My Culinary Route To Publication

Occasionally I’m asked about how difficult I found it to get a publishing contract. The short answer is that in 2011, I emailed my novel to an agent and then spent a year polishing it before I got a two-book deal. The long answer is – well, go fetch yourself a cup of coffee (and maybe a fortifying piece of cake).

It was 1995, nearly twenty years ago, that I scraped together the course fee for ‘Writing Fiction’ at Britain’s Arvon Foundation. Looking back, it was another world, before eReaders or iPads, when research meant tottering piles of library books rather than a quick Google search. My one-to-one tutorial with tutor Louise Doughty was encouraging and when the course ended I was all aglow that my hazy dreams were about to come true. I had a first novel, the tutors liked it, and I even had an agent sending out my rather juvenile work.

But what awaited me at home were seven long years of the dreaded rejection cycle. You know the stages –  you pour your heart into a novel and then finally, proudly send it out to maybe 30 agents and publishers. It gets rejected or occasionally considered for months on end – and then it gets rejected. So as well as all the time and dedication of writing,  you carry a burden of negative emotions: of wondering if your writings isn’t good enough, or whether you just don’t know the right people, and all the time the years of your life are slipping by.

Jump to 2002. I saw a small ad  in The Author magazine looking for someone getting married and I was getting married. Titled The Wedding Diaries, my commission was a diary of my wedding preparations with tips and advice.  While not exactly a literary masterpiece, it did give me journalism experience with national newspapers and specialist wedding titles and almost incidentally got me writing about baking. As a student I’d baked to save money and now I had baked my own wedding cake – a genuine triumph over a sweltering summer’s threat of disaster.

With genuine delight I picked up this new string to my bow. I wrote more recipes, entered baking contests & even won a cookery course in France, gaining me some wonderful experiences and a fascination with French patisserie.

So a few years later when I stood in the eighteenth century kitchen of the National Trust’s Erddig Hall, reading the historic recipes, I was a frustrated novelist scanning my environment for a big idea. The spark ignited and lit up my mind like a beacon illuminating my future. I would write a novel about a clever young cook that evoked a world of lost recipes, an account of a journey to foreign lands spiced with plot twists and murder.

Obsessed with authenticity, I learned Georgian cookery with TV food historian Ivan Day, and followed my heroine’s route across Europe armed with an 18th century Guide Book. I focussed on channelling back to my Northern childhood to write an irrepressible working class narrator, bursting with culinary terms and colloquialisms. Some four years later, emailing An Appetite for Violets to my first choice of agent, I knew it was the best thing I had ever written. On the eve of my book launch in London, Fay Weldon wrote that I had created a new genre, the ‘Culinary Gothic’, the sort of apt but unlikely praise I could never have dreamed up myself.

Now my second novel, The Penny Heart, about a vengeful escaped convict who becomes the cook to an artistic young wife, has just been published in the UK. (To be titled A Taste for Nightshade in the US, January 2016). I’m no longer naive and starry-eyed, but I couldn’t be happier that I made that final push to publication. I’m also proud to be part of http://theprimewriters.com/who all published their first book over the age of forty. Like most people who feel the call to write, it’s been a hard slog. But now, when people ask me about getting published, I recommend not only persistence but also a little indulgent play-time to re-ignite the creative spark.

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Martine Bailey is a historical crime writer based in Chester, UK. AN APPETITE FOR VIOLETS was an ALA Best Crime Debut pick of 2015 and has sold in the US, Spain, Germany and Croatia. THE PENNY HEART is a Sunday Times (UK) Summer Read 2015 and will be published by St Martin’s Press in January 2016 as A TASTE FOR NIGHTSHADE.

Find out more at http://www.martinebailey.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MartineBailey

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Publishing, On Writing