Coming-of-age novel set in 1990s rural IRELAND
The stresses of being a debut author publishing on 3rd September in UK
2nd September 2020
The stresses of being a debut author publishing on 3rd September.
On Super Thursday, 3rd September, around 600 books will be published. Some were scheduled well in advance but many have been pushed back to this date because of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is early September when publishers start to focus on the Christmas market. We felt it would be really helpful to understand what it really means for an author to be part of this amorphous group and how on earth a debut author can stand out from the crowd.
Over to debut author Zoë Somerville, whose novel The Night of the Flood, set in Norfolk, is being published on that day:
When I first signed the contract for my first novel to be published, in September 2019, I was too busy celebrating to think about the date it would be published. After having spent my whole life dreaming of this moment, and four years writing my book, The Night of the Flood, it was a minor detail. It also felt like a long time away. A whole year!
Fast forward nearly twelve months and we are still in the grips of a global pandemic, a recession is about to hit and just under 600 books are now going to be published on the same day as mine. In the context of the rolling disaster of 2020, having an overload of books out on the same day is hardly a pressing issue. For debut writers though, who are already a bundle of jittering nerves, alternately hysterically excited about a dream realised and panicking that no one will buy it, it is a source of anxiety.
But why is this autumn such a hotspot for publications anyway? There are a few reasons. Slots for publishing books are booked up a long time in advance, much longer than most people realise – myself included. My novel’s date was already 3rd September and I would have shared it with quite a few other books in normal times. During lockdown, many writers’ books have been pushed back to Spring 2021, but some were also pushed back to this autumn. At the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, it must have seemed to publishers (as it did to most of us) that the world would look quite different by then. Added to this is the fact that publishers usually timetable a lot of big releases for the autumn anyway as this is traditionally the period with the highest book sales.
However, as The Bookseller recently explained in a recent article, this isn’t as much a disaster as it appears. A lot of the books being published on the first Thursday in September are academic titles so are hardly competing for attention in bookshops and online with the fiction and popular non-fiction releases.
Nonetheless, the negative impacts of the glut, will be felt mostly with debuts. Review and publicity space is tight. Well-established writers and publishers’ much-touted titles are always going to be able to stand out in the media coverage. It is harder to see how an unknown debut can make themselves heard above the noise. If we’re lucky enough to have publicists they are doing their utmost to shine a light on our books through blog tours, radio interviews, podcasts to name but a few strands. Most of us are tweeting and instagramming like mad but who knows what difference this will make? In the end, we have to trust that after the hue and cry of September and beyond, our books will find their own way in reading world.
I certainly hope that’s the case for my own debut. In the meantime, I’d love to tell you a little about it. The novel is set in Norfolk, my home county. I was born and grew up in Norwich and spent many happy childhood days out on the beaches of Norfolk. I’ve lived away since I was eighteen and left home, but when I began writing seriously in my mid-thirties, most of what I wrote was set there. I had left, but it hadn’t left me. When I first conceived of The Night of the Flood on the Bath Spa MA, I imagined my characters, all young in the early 50s, in coastal locations in Norfolk as if that was where they belonged. Then I found out that on a freezing night in January 1953, a devastating storm surge swept along the East Anglian coast killing 307 and leading to the evacuation of 32,000 people. This was one of the most catastrophic natural disasters in UK history but it was hardly known. I knew I had the background to my characters’ tangles of love and betrayal.
The novel is set in the harbour town of Well-next-the-Sea, against the backdrop of the Cold War, and follows a group of five characters from a range of classes who are all desperate to escape from their lives. In the build up to the flood, tensions increase between all five of the characters. Everyone has secrets from everyone else, but the tragedy of the flood changes everything.
Zoë Somerville
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