Remember, Mr Sharma
How to sell a story
The problem
I wrote an award-winning novel published by Hachette UK in 2023.
Shockingly, I found no screaming fans at Waterstones clamouring for signed copies.
The approach
Reducing any literary novel to a single pitch is hard. For a novel packed with fantastical moments, it’s also dull.
It would be more interesting, I figured, to show the range of experiences it contained.
Flip to a random page
Within weeks, it had made it to the Amazon bestsellers, got 200+ reviews on Goodreads, was picked up by newspaper reviewers and magazine editors.
In 3 months, I was on the BBC pretending to be the heir to Salman fucking Rushdie.
Hell yeah, result.
Result?
