Born from a scene written on one writing course and then developed into a first novel draft on another, If Looks Could Kill was first conceived ten years ago, my first project after I retired from teaching. 

Multiple redrafts after protagonist Connie first grappled with the forces of evil in a remote Norfolk manor house, I decided it was time to go public. Find an agent was the received wisdom. That’s the only sure - and respected - way to find a publisher. And I needed help. I was a novice and I needed a mentor who believed in me, a master craftsman or woman who’d be able to understand how to work my still raw material into something finer.

So I did my research. I complied a long list of literary agencies, big and small, and studied them. I read through the biographies of various agents, what they were looking for, who they’d already taken on. Which smiling face seemed the most approachable? Who, I wondered, had a novel list similar to my work? Who did I think I’d be able to work with as my precious creation emerged into the world? I sweated over my opening chapters, my novel synopsis and agent letter, and sent off a flurry of speculative emails to my carefully chosen few. 

Then I sat by my computer and waited.

Of the ten or so agents I approached, no more than two bothered to send a standardised rejection. I know agents get a metaphorical sackful of applicants contacting them every day; overworked managing their already long lists, they probably delegate the task of sifting through a slush pile of novels of varying quality to an office junior. Writing friends I know had only secured an agent after months of trying and hundreds of emails. They were now petitioning editors and publishers, the next huge hurdle on the road to seeing their books on a table pile in Waterstones. 

Did I have the persistence to keep on trying to sell my wares? I couldn’t be sure that anyone had cast so much as a cursory eye over the opening couple of sentences. 

I’d put hours and endless effort into thinking, planning, writing and rewriting my novel and it felt wrong to give up at this point…

But here’s a fact that budding authors should know: getting a book published the traditional way is hard. It’s the industry’s way to weed out all but a selective and possibly persistent few. There are hundreds of writers being churned out by novel writing courses if not every month, then every year. The competition for attention is fierce. Not everyone is going to succeed this way.

I for one had lost confidence in my ability to cut through and be noticed. 

I’d found the process of writing mind-searingly excruciating at times, enjoyable at others. But however much I felt that my writing was worth reading, sharing this product of my fevered imagination was something else. 

It had been hard for me to ask even friends to look at my novel. Would I be putting them in an impossible situation if they thought it was terrible? How would I deal with the sense of rejection if they hated it? As an introvert and a woman of a certain age who’d got used to being invisible, I didn’t know how to risk honest and kind critique. 

Had my lack of self-belief somehow communicated itself to the people with power? My efforts to put myself forward to strangers had simply vanished into an internet void. My writer’s imagination saw rejection in the smiling faces on the agency websites, and wounded by the conclusion that the official publishing world is unkind by default to the potential authors knocking at its door, I gave up. 

I scurried away to the corner of the playground I felt safest in: writing another novel. However fraught with dangers writing can be, that’s where the fun is, and I hadn’t lost the will to write. 

Five years on, last year I finished a second novel. It’s nothing like If Looks Could Kill - it’s artier, more literary, even more likely, if I’m honest, to end up in a neglected backwater, and that’s if I’m lucky. Again, I tried a handful of agents, fewer this time than before and with the same woeful response. I saved the file in a place I hoped I’d be able to find again on my hard drive, and got on with the rest of my life. 

That involved redecorating the house and, in the process, falling down the stairs, an entire flight, from first floor to ground. Recovering from a broken wrist and two broken bones in my foot, I put my energies into just being thankful to be alive.

And then, when the Christmas and New Year celebrations were over and I felt the itch to start something new, I asked myself what was the point. I already had two virtual manuscripts stuck in a drawer. Wasn't it time I learned something from that? Maybe I should start something completely new, take piano lessons or join the Ramblers Association, the kind of things that other 60-something women do. Or maybe, that annoying little voice in my head said, I could learn a lesson or two from the stories I’d finished. Perhaps that would help me to come up with a magic formula to gain some kind of recognition, producing if not a best seller or Booker Prize winner, at least a book worthy of being given a chance.

When I located and then read over the first book I’d written, I decided that, regarded with a fresh eye, If Looks Could Kill didn’t seem so bad! It was actually quite good fun. Writings long neglected acquire a strange independence, as if they have been written by someone else. Objectivity becomes far more of a possibility, enough I decided to enable me to edit and polish it myself. I could have paid an editor to do this, and I probably would have a slightly different novel as a result. But I’d worked for a couple of years as a sub-editor after I finished university and later corrected enough assignments during my time as a secondary school English teacher to feel that I was qualified to give it a go. And this way, it would all be my own work. I’d have no-one to blame for the book’s inadequacies but myself. I’d grown a thicker skin and felt I could deal with the task.

So I read and reread my manuscript, adjusting and simplifying as I went, adding a dab of detail here, deleting an inaccuracy there, rephrasing and checking, then checking again. I’d publish it myself, I thought, and cut out the agent. 

So far, so good. I asked my husband to read it through for typos (his first proper view of what I’d been doing in my workroom all these years), and when I felt happy with my product, I mugged up on the process. Amazon, with their huge worldwide market, appeared to offer a simple enough way in, and their self-publishing wing, Kindle Direct Publishing (KPD), had endless pages of instructions and advice. Above all else, they wouldn’t charge anything to upload my manuscript, to provide an ISBN number and get all my hard work out into the public domain. 

First step, prepare your document. Starting with the paperback version as Amazon advised and following their step-step-step guide, I grappled with the niceties of word processing software I’d been using for years without any real understanding. Microsoft Word had me tearing my hair out as I tried to set up page size and margins that accounted for a gutter and the trimming of pages during manufacture. It seemed to be a matter of luck if the changes I implemented actually took effect, and I ended up in what might politely be described as a frightful muddle. When I finally came to the conclusion that it was the software rather than my own incompetence that was at fault, I resorted to Pages, the Apple equivalent programme. The process seemed to go more smoothly from then on and, firmly crossing my fingers, I saved the resulting document as a PDF.

A friend, animation creator and retired Norwich Art school professor Suzie Hanna, designed the cover, and after some trial and error, I uploaded blurb, text and cover to the website, decided on my pricing, and ordered a first proof copy. The bar code didn’t quite line up and the main colour wasn’t quite as expected, but a few adjustments and another proof later, I was ready to hit the button marked publish.

What happened then… next instalment to follow!