Blackpool author, Linda Hampton muses on the hurdles and bumps in the road that must be navigated to write and publish a book, and invites you to find out more about Sailing to the Moon, her debut novel that took her five years to finish.
After five long years of swinging between getting on with it and sheer procrastination, and many, many life events that made it difficult for me to just write, I finished my debut novel, Sailing to the Moon.
Sailing to the Moon is a story about the invisible ties that connect two people over a lifetime, and the sliding doors moments that keep them apart. Max and Lily meet again after forty years apart. Gradually their story is revealed through white truths, grey maybes and the elusive technicolour version of what might have been.
I rushed at it to begin with, being on a roll in 2021 on the back of the pandemic and all the lockdowns when I was lucky to have been busy and inspired by the endless free time some of us were gifted. I’d independently published a collection of short stories for children in 2020, Wish You Were Here Seaside Stories, and then went on to publish a quirky absurdist illustrated book about art and artists with my collaborator, Francis Charlton, The Art Worms on Imagination Street, also in late 2020. It was Francis who asked, “So when are you going to write the novel?” At the time I had no plans to write one, but when I started to meditate on the idea, I realised it was staring me in the face. I had reconnected with Francis after a forty year gap and we had been inspired to collaborate on a project together. This became the inspiration for the novel. It’s very much a fictionalised version of what happened but writers are told to ‘write what you know’ and there’s a fair amount of what I know in this story.
So finally the day came when I declared that there would be no more drafts. The novel had been proofread, beta read, and checked down to each comma and full stop, space and dash. But then I had another decision to make. Well, I’d already made it really. Traditional publisher or independently go-it-alone publishing? That was the question. The answer in my case, for several reasons, was the latter.
The publishing industry today is wild. So many more people are writing novels, short stories, poetry, you name it, and the competition is huge. And that’s assuming that it actually even gets to be read by someone who has the power to move it towards traditional publication. As some readers may know, to acquire a publishing deal, the usual route is to scroll through the Writers and Artists Yearbook (they publish an updated one every year at a cost of between £25 and £30) first, to find agents that might be interested in the type of novel you have written. Sailing to the Moon is hard to place within one genre, which is problematic in itself for promotional purposes, but poses an even bigger issue when agents are looking for a particular genre-and there are many more genres and sub-genres these days.
There are so many hoops through which to jump, and contorted shapes in which to coil before you’re even ready to approach these agents. Query letters, synopses, emails, extracts, biogs, and so on! Fast forward another 6, 12, 18 months or more and then you just might have obtained an interested agent -hooray! Fast forward another 6, 12, 18 months or even more then maybe said agent might have found a publisher who would like to publish your novel. By the time this might/might not have happened to me, I would be at least three years older. If I had written the novel at age 25 or 35 years, I might have considered the long game. But I’m not, so instead I skipped happily down the independent publishing path once again.
Part of this crazy trip is doing all your own publicity. Even if you are fortunate enough to be traditionally published, you will still find yourself doing the lion’s share of the marketing and promotion. I launched my novel at the end of March this year in a little café in St Annes called the Mirrie Dancer, when I was interviewed by fellow author, Michael Davies, with a lovely full house audience of friends and acquaintances. It was a happy occasion, a celebration, and a fun afternoon, but after the last lovely people drifted home, after everything was packed up and the café turned the sign to ‘closed’, a little tuft of tumbleweed began to drift down the road.
Sigh. So what next?
Well – apart from constantly posting on social media and messaging my friends and acquaintances asking very nicely if they will leave me a review, I am constantly thinking creatively about how to get more people to know about the novel. I need to seek out opportunities and be inventive about how to keep the momentum going now the book is out there.
However, sometimes opportunities present themselves from generous supporters. And that is how I come to be talking about Sailing to the Moon, and all things writerly at the delightful Tea Amantes Tea Room and Gallery, Albert Road, Blackpool on Friday 8 May at 5pm. The proprietor, Anna Paprzycka, is a huge supporter of the arts in Blackpool, and has made it her mission to help to showcase artists, writers, photographers, in fact any kind of creative practices by people in the town and along the Fylde Coast. In Blackpool, we are very lucky to have her passionate support of the arts.
Sailing to the Moon is available from the wonderful Aunty Social shop on Topping Street, Blackpool so pop in and enjoy the wonderful array of art, books and gifts from local creatives. The novel is also available from Amazon, and I’ll bring some copies along on the day too which will be available to purchase and signed if you wish.
So you’re very welcome to come along for a little teatime writerly chat when I’ll talk more about the ups and downs of writing a novel, and have a lovely cup of tea too. I hope to see you there as I trundle on with my little solo book promotion machine.
