Business Profile: Author and publisher Christine Coleman
Undaunted, she set out to write another. This one was partly inspired by previous conversations with Clarissa, now well known as one of the Two Fat Ladies.
“We thought this would be a good time to write a sitcom together, and we both liked the idea of featuring anarchic older people. Although we never got round to writing it, that idea worked its way into The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, my first published novel. After so many years of rejection letters, the phone call from the publisher, Transita, telling me they wanted to publish my book was one of the best moments of my life!”
Clarissa was there to introduce Christine at her book launch, which took place in 2005, 20 years after her prize-winning story about Clarissa’s alcohol addiction.
“Neither of us could have predicted this wonderful event and the changes in both of our lives – Clarissa was no longer drinking and had forged an amazing new career for herself in television, and I was a published novelist at last,” she said.
But that was not the end of Christine’s struggle. The world of fiction publishing is getting tougher every year. Her publisher, Transita, has not survived, so Christine had to start all over again in her search for a publisher for her next novel.
“Selling books is incredibly difficult and getting harder all the time. Few people look beyond the best seller lists and so, understandably, publishing houses tend to stick to known authors or novels by celebrities; a new book from an unknown author is unappealing in the hard light of commercial reality.
“But, after years of working with all sorts of creative writing groups I know that there are some brilliant authors who simply are not getting the opportunity they deserve so, with a small group of writers from my Masters course I set up the publishing house, Novel Press. My novel, Paper Lanterns, is its first product.”
Paper Lanterns is a story that is woven around an amazing find of her husband’s and set in a place she knows well.
“My sister lives in Hong Kong so I’ve spent a great deal of time in the city and archipelago and thought it would be a wonderful setting,” she says.
“My husband collects paper items from the Far East, and a key section of the book emerged from a collection of letters he found. Five were from a married English woman to an English man living in China in 1920. One was from the woman’s friend to the man explaining why the woman had stopped writing, and two were written four years earlier in broken English by a young Chinese woman to the same English man. The find was a wonderful gift to a writer.”
Christine is now tapping into online networks to promote her books.
“I have a following in Book Crossing, a global group with a mission to spread the word about the books they love,” explains Christine. “Their tactics include leaving books on park benches to pass them on to others, posting reviews online and running Book Rings, in which people put their name on a list to have a selected book sent to them.
“We are using these networks to promote and get feedback on Paper Lanterns and hope to be launching other books shortly. Our ambition for Novel Press is to publish books likely to be ignored by the mainstream commercial publishing houses but which deserve to be in print.”
The Birmingham Book Festival is hosting its first ever festival, called The Spring Thing, on May 29 at the Conservatoire.
