It’s just over eight months now since The Hollows was released by Angry Robot Media, and a little under a year and a half since I signed the contract.
It’s fair to say a lot’s happened since then. But for the beginning of the whole sorry saga, we’ve got to go back to the back end of 2019…
I’d spent several months rewriting an epic horror novel for my last agent. It was a quarter of a million words long, and set in the aftermath of a devastating global pandemic. Just as I finished work on it, my then agent quit the business and left me seeking new representation. And just as I was sending the pandemic epic out to prospective new agents – as you’ve probably guessed – COVID-19 decided to show up and rain on everybody’s parade.
Naturally, the pandemic novel wasn’t going to be of interest to agents and publishers right then, so I did the only thing I could think of and started writing something new. I settled into a fairly contented routine, writing 1000 words a day. More importantly, I think, I wrote exactly what I wanted to write, not caring whether anyone else would like it or not. Over the next two years, I produced three novels back to back in this way.
Anne Perry at the Ki Agency read the first of these. She didn’t feel it was quite right for the market, but she enjoyed it and asked what else I was working on. I told her about the third novel, then still in progress and called Tatterskin. She told me to work on it, take my time until I felt I’d got it right, and then let her see it.
Anne read and loved Tatterskin, but asked for rewrites. I completed those, and she offered representation towards the end of 2021. (Working with Anne, by the way, was a delight. She’s a lovely person and has an amazing editorial eye. She moved on from Ki in 2022 and is now commissioning editor at Jo Fletcher Books, and I have to say I envy her authors.)
After a final round of edits, the book – now called TheHollows – went out to the publishers in early 2022. In publishing, there are usually two speeds: dead slow and warp factor four. You can send something out and months (or years) can go by without anything happening – or everything suddenly needs to be done yesterday.
The second one’s much more fun, and early everything with The Hollows travelled at that speed.
Angry Robot loved the book; they were as massively enthusiastic about it as Anne herself had been. So much so they decided they wanted to publish The Hollows the same year. That’s unusual: publishers normally acquire books with a view to releasing them in a year to eighteen months’ time. It meant that any rewrites would have to be completed quickly, and that the work of planning how to publicise the book would have to start almost right away.
But I’ll tell you about that next time.
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