It’s been a moment…

Well. It all went very quiet for a while there. It’s fair to say my writing life the past few years has been… tense. Erratic. Painful. Non-existent, on occasions. So it’s difficult, to know where to start with the story. At the beginning, I suppose!

When I won the Comedy Women in Print award in 2020 it was an unbelievable, life-changing event. It propelled me from the slush pile to the #1 best-seller spot in Women’s Action and Adventure audio books and – personal highlight! – an appearance in Bella magazine. But it was also a really odd time to release a book. Tinker, Tailor, Schoolmum, Spy was published in Autumn 2021, at the back end of the Covid lockdowns, rule of six and mandatory mask-wearing. For context, I didn’t meet my editor in person until publication day. Even my coveted CWIP Prize was delivered in the mail, my ‘win’ pre-recorded as part of a video montage. My book launch was the first time I’d been in a room with more than ten people in 1.5 years.

It was a tough environment to market a debut book. Not the toughest – I’ll hand that to the poor writers who had books out the year previously, who couldn’t even leave the house. But still – it wasn’t easy. The world had changed the way it operated, but everyone was still playing catch up. And while I had the kudos of being a prize winner, the genre my novel sat in was still relatively under-developed. Bookstores didn’t really know where to place me on the shelf; algorithms didn’t even know I was there; and as a consequence, while I was getting great reviews and working really hard to market myself, sales stayed below the threshold that would have secured me the coveted second book deal.

My dreams of literary world domination began to quickly fall away. Undeterred, I carried on writing and finally, finally squeezed out a second novel. I knew it was good. Better, even, than the one I’d got published. And so in 2023 I embarked on the long journey to submission once more.

My agent worked every angle in an environment that was increasingly hard to penetrate. We got an audio deal, but they wanted a print partner; we got to acquisitions stage in another instance, but in the end, they had a similar book already signed and didn’t make an offer. My agent passed me many delightful bits of feedback from editors, telling us how much they enjoyed the book, could I send them anything else I had written, that the quality of my writing was really great, etc. etc. but still – no deal. I was bemused and disappointed. My book – a light-hearted murder mystery featuring three middle aged women – was certainly in a category that had wings this time around. Think Vera Wong, the Finlay Donovan series by Elle Cosimano, anything by Janet Evanovich – my book sits right in amongst them. But for publishers on tight budgets it wasn’t quite commercial enough. I wasn’t an exciting debut author anymore, nor was I a runaway literary success. And despite the mystery/crime fiction landscape slowly shifting to accommodate novels that go beyond comedy pensioners or alcoholic Scottish detectives solving crime, the algorithms – the goddamn algorithms – still didn’t work for me in a growing, but small, sub-genre. I wasn’t cozy enough to be cozy, I wasn’t serious enough to be crime; and I wasn’t famous enough to sell, regardless.

At the end of 2024, after the book had been on submission for over a year, I was, to be blunt, completely fed up. It had been three years since I’d had a book out and I was itching to get myself back in print. I knew even if I got a deal that day, it would be another year at least before it was on the shelves of Waterstones. And that was a big ‘if’. By this point, I had another manuscript ready to give my agent, something that would tick the boxes. My agent and I both recognised that having the two books on sub at the same time would be conflicting, so Kiss, Marry, Murder would have to be pulled. But I’d waited so long. I didn’t want my book to sit in a drawer. So I floated the idea to self-publish it.

My agent told me to take my time to decide. She was right to make me think about it: if I was going to do it, it had to be done well. I was savvy enough to realise that self-publishing badly would be detrimental to my attractiveness as a trad published author. But do it well, and suddenly it seemed a rather old-fashioned view of the industry. Books sell books and self-publishing – done the right way – can be hugely rewarding and commercially successful. One book sold is one more than if I do nothing. And the more books I have to offer, the more I will sell. Finally, I reasoned, why should one that I knew was quality, that I knew my readers would enjoy, and that I had to the confidence to put out there looking just as good as a trad pub book, sit in a drawer because of algorithms?

The literary snob inside still filled me with doubt, whispering that I was less than for doing it. And it’s true, that perceptions can change, once you tell people you’re self-publishing. I’ve watched some people’s faces falter slightly when I’ve said it, as though I’m admitting failure, rather than taking control. But I’m not selling books to just my friends, or family, or even fellow writers – I’m selling them to (hopefully) thousands of people who will never realise or care how this book got into their hands. I began to rebel against my own self-doubt.

The more I thought about it, the more sure I was, that it was a sound investment on my part. And not just because I couldn’t get a deal, but because I was less and less convinced I wanted one for this particular project. Kiss, Marry, Murder is intended to be the first in a series and I’d already plotted out the next one in quite some detail. I’d been bitterly disappointed not to get to write a sequel to my debut novel and I didn’t want to be in that situation again. The idea that I could do exactly what I wanted with my characters, for as many books as I felt there was a story to tell, began to make sense.

Going hybrid isn’t an admission of defeat – it’s a positive choice that allows me to move forward with my writing career in the best way I can. I’m still ambitious and hungry for a book deal. Having done it once, I believe there are still many good reasons to publish traditionally, with the right book. But as with everything, it’s about finding a balance. And I’m joining a growing number of authors who are trying to dismantle the notion that a professional writer can’t have the best of both worlds. Let’s see how it works out.

A version of this blog appears on Substack. You can find me there @fayebrannwriter.

Kiss, Marry, Murder is out in May 2025. To subscribe to my newsletter for upcoming announcements please hit the button.