Getting Published, and Finding an Audience

OCA Creative Writing Tutor Rab Ferguson talks to us about his journey to publication, finding an audience, and receiving a national award for his children’s writing. 

First, a publisher…

In a single week in July 2020, I received three offers of publication for my first novel, Landfill Mountains. I’d decided to go via the indie press route, so I was submitting directly to publishers at the time. I’d recently altered my cover letter, changing the comparable titles for the book, and suddenly had been getting a lot more full manuscript requests. 

There’s a lesson there for any of you trying to get a book out into the world – the cover letter (and synopsis) matter! Make sure you read up online about how to write them, and don’t be afraid to edit it, and your book, if you’re not getting the responses you want. 

One of the three publishers who made an offer was Onwe Press, who I eventually published Landfill Mountains with. It was an ambitious book, around storytelling aloud being used as magic, and the impact of climate change on generational relationships (father son, mother daughter, etc). 

We marketed Landfill Mountains as Young Adult, and through my engagement in online writing communities, Onwe’s social media connections, and some really outstanding cover design, we did reach a small audience.

There was some wonderful feedback for the book. I had one message where someone told me it helped them enjoy reading again, after a long time finding they couldn’t connect with books. A very particular set of people, including a storyteller and his daughter, classed it as one of their favourite books. 

But the audience was mostly people who were interested in books, writing, and indie publishers. It never broke through to the mainstream Young Adult audience we hoped to reach. So when I started the next book, I wrote with an audience in mind.

Then, an audience

When I started my next book (with plenty of time to write in the mornings, because a certain pandemic meant I was working from home), I’d been working in a local mental health charity with children and young people for years. I’d always liked giving young people I worked with books related to what we were talking about. A moment from that career that sticks out to me is receiving a copy of Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive back from a teenager, with a note about how much that book meant to him.

I worked with a lot of young carers, and I noticed that particularly for the primary school age, there weren’t many books featuring young carer characters, especially that specifically addressed the caring responsibilities. It was an issue that I had a personal connection with – including having caring responsibilities myself as an adult, and having loved ones who had been young carers. 

So, I decided to fill that gap and write a book. In The Late Crew series, young carers meet aliens and have adventures. I knew from the start that I wanted this books audience priorities to be: 

1. Young Carers 
2. Other Primary Aged Young People 
3. Surrounding Adults (e.g. parents and teachers) 

This way hopefully young carers could find a book with characters that reflected themselves, other young people could learn more about their peers while enjoying a space adventure, and the adults reading the books aloud to children could build their own young carer awareness too. 

Knowing the audience I was aiming for informed the books from the start, which helped me get them out into the world. My knowledge of the charity sector helped me reach out to carers charities, who booked me for young carer workshops and school assembly tours. Young carers supported by charities across the country voted for the first The Late Crew book in the Children’s Literature Festival Book Awards, and it won Best Indie Young Reader Book 2023. 

Onwe Press, who’d published the first The Late Crew book as well, sadly closed the same year as The Late Crew received that award. At that point, I still had loads of young carers charities who wanted the book, so I moved to self-publishing for a short while, before Valley Press picked up both re-publishing the first book and newly publishing its sequel, The Late Crew and the Copy Cat Creature (also, book 3 is now coming soon with Valley Press!).

It’s an unusual situation for an existing series to be picked up part way through by a new publisher – but it was that engaged audience that kept The Late Crew series going!

Last Christmas 1500 young carers across Dorset and the Isle of Mann received copies of the second book from a charity called MyTime. The reason this sort of amazing reach has been able to happen is deciding an audience is far from the start, and making a decision around what my aims are, who I’m trying to reach, and what I’m trying to achieve. 

For everyone reading this and thinking about getting their own books out into the world, I’d encourage you to think about these three questions for your own work – and let that direction drive you!