firm plans for the Saturday that nothing short of a crazed gunman running amok in the High Street was going to interrupt. And after the previous evening that had left her miserable enough to cry most of the way home she needed some time to and for herself.
There was an event at the Dover Marina Hotel on the seafront just along from her home in The Gateway that she had been excited about attending ever since she’d seen it advertised.
The Dover Marina Hotel was about the poshest hotel in town. And that was one good reason why it had been chosen. Someone was trying to make a statement. Someone was showing off. Someone was letting the world know that she’d made it on her own. That someone was Stephanie Lather, self-published author of the tremendously successful and popular JR Lleroy novels.
Stephanie Lather had been born and bred in Dover. The daughter of Dover shopkeepers, she’d gone to the local comprehensive, left school at sixteen to pursue a career in hairdressing, got married, had kids, been divorced and taken up writing.
Writing had been the teenage passion Stephanie had been forced to abandon when real life reared its ugly head. When her girls had started sleeping at regular and manageable hours of the evening, Stephanie had gone back to her greatest childhood love: making up stories and writing them down. At twenty-five, she sold a short story to a women’s magazine. Encouraged, she’d worked harder at her gift for story-telling. She had more short stories published, but, despite repeated and tireless efforts, never impressed a literary agent enough to be made an offer of representation for any of her full-length novels.
Then the ebook arrived. Stephanie had been quoted in media articles detailing her rise to fame and fortune as claiming that the advent of the ebook, with all its possibilities and opportunities, opened up the world of readers for her like Moses opened up the Red Sea. She also liked to add that she probably made more out of it than he did, which some commentators clearly found a little crass. But with the kind of money Stephanie was raking in for her churn-em-out-cheap JR Lleroy series she didn’t take too much care in what she said.
Stephanie Lather wasn’t even thirty and thanks to her books, hard work and her canny self-promotion through the manipulation of social media, she was an international sensation on both sides of the pond. She was also rumoured to be considerably wealthy.
From reading about Stephanie, Joy had learned that while the gatekeepers to the world of traditional publishing had shunned her, she had never given up hope and had kept thumping away at the keyboard and submitting manuscripts. With the advent of ebooks and ereaders, she had seen and seized her opportunity. Stephanie had ditched her dream of a book deal and, as one particularly influential traditional publishing house with substantial vested interests in the dying physical book market had famously remarked on the subject of ebooks, sold her soul to the devil. Fundamental to her success were her self-promotion skills, which were on a par with her writing skills – aggressive and irresistible. Stephanie Lather had worked with a single-minded tirelessness – one that she claimed made Mother Theresa look like a part-timer – towards fulfilling her dreams of becoming an author of note and she had succeeded in emphatic fashion. An author of note she had certainly become, but perhaps not in the way she had originally intended. This was not something that appeared to bother her as she commuted between her homes on the Dorset coast, in London’s Knightsbridge and in a New York apartment building.
No one was pretending that Stephanie wrote erudite and scholarly fiction. No one was talking about literary prizes, not even longlists for them. But she did have a gift for telling a good tale, her plotting was regularly ingenious and her characters always seemed so familiar and real and created for readers to empathise
There was an event at the Dover Marina Hotel on the seafront just along from her home in The Gateway that she had been excited about attending ever since she’d seen it advertised.
The Dover Marina Hotel was about the poshest hotel in town. And that was one good reason why it had been chosen. Someone was trying to make a statement. Someone was showing off. Someone was letting the world know that she’d made it on her own. That someone was Stephanie Lather, self-published author of the tremendously successful and popular JR Lleroy novels.
Stephanie Lather had been born and bred in Dover. The daughter of Dover shopkeepers, she’d gone to the local comprehensive, left school at sixteen to pursue a career in hairdressing, got married, had kids, been divorced and taken up writing.
Writing had been the teenage passion Stephanie had been forced to abandon when real life reared its ugly head. When her girls had started sleeping at regular and manageable hours of the evening, Stephanie had gone back to her greatest childhood love: making up stories and writing them down. At twenty-five, she sold a short story to a women’s magazine. Encouraged, she’d worked harder at her gift for story-telling. She had more short stories published, but, despite repeated and tireless efforts, never impressed a literary agent enough to be made an offer of representation for any of her full-length novels.
Then the ebook arrived. Stephanie had been quoted in media articles detailing her rise to fame and fortune as claiming that the advent of the ebook, with all its possibilities and opportunities, opened up the world of readers for her like Moses opened up the Red Sea. She also liked to add that she probably made more out of it than he did, which some commentators clearly found a little crass. But with the kind of money Stephanie was raking in for her churn-em-out-cheap JR Lleroy series she didn’t take too much care in what she said.
Stephanie Lather wasn’t even thirty and thanks to her books, hard work and her canny self-promotion through the manipulation of social media, she was an international sensation on both sides of the pond. She was also rumoured to be considerably wealthy.
From reading about Stephanie, Joy had learned that while the gatekeepers to the world of traditional publishing had shunned her, she had never given up hope and had kept thumping away at the keyboard and submitting manuscripts. With the advent of ebooks and ereaders, she had seen and seized her opportunity. Stephanie had ditched her dream of a book deal and, as one particularly influential traditional publishing house with substantial vested interests in the dying physical book market had famously remarked on the subject of ebooks, sold her soul to the devil. Fundamental to her success were her self-promotion skills, which were on a par with her writing skills – aggressive and irresistible. Stephanie Lather had worked with a single-minded tirelessness – one that she claimed made Mother Theresa look like a part-timer – towards fulfilling her dreams of becoming an author of note and she had succeeded in emphatic fashion. An author of note she had certainly become, but perhaps not in the way she had originally intended. This was not something that appeared to bother her as she commuted between her homes on the Dorset coast, in London’s Knightsbridge and in a New York apartment building.
No one was pretending that Stephanie wrote erudite and scholarly fiction. No one was talking about literary prizes, not even longlists for them. But she did have a gift for telling a good tale, her plotting was regularly ingenious and her characters always seemed so familiar and real and created for readers to empathise
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