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21.10.16 www.thebookseller.com


OPINION SELF-PUBLISHING


25


Making the write moves A


cold September day, 2009. I run quickly down the street. I am late. I pass people walking briskly to their homes. I have walked briskly away from mine. The


mother-in-law has agreed to look after the baby twice a week for two years. I am Sri Lankan, my husband is Jewish. Soon my daughter could be speaking Hebrew and learning passages of the Torah for a bar mitzvah I have not agreed to but I am willing to take that risk. Why? I have been accepted on an MA in Creative Writing at City University, taught by the inimitable Harriett Gilbert and Jonathan Myerson, that’s why. I delve into my pocket to retrieve my phone, which will show me how late I am. Ugh. I sit down, sweating, dishevelled. Surrounding me are leather


satchels and grown-ups. Professor Gilbert has jumped straight in. She is talking about the novel we will write and complete while on the course. I chose the course because it was one of the few that made completion of a novel compulsory. I look around at Serious Writer One, who writes furiously as if he has just finished the novel she has asked him to think about writing. I look at Serious Writer Two, rifling through papers she has pulled out of a bag full of books. I search my pocket for a pen, but all I fish out are a dummy and a sachet of teething granules. There will be a showcase, I am told. Agents will come to hear something that makes them look up, that makes them feel as if this is something new, something fresh, something exciting. This has me distracted. Looking around a room of serious writers, I wonder what I can write to stand out. What story I can possibly tell that will differentiate me from everyone else? And then I notice that while there is a relatively even split between men and women, blue and brown eyes, blonde and dark hair, I am the only Asian girl in the room. And, without my complete consent, the postcolonial novel pulls up a chair next to me.


LONG, WINDING ROAD Two years later at my graduation I have a choice of 10 agents, but the most flattering letter is from Will Francis at Janklow & Nesbit. Will and I work on Cockroach Girl for two years, trying hard to give various publishers the changes they want. But in the end it just doesn’t work out. I wrote another book, this time Young Adult, for which I needed to find another agent as J&N did not represent my new genre. Two years rolled on; same story, different novel. In the meantime, I publish a short story, “Too Asian Not Asian Enough”, with Tindal Street Press and, after a prominent author of young wizards passes on the opportunity, I successfully pitch to write a children’s book for the charity Elephant Family, An Egg Hunt in New York. Life continues. I have three children and my father has just passed away. I am meant to be grieving but every time I start I


Ahead of tomorrow’s all-day self-publishing conference, indie author Anoushka Beazley explains why going it alone was the best choice for her


am interrupted by the school run. Rather than be consumed by my growing bitterness, I start to write. When The Good Enough Mother is finished I realise I’ve written an incisively raw book straight from my heart and it needs to be read. A black comedy about a mother who cannot afford to pay her daughters’ private school tuition, so she turns to criminal means. I self-published with CreateSpace and gave copies to book clubs like Poppyloves, which named me as its September read—its first ever self-published author. I walked into bookshops with my three kids and a suitcase full of books and pitched them the novel. I am stocked in Waterstones’ Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square,


Islington, Finchley Road, Hampstead,


Chiswick and Rye branches. Daunt Books in Hampstead was absolutely wonderful and hosted my reading/signing/author Q&A and interview with Harriett Gilbert. I am stocked in all of my local independent bookshops. The book has received fantastic reviews by book bloggers, press from Camden New Journal and mummy blogger websites, and this has led to me being asked to write articles for other sites and publications, all promotion for the book. It’s completely acceptable when musicians make music on a


computer in their room and release it themselves, and it makes sense that writers, in order to have their work reach people, are doing the same. I wrote, published and marketed my novel myself, showing that there are many ways to skin a cat, prove yourself a serious writer and get your book out there. I think publishing is at its best and most exciting when people, not just writers, take risks. That’s what I did. 


Self-published author Anoushka Beazley at the launch of her novel The Good Enough Mother at Daunt Books in Hampstead, London


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