.
I really wish you well for the future and thank you for such an insightful glimpse into your own amazing story.
You're an inspiration, me old mate.
Roll on the new decade and I wish you every success with it.
Thanks for the little essay, very interesting!
This is a bit weird, but I'm responding to my own blog at the request of 'Meat' & 'Garbage Man' author Joe D'Lacey, who doesn't have a google account. Joe has asked me to say:
"You are a stalwart, Mark.
The highs and lows of this business seem violent enough, at times, to break any spirit. It's heartening, therefore, and particularly so for me, to see that your response has been quite the opposite. I wish you continued success, fulfilment and fortitude.
I'm grateful to you for sharing these insights into your survival. The heart of your message is that you love what you do and that it carries you through. I'm both strengthened and inspired by that because there are some days when, no matter what you tell yourself, you forget why you're here.
Thanks for the reminder."
And thank *you*, Joe, and indeed thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read the blog and leave wonderful, supportive comments. What a brilliant bunch of people horror writers are. I'm proud to be one of you.
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