A long time ago – well, maybe only six or seven years, but it feels like a long time – when Crème de la Crime was only a list of questions on a notepad, one question we never thought to ask was what happens when a debut author stops being a debut author?
Debut authors being our speciality, it was something that soon came up. And of course there’s more than one answer.
One option – actually the one that seems to have happened most – is that they become series authors. Of the thirteen debut novels we’ve published in the past six years, eight turned out to be the firsts of series and a ninth is heading that way. I’m counting two books as a series here; a couple of those didn’t make it beyond the second, which was a shame, but that’s how it goes sometimes.
It doesn’t always work out – if only! Some books capture the reading public’s imagination, other’s don’t. (Let’s face it, the reading public’s imagination is sometimes a strange and wonderful creature. If I could lose a pound for every time I’ve said, How did that get to the top of the bestsellers?, I might be able to get into that pair of jeans at the back of the wardrobe…) So just occasionally, the debut is all there is. It gives me a warm, glowy feeling to know that here at Crème de la Crime it is just occasionally. Mostly, if I love a book, it’s not hard to persuade other people to love it too.
The ideal solution, the one we all lie in bed dreaming of, is that the author moves on to greater things.
Every writer knows that the giant step is getting published at all. The reason we founded Crème de la Crime was to make that giant step a little more accessible for a few more people; so far we’ve done it for thirteen people. But I like to think we’ve done more. Four of our debut authors have moved way beyond anything a little indie can offer. Two have books coming out in the next few months with bigger houses. Another already has three additional books out there. The fourth caught the interest of a leading literary agent with his debut novel for us, and subsequently hit the big time with one of the mega-publishing houses, albeit under a different name.
So in at least three cases we’ve been the springboard: made possible the background that made an agent or an editor look a second time at a query.
I’m under no illusions, and take no credit at all for their huge talent – all I did was unearth it and give them a chance. But I discovered on my own account a lot of years ago that nothing impresses an editor as much as another editor’s good opinion. When I was writing magazine stories and features, I found success bred success. The quality of the work is what counts for the final decision, of course, but a CV which could list significant previous publications seemed to go a long way towards getting the work looked at in the first place.
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