Crafts Against the Current // 1

Fantasy world-building and second series syndrome

Crafts Against the Current is where I’m going to be putting any writing/craft/publishing chat and is going to be my paid strand of writing here on Substack. I’m really hoping to be able to put out a series of more detailed craft chat featuring early drafts, editorial feedback and frank publishing/author life chat (including answering questions) that I hope is useful or interesting. Please do let me know what you’d be interested in reading about, the sort of subjects I was thinking:

• Publishing and promoting the first book in a new series when the children’s market has taken a turn for the worse (more below on that).

• Drafting and editing my Alice in Wonderland book.

• Drafting the second book in my fantasy series (while worrying about how the first will be received).

• A secret project 👀 (maybe).

• Writing books while writing about other people’s books online.

• More in depth essays and opinions pieces that require a bit more research and planning (the sort of thing I would usually pitch to a magazine or newspaper to be paid to write). I’m currently working on an essay about Poor Things (the book and the film).

• If there is appetite for it: interviews with publishing folk and other authors.

  I’d be so grateful if you were able to become a paid subscriber to A Case for Books, to support me and my writing, and am very open as to what frank chat you’d like on this side of the paywall - do let me know.

  

  so we beat on, crafts against the current

With all that being said, as my little boat bobs on the waves of my fantasy heroes under the weight of a tortuous Gatsby pun, let me tell you about the gentle - but extended - existential crisis I had coming up with my second children’s fantasy series.

When Pages & Co was out on submission, way back in the summer of 2016, the children’s fantasy market was a pretty different place. That’s not to say there weren’t brilliant and/or popular fantasy books publishing but it was definitely at a slower rate and tastes tended more towards contemporary. The last How to Train Your Dragon book had come out in 2015, and Nevermoor had only just sold a few months before Pages did. I was a literary scout at the time, and editors were very excited about Nevermoor, mainly because it is very good but also because essentially they were looking for books that felt nostalgic and fresh all at the same time. The sort of whimsical fantasy adventures that are now being published by the bucketload. This of course was great news for me, with my manuscript about to go out to these same editors (I stopped scouting when I sold my book, I wanted to stop seeing so far behind the curtain, let me know if you’d like more on being a scout - I love to humblebrag about calling Sally Rooney when she was on sub). And when my agent and I met with editors, we heard again and again how keen they were to find something in the genre/tone of Pages & Co and while I like to think the books would have found a home in any year, I am absolutely aware that the timing of writing Pages & Co was very much on my side in terms of what publishing was looking for. So we sold the first three books in the Pages & Co series in a deal that was relatively notable for children’s fantasy at the time, but considerably less than where deals ended up going over the next five years or so.