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#22 - Susanna Kleeman
214 Plays4 years ago
Speculative thriller author, Susanna Kleeman drops by to tell us all about her speculative psychological thriller, Twice. We talk all about the ups and downs of her writing journey and everything she learned along the way, which is documented on her blog 'My Rejections'. A very relatable conversation for anyone who has gone through or is in the thick of writing and submitting.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Right and Wrong podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
So our podcast is called Right and Wrong.
00:00:01
Speaker
Are these your notes?
00:00:03
Speaker
These are your notes about what we're going to say.
00:00:06
Speaker
What does it say?
00:00:07
Speaker
I thought it would be a good... I didn't even get the idea.
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Speaker
Maybe I can just ask you the question.
00:00:16
Speaker
It's going well.
00:00:16
Speaker
It's going really well.
00:00:21
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Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast.
00:00:24
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I'm Emma.
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And I'm Jamie.
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And today we're joined by Susanna Kleeman.
00:00:29
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author of upcoming psychological thriller, Twice.
00:00:33
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Hi, Stingana.
00:00:34
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Hello.
00:00:35
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Thank you.
00:00:35
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Thanks for having me.
00:00:37
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Yes, it's great to have
Discussing "Twice", a psychological thriller
00:00:38
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you on the show.
00:00:38
Speaker
So I guess let's start off with your soon-to-be-released book.
00:00:43
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So it's out on the 25th of June.
00:00:45
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That's right.
00:00:46
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Yeah.
00:00:46
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Can you give us and the listeners a little bit of a blurb for it, like a background?
00:00:52
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Sure.
00:00:54
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So twice, let's say it's a speculative psychological thriller, let's say.
00:00:58
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And it's the story of Nim and she's on the run with someone who might be her ex-love and might be his double.
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I hate when that happens.
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It's about doubles, lost loves.
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It's about the secret history of the world.
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And it's also kind of about what we've lost now that we've handed over our senses and souls to digital tech.
00:01:22
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So big tech, espionage, sabotage, all that great stuff.
00:01:26
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All sorts of stuff.
00:01:27
Speaker
Yes, exactly.
00:01:28
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What was the inspiration for
Historical influences on Susanna's writing
00:01:32
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this?
00:01:32
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So there's a variety of inspirations.
00:01:34
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One is I studied history and I always was interested in history.
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But for me, history just doesn't fully make sense.
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The past is much more mysterious than we're taught.
00:01:48
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And the further back you go into the past, the more mysterious things are.
00:01:52
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And I'm talking here about things like
00:01:54
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ancient Greek computers, they exist.
00:01:56
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They were just in the news this week.
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Don't know if you saw them.
00:01:57
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It's called the Antichythera Mechanism.
00:01:59
Speaker
I didn't see that.
00:02:01
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No, wow.
00:02:01
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Okay.
00:02:02
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Yeah, yeah.
00:02:02
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Highly recommend it.
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So that's 2,000 years old.
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It's made of bronze.
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It's an ancient Greek computer.
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It's got lots of gears.
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It's a model of the solar system.
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How was it?
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Stuff like that I was always very interested by.
00:02:14
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And that's one hand.
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On the other hand, I was always very interested by the present, which doesn't seem to make much sense either.
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And it seems a bit like history.
00:02:24
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Sometimes there's only a certain, there's a kind of walled garden that we're allowed to be interested in.
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And there's a whole lot of other stuff also.
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And then the third strand, I would say, is like everybody else, I'm also interested in people and sometimes they don't make sense either.
00:02:38
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So somehow in this stew of stuff, that's kind of where my book comes from.
00:02:45
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Wow.
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Amazing.
00:02:46
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Well, that's very relatable in many ways.
00:02:50
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The history stuff immediately to me is I'm thinking, yeah, history is so murky because as they say, history is written by the winners.
00:02:57
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So you're never really going to get that perfect account.
00:03:00
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And I guess when you talk about modern day things, it's more like the news we receive is very curated by specific people.
00:03:06
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Yes, exactly.
00:03:08
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And at the edges of things, there are all sorts of unexplained things, which also there's big taboos on discussing.
00:03:13
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If you start talking too much about what lies at the edges of our culture, then you're lining yourself up with some interesting people on the internet.
00:03:20
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And that's quite easy to discard and laugh off, but it is very interesting.
00:03:24
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I'll tell you something else that is in the background to my book is I spent a lot of time in
Wales' history and its impact on "Twice"
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Wales.
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My husband's family live in Wales, and I don't know how much time you spent in Wales, but that's a very interesting place.
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And it's got a lot of very ancient, very overgrown history.
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And a lot of it is to do with mining and castles.
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And after a while, what I came to realise about Wales, and in fact, it's true of all of West Britain, and a lot of my book is a kind of secret history of Britain, is it's got incredibly valuable mineral resources in it.
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I studied, as I said, at university.
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I studied history.
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I studied medieval history.
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I studied older than medieval history, but at no point ever was the incredible mineral wealth of West Britain ever discussed.
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Once I understood that from going to Roman gold mines, for example, that are in Wales, I was like, okay, now I understand why everyone's invading Wales all the time.
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Wow.
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For example, I studied the Normans.
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The Normans come to Britain, they secure the southeast, and then they rush up to Wales and to the west coast of Britain, as the Romans did.
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And it's like, why would they go there?
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And it's like, well, maybe they would go there for the vast amount of mineral resources, gold, iron, copper, everything that you can name is there.
00:04:30
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And that sort of stuff is just never discussed.
00:04:32
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And so, yeah, I could ramble on a lot about all of that.
00:04:36
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So it's the causality that fascinates you and that's what's kind of come into this more modern book.
00:04:42
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Well, what it is, is I get the sense, and I could be entirely wrong, and here I'm a novelist, I'm not a historian, but I get the sense that in the past and possibly in the present, there are people who know a lot of stuff and then there's the rest of us.
00:04:55
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And the people who know a lot of stuff know that West Britain is a great place for mining.
00:05:00
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And in fact, the reason West Britain is a great place for mining is because it's the seam of a volcano.
00:05:04
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The whole of West Britain is the seam of a volcano that used to be under the Atlantic.
00:05:08
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And you can see throughout history, you know, in the Lake District, for example, it's a place called the Langdale Axe Factory, high up in the Lake District.
00:05:18
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You know, Stone Age people were making incredible weapons there and exporting them all over Europe.
00:05:23
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And here we're talking 5,000 years ago, earlier than that, because of the volcanic rock there.
00:05:27
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So what I'm trying to say is the sense I got is some people have always known that West Britain's an amazing resource.
00:05:34
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Some people have always known a lot of stuff.
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And then there's the rest of us.
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And our job is to dig, basically.
00:05:39
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But my book is very much set in the present.
Susanna's writing journey and early experiences
00:05:43
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And it's about uncovering those ideas and sort of understanding that as also talking about how things might be working now.
00:05:51
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That's brilliant.
00:05:51
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I think as well, I'm interested to know, prior to Twice, what was your writing experience?
00:05:59
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Well, I've had a very long and varied writing experience.
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So Twice is my first published novel, but I have certainly been attempting to write those novels over the years.
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And I should actually say,
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My first writing experience was when I was 11 and I won the Royal Court Theatre in London.
00:06:15
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They have an amazing thing called the Young Writers Festival and it's a playwriting festival.
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And so when I was 11, my play was put on at the Royal Court Theatre.
00:06:24
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Wow.
00:06:25
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Amazing.
00:06:26
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Yeah, it was brilliant.
00:06:26
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It was brilliant and it was also a very strange experience because let's put it this way, I certainly felt great.
00:06:33
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Well, that's me set up for life now.
00:06:34
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Other people have to find a career or what to do, but I'm 11 and I'm just going to be a playwright from now on.
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And it took a little bit of unpicking to, let's put it that way, to learn that that wasn't necessarily going to be how it was.
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Anyway, jump forward.
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I left university.
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I wanted to write novels.
00:06:52
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I love books.
00:06:53
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I read so much, spent all my time reading books.
00:06:56
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I'd moved away from the playwriting sphere.
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I just wanted to write novels.
00:06:59
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And so I wrote some novels and those were, I must've written four novels before twice, but they were to a lesser or greater extent, those were quite autobiographical novels and to a greater and later extent, lesser extent, they weren't particularly good.
00:07:14
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So...
00:07:18
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I wrote those novels and I think that was fantastic that I did.
00:07:21
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And I sort of think,
Challenges in writing and creating plot-based stories
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as I'm sure you've heard and perhaps you've experienced yourself, you've got to write those novels and then you've got to put them away.
00:07:26
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But then I wrote, I very consciously then thought, I don't want to write autobiographical novels.
00:07:31
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I've got all that stuff out of me.
00:07:33
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And what I want to do is to learn how to write the books that I love, which are generally books like...
00:07:40
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you know, Umberto Eco.
00:07:44
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I love books that are, let's put them this way, literary thrillers, but they have lots of plot in them or the secret history or something like that.
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I thought I want to learn how to write plot, to write books that have lots of plot in because that's what I love.
00:07:55
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That was a difficult process, but I did that work and then I wrote twice and I thought, yeah, okay, great.
00:08:01
Speaker
I'm so pleased this is a different sort of thing.
00:08:03
Speaker
Amazing.
00:08:03
Speaker
So this was actually your first proper attempt.
00:08:06
Speaker
I don't know how much fictional or real realism there was in your previous books, but this is your first full fiction.
00:08:14
Speaker
Yeah, my other books were gussied up nonfiction.
00:08:19
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Names were changed, let's put it that way.
00:08:22
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And the first ones I wrote were very much purely that.
00:08:25
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And then the next ones were kind of that with a few other sort of half-hearted bits of plot in there.
00:08:30
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But basically, I didn't know how to write plot except the plot that had happened to me.
00:08:35
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And what happens to you is...
00:08:38
Speaker
It's fascinating to you, but it's just not that much fascinating to other people unless you can magic it up, which for me means actually making a plot that's not just, oh, this happened and then this happened.
00:08:49
Speaker
Yeah, sure.
00:08:50
Speaker
And it's been a long journey for you, which you have very generously documented on your blog, My Rejections.
00:09:00
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It's been certainly very generous of me to document.
00:09:03
Speaker
Yeah.
Blogging about literary rejections and lessons learned
00:09:05
Speaker
It's very easy for everyone to talk about their successes.
00:09:12
Speaker
You know, it's a bit harder to tell everyone that it is a hard ride and I had a hard time doing it.
00:09:18
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But that's what we're trying to do with this podcast is kind of say, you know, there's a lot of people submitting books.
00:09:23
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There's a lot of people trying to get published.
00:09:27
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And we're all kind of, you know, we've all either been in it or are in a similar sort of boat in that way.
00:09:33
Speaker
So I think it's great.
00:09:34
Speaker
I really I've read all through my rejections blog.
00:09:40
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What made you decide to just start documenting that and putting it all up?
00:09:44
Speaker
Well, the first thing I should say is, you know, whenever what I've discovered also about writing is every time you feel like, oh God, it would be so great to write about that, but I just can't.
00:09:52
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That's when you know that you've got something juicy there that other people would want, you know?
00:09:56
Speaker
And I, what happened to me is that I, so I'd done all the work.
00:10:00
Speaker
I'd written my autobiographical novels.
00:10:02
Speaker
I'd put them in drawer.
00:10:03
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I'd spent a long time writing this book and I really believed in it.
00:10:06
Speaker
And also I was a fantasist as I still am.
00:10:09
Speaker
It's kind of a job requirement to be a novelist to some degree.
00:10:11
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Yeah.
00:10:12
Speaker
A fantasist and very naive.
00:10:15
Speaker
And what I thought was, my book's great.
00:10:18
Speaker
And I'm just going to, for the first time, I've sent it.
00:10:20
Speaker
I've done the whole submissions process before.
00:10:22
Speaker
I'd sent to literary agents.
00:10:23
Speaker
I'd got some good responses from literary agents about books in the past.
00:10:25
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I hadn't got a literary agent, but I felt like, okay, I understand why they rejected the other ones.
00:10:31
Speaker
I've got some good connections.
00:10:33
Speaker
I'll try with this one.
00:10:34
Speaker
And I was just in a mad way really convinced that literary agents...
00:10:38
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We're going to love it.
00:10:40
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And what can I say?
00:10:41
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They didn't.
00:10:45
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But then I got, you know, I had a whole, well, you've read my rejection.
00:10:48
Speaker
So, you know, I got a whole slew of things.
00:10:50
Speaker
I got some nice responses, but I was really like, why don't they like my book?
00:10:54
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I like my book an awful lot.
00:10:56
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I'd like to read this book.
00:10:57
Speaker
Why don't they like it?
00:10:59
Speaker
And I went through a lot in, it was about, you know, it actually wasn't that long.
00:11:04
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It was about nine months worth of getting, I would say I got about 50, 60 rejections.
00:11:12
Speaker
Well, having said that, as you'll know from having read my rejections, some of those were straight out rejections and some of those were just people not replying to me in various different ways.
00:11:20
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:11:22
Speaker
Well, I don't want to, I'm trying to answer the question, but you know, if people say on their website, if you don't hear from me, then it's a rejection.
00:11:29
Speaker
That's fine.
00:11:30
Speaker
I can tell you.
00:11:30
Speaker
But if people say, oh, I'll get back to you within six weeks, you know, and never do, that's not acceptable as far as I'm concerned.
00:11:38
Speaker
But anyway, let me not talk too much about that.
00:11:42
Speaker
But what I also felt is like, I also was coming at the end of this time, I was coming to understand the fatal mistake
00:11:49
Speaker
I was coming to understand how very naive and arrogant I had been.
00:11:54
Speaker
I felt like there is a good story to be told here.
00:11:58
Speaker
In fact, I started writing it before I got a publisher for my book.
00:12:02
Speaker
What I'd had to do is I'd had to come to terms with the fact that I had written a strange book.
00:12:07
Speaker
And this is the key insight that I learned and that I hoped to document in my rejections.
00:12:12
Speaker
You have to be true to yourself.
00:12:14
Speaker
You have to know what it is that you've written.
00:12:15
Speaker
And you have to understand very firmly that what you're entering when you start writing to literary agents is a business arena.
Genre challenges and the publishing industry
00:12:22
Speaker
And that's what it is.
00:12:24
Speaker
And you asked me at the beginning to tell you about my book and what it was.
00:12:28
Speaker
And I said, let's call it a speculative psychological thriller.
00:12:30
Speaker
That's not a genre that trips easily off the tongue.
00:12:34
Speaker
And that's not exactly what my book is either.
00:12:36
Speaker
I had written that fatal thing, which is a book that doesn't sit easily in a genre.
00:12:42
Speaker
And therefore literary agents weren't interested in it.
00:12:44
Speaker
And why should they be interested in it?
00:12:45
Speaker
They've worked hard.
00:12:46
Speaker
They've got relationships with editors.
00:12:48
Speaker
They know what those editors want.
00:12:49
Speaker
My book didn't fit into those slots.
00:12:52
Speaker
And so I'd come to understand that, but I had also come to the understanding that I still like my book.
00:12:58
Speaker
And I had come to a crossroads where I felt like, you know what?
00:13:01
Speaker
I would do that thing that previously, through whatever outdated, snobbish, silly attitudes I'd had, I would never have considered, which is self-publish.
00:13:09
Speaker
I thought I will self-publish my book.
00:13:10
Speaker
If no one wants to publish it, I care about it and I'll go through the pain.
00:13:15
Speaker
And in doing that, I thought, I want to write about this...
00:13:20
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these new thoughts that I have had, the journey I've had to be on, the naivety, ignorance, lack of understanding that I've had.
00:13:29
Speaker
It's hilarious to a certain extent.
00:13:31
Speaker
It is funny.
00:13:33
Speaker
I particularly enjoy the monikers that you give to the agents, the gentleman agent and the grand dame.
00:13:42
Speaker
And some of those were very lovely people who I had a very lovely interaction with.
00:13:46
Speaker
Most of them were, but I was just, you know, trying to sell them, I don't know, a baguette and what they wanted was a cream cake.
00:13:51
Speaker
So, you know, that's it.
00:13:53
Speaker
But I just felt my own stupidity.
00:13:55
Speaker
And I think, you know, for me, an essence of comedy is someone very serious attempting to do something utterly ludicrous.
00:14:00
Speaker
And that is what I want, what I've been set up.
00:14:04
Speaker
I just thought, I want to write this.
00:14:05
Speaker
And as soon as I did, as soon as I wrote the first episode of it, I just felt great.
00:14:10
Speaker
Just to kind of vomit up the truth is always a good feeling.
00:14:15
Speaker
And then after a while, I just couldn't stop writing it.
00:14:17
Speaker
Then during the course of it, I got a publisher, but I still felt, you know, I thought, great, I've got a happy ending to my story that I'm going to do here.
00:14:24
Speaker
And then also, I don't know if you saw this, but the other thing that I did is I self-published my rejections.
00:14:29
Speaker
It's up on Amazon.
00:14:32
Speaker
Your listeners are free to go and purchase it.
00:14:35
Speaker
It's there.
00:14:38
Speaker
It was important because I had thought I would do that for my book.
00:14:41
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I just decided I must do this.
00:14:44
Speaker
I must divest myself of the last bit of silly, snobbish, unmodern thinking that I had.
00:14:49
Speaker
I want to find out what it's like to self-publish a book.
00:14:51
Speaker
I want to get to know what the silly process is or whatever you do with Amazon and make my own cover, whatever.
00:14:56
Speaker
I'll do it.
00:14:56
Speaker
It gave me a lot of satisfaction to do that.
00:14:59
Speaker
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.
00:15:00
Speaker
I mean, as you just said, like, you know, rejections is something that almost every writer has to go through and experience as sort of journey as, as what we were saying.
00:15:10
Speaker
And I think I know me and Jamie and in different, um, varying things of, of like had our own fair share of, of that as well.
00:15:18
Speaker
And I think the long journey was sort of like really like a lot of ups and downs.
00:15:23
Speaker
Um, but when you family found that, like sort of that yes moment, um,
00:15:29
Speaker
Do you think it was just because of all of the, I guess, the ups and downs and the pre-writing and all that that you've done before?
00:15:37
Speaker
What was that like?
00:15:43
Speaker
Um, it was good.
00:15:45
Speaker
It came into my junk mail folder.
00:15:48
Speaker
It came into my junk mail folder.
00:15:50
Speaker
So I, and I was someone, um, perhaps you can relate who'd sat there whenever, you know, to begin with when I'd sat there, um, uh, send out something to an agent, sit there waiting, maybe they'll get back immediately.
00:16:00
Speaker
Maybe they'll just love it.
00:16:01
Speaker
You know?
00:16:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:02
Speaker
I, I was an inbox watcher, which is not me.
00:16:07
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And so it was even more hilarious to me that it came into my junk mail.
00:16:09
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I didn't see it for about five hours.
00:16:11
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I just happened to check my junk mail.
00:16:13
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There it was.
00:16:15
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To go back slightly, I think you have to do it.
00:16:17
Speaker
Part of being a writer is not just writing your book.
00:16:20
Speaker
It is being rejected.
00:16:22
Speaker
It is also having to go through the process of truly simplifying what it is that you are
00:16:28
Speaker
writings and expressing it properly to people, getting rejected, having to do it again, coming to understand it.
00:16:33
Speaker
I think that's what marks you from being someone who writes perhaps as a hobby experiment to being someone who's putting themselves forward as a professional writer.
00:16:41
Speaker
You have to develop a tough skin, which I did not have, which I do have a lot more of now.
00:16:46
Speaker
You have to do all that.
00:16:47
Speaker
So the other thing about it is the publisher I'd sent it to, zero.
Finding the right publisher for "Twice"
00:16:50
Speaker
So what I'd come to understand is
00:16:52
Speaker
I must send it direct to publishers because agents are going to be a bit shy to give this to publishers because it's just a bit strange.
00:17:00
Speaker
And I also understood I've got to give it to a certain sort of publisher.
00:17:05
Speaker
And the certain sort of publisher, I've got to give it to someone who publishes political and cultural theory as well as novels because my book is also
00:17:11
Speaker
political and cultural theory.
00:17:13
Speaker
As soon as I thought that, I thought, yeah, because I can write a really easy letter to that person.
00:17:19
Speaker
They'll get it.
00:17:19
Speaker
I won't have to pretend my book is something it isn't.
00:17:22
Speaker
I think that was also another key insight, which is just who could you talk most easily about the material that you're working on to?
00:17:29
Speaker
That's the person you send it to.
00:17:29
Speaker
It sounds pretty obvious, but it's not pretty obvious stuff that I had to learn.
00:17:33
Speaker
I was really pleased.
00:17:34
Speaker
Also, they have a very quick, they pride themselves on it.
00:17:37
Speaker
You send it to them
00:17:39
Speaker
They give you an answer in a week, which is amazing.
00:17:41
Speaker
And I just felt, hooray.
00:17:43
Speaker
I thought, this is great.
00:17:44
Speaker
This is exactly the journey I should have been on.
00:17:46
Speaker
This is exactly the right publisher.
00:17:48
Speaker
And what a lot of trial I've been on to understand that's how it is.
00:17:51
Speaker
And here it is in my junk mail folder.
00:17:53
Speaker
Hooray.
00:17:54
Speaker
Yes, I did.
00:17:58
Speaker
That's brilliant.
00:17:59
Speaker
From that, you've got a publishing deal.
00:18:01
Speaker
Your book's coming out.
00:18:02
Speaker
It's very exciting.
00:18:04
Speaker
Do you think now with a published book,
00:18:08
Speaker
you would consider reaching out to agents again.
00:18:12
Speaker
Yes, I do.
00:18:14
Speaker
Actually, I'm in the process of writing another book for Zero, which is nonfiction.
00:18:19
Speaker
So it was a two-book deal?
00:18:21
Speaker
No, it wasn't a two-book deal.
00:18:24
Speaker
I've been in conversation with them and out of our conversations has come that I should write another book and I'm pretty happy to.
00:18:32
Speaker
I think that they're great.
00:18:34
Speaker
One thing that's interesting about them, for example, is they do a lot of their business from their YouTube channel, unlike other publishers they've got.
00:18:41
Speaker
A big YouTube channel.
00:18:43
Speaker
And part of the promotion for my book has been about making some videos for their YouTube channel, which I've been doing.
00:18:47
Speaker
And out of that has come discussion about another book.
00:18:51
Speaker
What I really want to do, though, is write novels.
00:18:53
Speaker
And so, yes, of course, I totally understand that another book I write might not be suitable for them because they are cultural theory, political publisher.
00:19:03
Speaker
And I might want to write something that's not exactly like that, but I would be.
00:19:06
Speaker
But I also think that not everybody has an agent.
00:19:10
Speaker
It's not always essential to have an agent.
00:19:12
Speaker
And part of the journey that I had to go on is understanding that quite a lot of the reason why I wanted an agent is because I just wanted a pat on the head, you know?
00:19:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:20
Speaker
Of course, agents do a lot more than that.
00:19:22
Speaker
And to have a wonderful agent would be a wonderful thing.
00:19:24
Speaker
But I understood that quite a lot of what I was looking for was affirmation.
00:19:28
Speaker
And I also came to understand it was really unhealthy and was actually really holding me back.
00:19:34
Speaker
And that to a very great extent...
00:19:36
Speaker
the journey I've been on to get published has been about learning to stand on my own two feet and give myself the affirmation.
00:19:42
Speaker
I think that's really important with the writing also because to an extent also when I began sending it out to agents, I knew, oh, it's not, you know, yes, it wasn't a first draft by any means that I was sending out, but I was like, you know, I've been reading about how agents like to work editorially and I'm so looking forward to chatting with my agent about how we're going to improve this.
00:20:00
Speaker
That's a bad attitude.
00:20:02
Speaker
Really, in the end, by the time I sent it out to Xero,
00:20:05
Speaker
I had done so much revision on it myself.
00:20:08
Speaker
I had effectively become my agent, become that I because nobody else was doing it for me.
00:20:13
Speaker
So, of course, I would like to have a lovely agent, but it's not essential to me.
00:20:18
Speaker
And that is a good feeling, I have to say.
00:20:22
Speaker
That's great.
00:20:23
Speaker
People work in different ways, don't they, as well?
00:20:25
Speaker
And that's what this is all about, to find out what different avenues you have to go down, that it's not just, there's not just one avenue.
Advice for aspiring writers
00:20:32
Speaker
There's lots of different ways that you can get the result that you want to get for you as well.
00:20:36
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:20:39
Speaker
as with anything in life, is being honest with yourself, being true to yourself.
00:20:43
Speaker
Who are you?
00:20:44
Speaker
What have you written?
00:20:45
Speaker
Who is interested in that sort of thing?
00:20:47
Speaker
And not trying to think, as I did, oh, well, it might, this is not exactly what they want, but I think it's so good that they'll bend their rules for me.
00:20:55
Speaker
Nobody's bending any rules for anybody, you know, especially not for debut novelists.
00:20:59
Speaker
And that is the hard lesson I had to learn.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah, so true.
00:21:02
Speaker
I mean, going on from that bit of advice, do you have any other,
00:21:08
Speaker
nuggets of advice of people wanting to go into this industry and sort of write either, you know, plays or that you've got experience in or novels as well?
00:21:23
Speaker
I think, you know, there's a whole lot of all sorts of different advice.
00:21:27
Speaker
I'm a debut novelist.
00:21:28
Speaker
I'm not.
00:21:28
Speaker
I'm by no means some kind of a doyen who's going to be handing out the advice to the front and centre.
00:21:33
Speaker
From my own perspective, there's different areas.
00:21:36
Speaker
One is writing the thing.
00:21:39
Speaker
And, you know, there's a lot of different advice about that.
00:21:42
Speaker
The other thing is getting someone to buy it.
00:21:44
Speaker
And what I would say is you must read, you must do as we all do, go and read everything you can, Google everything, find out how the industry works.
00:21:53
Speaker
But I would also say, don't necessarily believe everything that is being said.
00:21:57
Speaker
And also really, really, truly be aware it is a business.
00:22:02
Speaker
The complexity is it's about novels.
00:22:04
Speaker
We all love novels, wonderful stories.
00:22:07
Speaker
One can get caught up if you look too much on Twitter.
00:22:09
Speaker
You can start thinking, oh, it's just a wonderful – just slightly out of reach.
00:22:12
Speaker
It's this wonderful culture of people who just sit around talking books and love books so much.
00:22:18
Speaker
That is true, but it is a business, and it is about the relationships that people have in that business.
00:22:24
Speaker
It's about what you've got and giving it to the person to whom it is the right –
00:22:31
Speaker
Yes.
00:22:31
Speaker
So the big lesson I would have is take it with a pinch of salt, understand it's a business.
00:22:37
Speaker
Think to yourself, are you writing something that slots easily into that business?
00:22:41
Speaker
And if you're not, understand that it's going to be a harder road and that you might end up self-publishing.
00:22:47
Speaker
And I may, you know, you asked me if I would have an agent.
00:22:49
Speaker
Also, I think maybe, you know, perhaps I would self-publish more things in the future.
00:22:53
Speaker
It depends.
00:22:54
Speaker
I'm quite excited now by that self-publishing stuff I did.
00:22:57
Speaker
Okay.
00:22:59
Speaker
How much did you get into the self-publishing side of things?
00:23:02
Speaker
Because self-publishing essentially makes you your own kind of whole marketing team, right?
00:23:07
Speaker
Yes.
00:23:07
Speaker
You know, I have not pushed that book very much.
00:23:09
Speaker
It was symbolic to me.
00:23:10
Speaker
I just symbolically had to do it.
00:23:11
Speaker
But in my day job, part of the job that I do is I make websites for people.
00:23:16
Speaker
So I have some, you know, skills in making in graphic design.
00:23:22
Speaker
It's a completely different skill to being a
00:23:24
Speaker
making your book cover, obviously, although I researched that too.
00:23:30
Speaker
It was very useful for me to have to begin to think, well, how would I begin to market if I'm going to do this myself?
00:23:35
Speaker
What would the things be?
00:23:36
Speaker
And in fact, the lessons that I've learned from that, again, I'm no expert and other people do it much better than me and have a lot more knowledge, but that helps me right now with my book where I have the understanding that I will do marketing
Exploring self-publishing versus traditional publishing
00:23:46
Speaker
for my book.
00:23:46
Speaker
My publisher will do it in different ways, but I will do it too and I will make graphics and I will come to understand who might be interested in my
00:23:53
Speaker
in what I've written.
00:23:54
Speaker
So to answer your question, I didn't get that into it in terms of Facebook ads, that sort of thing, but I certainly read about it and I certainly thought about how I would do it.
00:24:02
Speaker
And what was very useful and what I did get into is boiling down the marketing taglines for my rejections, what it would be.
00:24:12
Speaker
And then the same discipline of trying to do that for twice, my novel, has actually been very helpful.
00:24:17
Speaker
Trying to think, okay, if I was a massive marketing team, what
00:24:20
Speaker
What would I say about this book?
00:24:22
Speaker
What would be the strapline?
00:24:23
Speaker
That sort of thing is very good because the publisher I have, a cultural, political publisher, quite a small publisher, is not going to be, as some other publisher might be, working on the hard sell of my book.
00:24:35
Speaker
I can do that if I want, but that means me with them working on what those things might be, and I really enjoy that.
00:24:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:43
Speaker
I mean, that's, it sounds like a very interesting path to, to have kind of almost experienced both.
00:24:50
Speaker
You've experienced traditional through a smaller publisher, as well as kind of dipping your toe into self-publishing.
00:24:56
Speaker
That's right.
00:24:58
Speaker
Although I listened to, I'm sorry that I can't remember my name, but very interesting chat you had with another author on the podcast, who's someone who also has self-published as well as, um,
00:25:07
Speaker
Marissa Noel.
00:25:08
Speaker
Yes, that's right.
00:25:11
Speaker
She's a lot more professional than I was about it.
00:25:13
Speaker
She's doing it for her, you know, she's doing it as an absolute business.
00:25:17
Speaker
And as I said to you, when I self-published my rejections, it was more, it was a promise to myself.
00:25:22
Speaker
It was something that I wanted to do.
00:25:23
Speaker
It just, it was just, you know, I think I've possibly sold 30, I was going to say copies, but they're all digital files on Amazon.
00:25:32
Speaker
But every time I get a notification from Amazon that someone's bought it, it's thrilling.
00:25:35
Speaker
You know what
00:25:36
Speaker
I mean, and I'm not pushing it, but you know, I didn't do it for that reason.
00:25:42
Speaker
Wow.
00:25:42
Speaker
I'm looking forward to seeing what avenue you have for us waiting in the future.
00:25:48
Speaker
And I think that rounds off the interview and brings us on to the final, often dreaded question.
00:25:58
Speaker
A great question, Jill.
00:25:59
Speaker
A great question.
00:26:00
Speaker
If you were marooned on a desert island and could take nothing but a single book, which book would you take?
00:26:08
Speaker
Well, I've thought about this.
00:26:10
Speaker
I have thought about
Desert island book choice: Proust
00:26:11
Speaker
this.
00:26:11
Speaker
I would take Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, which I have read.
00:26:16
Speaker
I was once a teacher for a year in a rural Chinese university, and I spent most of that time reading Proust.
00:26:22
Speaker
It's fantastic.
00:26:23
Speaker
I would also say Jane Austen, like many people would.
00:26:26
Speaker
But Proust is like Jane Austen, except it's the same qualities for me.
00:26:31
Speaker
It's hilarious and so true about people, but it's also just a bit more rude stuff happens in it.
00:26:37
Speaker
We're here for that.
00:26:40
Speaker
It's amazing and brilliant.
00:26:41
Speaker
But I was tempted also to say what I would bring is Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China, that momentous 11-part encyclopedia for Chinese technology.
00:26:54
Speaker
That will last a long time.
00:26:56
Speaker
That will last a long time.
00:26:57
Speaker
And by the time I'd cloud through that, I would be able to build my own spaceship on that island.
00:27:01
Speaker
Well, exactly.
00:27:02
Speaker
There you go.
00:27:04
Speaker
I think I'll go for the proof.
00:27:05
Speaker
It's funnier.
00:27:06
Speaker
Proust, yes, we'll stick with that.
00:27:09
Speaker
Oh, thank you so much for joining us, Susanna.
00:27:12
Speaker
Thank you so much.
00:27:13
Speaker
It's been a pleasure to have you on.
00:27:14
Speaker
Honestly, it's been fabulous.
00:27:16
Speaker
And thanks to everyone listening.
Conclusion and social media plugs
00:27:17
Speaker
If you want to stay up to date with everything Susanna is up to, you can follow her on Twitter on at Susanna Cleman.
00:27:25
Speaker
And if you'd like to check out her blog, head over to myrejections.com, which is absolutely brilliant.
00:27:31
Speaker
So I really advise everyone to go and have a look at it.
00:27:34
Speaker
Definitely check it out.
00:27:35
Speaker
If you're going in through the process as well, definitely check it out because you might,
00:27:39
Speaker
you might see some things happening and cut yourself off at the pass.
00:27:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:45
Speaker
And to make sure you don't miss out on an episode of this podcast, you can follow us on Twitter at rightandwronguk and on Instagram at rightandwrongpodcast.
00:27:55
Speaker
You sounded like you didn't know what that was.
00:27:57
Speaker
You were like, at rightandwronguk?
00:28:02
Speaker
I don't know any of these social media things.
00:28:04
Speaker
But anyway, you can find our guest book list at
00:28:06
Speaker
and the Desert Island Library list, the Desert Island Library list, but I'd say that four times faster, on uk.bookshop.org forward slash shop forward slash right and wrong.
00:28:18
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening.
00:28:20
Speaker
Thank you, Susanna.
00:28:21
Speaker
And we will see you all next time.
00:28:22
Speaker
See you next time.