How I Got Published: View from One Year Post Publication: by Hazell Ward author of The Game is Murder

This time last year I was eagerly awaiting the hardback release of my debut novel, The

Game is Murder. It had been a long and strange journey to publication, and I had always seen the release day as a final destination, and the culmination of my efforts.

Today, though, I am just as eagerly awaiting the paperback release (on 27th August) while busily trying to complete my next novel, and I have realised that publication need not be a final destination, but the first stop on an entirely new journey.

I had written three or four novels before Game, most of them awful, and at least one of them excruciatingly bad. They lead a shameful existence on old hard drives in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet, and I will never let anyone read them. Especially me.

My writing improved with each novel, but at the rate I was progressing it would take another twenty years before I had anything publishable. I needed to take a different approach. Meanwhile, my children were growing up and leaving home, and my employer was offering voluntary redundancies.

I took a leap of faith. I left my job and enrolled in an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. The experience gave me so much insight into how novels are constructed and I began to see the weaknesses, and the strengths, in my own writing. I wrote a novella which will likely never be published, for lots of reasons, but for the first time, I

was happy with what I had written, and several agents and publishers gave me positive feedback about it.

Finally headed in the right direction, I enrolled on a Creative Writing PhD. The Game is Murder is the novel I wrote for that PhD. This made a difference because I started writing, not with a character or a plot idea, as I had done before, but with a research question - about the relationship between the author and the reader and what we owe each other. And because of this unusual angle, I was forced to be really inventive to keep the novel fun. At times, I worried that I had been too ambitious, and writing it was challenging, but I was so interested in this new way of working, that I enjoyed writing it. I also allowed myself to be really bold and take risks with the writing.

I have always loved books that address the reader directly, bringing them into the story. And I have always loved crime novels, and particularly classic whodunnits, which have an element of competition between the author and the reader. I combined both these elements with an unsolved true crime so that I could give the reader the opportunity to solve a real crime, decide whether to convict or acquit the accused, and come up with a solution that answers every question in the case.

So, it is quite a challenge for the reader, too!

When it came time to approach agents with my book, I decided to take a slightly different approach to that, too. Instead of writing a pitch letter and combing the Writers & Artists Yearbook for agents who might be interested in my book, I wrote some short crime fiction and entered writing competitions. One of my stories was lucky enough to be included in an anthology (Cast a Long Shadow, published by Honno Press), and this led to me winning a Crime Writers Association Short Story Dagger. I met my literary agent, Sarah Such of the Sarah Such Literary Agency, at the awards ceremony, and she invited me to send her my novel. And the rest, as they say…

Looking back, I can see that trying new approaches really helped me – both in writing the novel and in getting it published. Giving myself permission to experiment and explore my writing made the novel better and more layered than it might otherwise have been.

Previously, I had assumed that no publisher would want to take a risk on an unknown writer with a genre-bending novel. I was completely wrong. We had interest from editors within two hours of submission and a pre-emptive offer from Penguin Michael Joseph that was beyond my most optimistic daydreams.

Publication day was one of the biggest thrills of my life. Seeing words that I had written in the silence of my spare bedroom/study in the hands of strangers who would read them was a strange, but wonderful, experience.

And one I can’t wait to repeat.