Kate Baker: write the book you want to read
So chuffed to have Kate on the blog. We chatted briefly on Instagram before meeting at London Book Fair last year and now, here’s Kate as a published author! Kate’s journey to publication is really inspiring and shows how self-belief and perseverance really pays off. I so loved watching Kate’s unboxing video of her debut - it’s the pinnacle of all the hard work and such an emotional moment for an author.
Tell us all about your debut Maid of Steel.
The idea for MOS first came about following a weekend away with a friend of mine in May 2019. We’d gone on a city break to Cork and found ourselves at the Cobh Heritage Centre in the gorgeous harbour town where St Colman’s Cathedral dominates the skyline.
In the museum, which is split into two sections, I read first about the potato famine of the mid 1800s and how many thousands of people fled the country to begin new lives in America, Canada and Australia on big wooden ships. They became known as coffin ships as so many lives were lost during those weeks at sea in appalling conditions. (We touched on this at school, but I hated school and especially history, so I don’t think I listened that well!)
The second section was about Titanic calling at Cobh – which was known as Queenstown in 1912 when she was moored out at Roches Point, too large to come right in to the harbour – for her final call before sailing across the Atlantic. She managed only four days before hitting the iceberg.
Back in our Airbnb, I began to jot down an idea about a woman travelling back to Ireland from New York, to find out where her grandmother had come from. (Emma’s grandmother, Ellen, no longer has any space on the page in Maid of Steel, but in early drafts we did hear from her in some chapters! But I’m afraid she was cut out during a later edit in order to keep the focus on Emma’s story).
I will find out in July this year just how many copies I have sold (as TBG pay royalties only twice a year), but the enjoyment I’ve had from this journey even up to this point has not been about numbers.
I’ve learnt so much about marketing and post-publication marketing opportunities and had a great time on four radio interviews, a couple of podcasts and newspaper articles and even featured in Yours magazine as one of three Editor’s Choice (issue 422) back in late March.
If your book was to be made into a movie, which celebrities would star in it?
This is a great question. Perhaps Brie Larson could play Emma, as I think she has a look which could be both cutesty quiet and pretty. Alice would need to be dark-haired, so how about Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary from Downton Abbey) as I think she could pull that aloofness off very well. But Thomas… that’s a hard one. For those who’ve read Maid of Steel, you’ll notice I don’t describe him at all, as I wanted readers to picture their own hero, lookswise! Ideally Irish (or at least capable of an Irish accent) I did find Eoin Macken rather easy on the eye, but he’d have to pin Thomas’ wonderfully soft nature … or I’d fire him!
What was your path to publication like?
The novel took four years from that first idea to publication in February 2023, although there were great chunks of time when I wasn’t actively working on it. I plotted the whole timeline using ‘Save The Cat’ method during the summer of 2019 and that November I typed the first draft during NaNoWriMo; 54k in 26 days (I’ve still got the laminated certificate to prove I did do it once!).
The story went through two re-writes over the next eighteen months while I continued to discover the characters. I workshopped sections of it while I studied with Anstey Harris, online for a year. It had a final edit with Mark Stay (of The Bestseller Experiment podcast) when I joined their Academy in August 2021.
While there had been agent interest during various 1-2-1s, I elected to go indie and submitted to The Book Guild in May 2022. A month later they offered me a contract which I immediately sent off to the Society of Authors to have it checked thoroughly and their feedback helped me decide to sign on the dotted line.
I thoroughly enjoyed the months leading up to publication; the editor at The Book Guild was thorough and after the proof read (which showed me what it would look like in paperform, by which I mean it was formatted ready to go) I was given my publication date of 28 Feb. It was a Thursday, to fit in with the rest of the publishing industry, and the Jan/Feb release phase is great for new authors as the big names in fiction have usually been released either in the summer or around October, ready for the big Christmas rush. So my novel got lots of attention, even before I booked a 10-day blog tour with Rachel Gilby of Rachel Random Resourches.
What was your favourite part and your least favourite part of the publishing journey?
I think my favourite part had to be the day my paperbacks arrived from The Book Guild’s printing warehouse. Three cardboard boxes full and seeing THE most beautiful cover, designed by Chelsea Taylor, for the first time in real life, on an actual cover of a novel I would open and sniff and let sink in that the words inside were mine. Truly amazing sensation!
I’m struggling to find a ‘least favourite’ because I’ve enjoyed every stage and moment, even finding an error towards the end of the book. Not a typo, but a leftover nod to an earlier draft which none of us spotted! That could have been a negative, but I spoke to the publishers and they altered the ebook immediately and have altered the print version in readiness for any future print runs. That’s life and it is what it is, and only two readers have brought it to my attention!
Do you plan your books?
I did plan MOS using Save the Cat, but I’d not got to know my characters very well before writing that first draft, so there was lots of adding depth work to do. Plot is fine, but it won’t be a memorable read if the characters are wooden. So with the next novel, I’m doing more work on character by hand-writing and typing scene ideas, whilst keeping an eye on the vague plot shape I already know I want to follow.
What advice would you give a new writer, someone just starting out?
I was so desperate to learn and be a good writer, that I booked on to all the courses I could afford, bought many How-To books and attended writing retreats and so on. I quickly became overwhelmed by all the advice out there, often conflicting, and frequently lost focus and drive. While advice from some experts is utterly essential, we must learn to narrow down whom and what works for us and our style of approach, even before you begin to write and ask for feedback. Some tutors are great plotters and planners, others encourage pantsing and letting your characters tell you where the story will go. Therefore, I refuse to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t do!
I am an author who writes in fits and starts. I’ll do no new words for a few days and then I may produce one to two thousand a day for a week. It really depends on what’s going on around me. I run my own horse rug washing and mending business here on the farm, and there are weeks that are more busy than others and my clients have to come first. While I take my writing seriously and want to publish another standalone, writing is still very much a hobby. I’m slowly building a following, and hope MOS will become a backlist title within a year or two (but no more; I don’t want this next one to take four years!).
I’d recommend listening to writing podcasts and particularly The Bestseller Experiment. They have over six years of listening you can tap into for free. They’ve interviewed hundreds of authors, both traditionally published and self-published as well as industry profressionals and even now me! Becoming a Patron for as little as £4 a month will give you access to more content.
Above all, WRITE THE BOOK YOU WANT TO READ. Get that first draft down. Don’t show it to anyone. I can almost guarantee that before you get to type THE END you’ll have changed some of the early chapters and it would have been a waste of time, energy and possible confusing showing those to someone while those words are still the seedlings of what will become a healthy mature plant one day! Nurture those ideas in your mind, your heart, in your notebook and on your screen. Only when you’ve finished that first draft and then gone back to read through and given yourself the opportunity to make it better, will you be in a good position to let another person have an opinion. Because by then, you’ll know you have a book. What shape it takes in future rewrites can be up to you. The risk of showing someone early chapters when you’ve only written a few thousand words is that can lead to a feeling of inferiority and you’ll stop writing altogether. I know because it’s happened to me.
Can you tell us what you're writing at the moment?
‘The Projectionist’ is a novel inspired by both The Electric Palace cinema in Harwich - a few miles away from me – and the old Bradford Cinema which was closed down in the 1980s and is now being refurbished and will soon re-open as an Arts and Entertainment Centre.
In my story you will meet Frank, a retired projectionist who spent some years in the Suez Canal zone doing his National Service in 1953. Unfortunately he couldn’t be at home helping his wife, Joan, who in the January of that year had the horrifying event of the East Anglian floods which killed many people. I’ve yet to decide if it will be a dual time line, but I know how the novel will start and how it will end! If you’d like to meet Frank, I wrote a flash piece which was published by Fairlight Books in February 2022 which you can read for free here: https://www.fairlightbooks.co.uk/short_stories/the-projectionist/
And just for fun…
Your most anticipated reads of this year?
I’ve read and loved three Taylor Jenkins Reid titles this spring (Daisy Jones & The Six, Carrie Soto is Back and Malibu Rising so would like to continue until I’ve read them all, but especially The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo as everyone has raved about that one! A writing buddy of mine, Emma Claire Wilson, is releasing her debut This Child of Mine in early July and that’s going to be a corker!
The best book you’ve read recently…?
Good Girls Die Last, by N J Simmonds is a gritty feminist novel of our time. Raw moments and a time-running out feeling, set in London in a heatwave. I was able to read an early copy of this novel which is already being made into a TV series, so read it now, while you have the chance to enjoy it in word form and then we can wait to see what the script writers do to it!
What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
I knuckle down to work. In The Rug Room, which I run from a barn on our farm, I pop on a podcast and sit at the industrial sewing machine to add a patch to a rug, or re-attach a strap which a horse has managed to pull off! I’ve not listened to the radio since before lockdown. I feel that time is a precious commodity and I want to utilise it well. Even when I can’t be actively writing, I’m thinking about it, I’m being inspired by others, although I have now narrowed it down to three or four, rather than twenty-four!
Your dream weekend would be…
Sun shining on our south-facing patio, a good coffee under a gazebo (that would never blow down). I’d write for hours while a meal simmered in the background (because I’d bought all necessary ingredients). I’d process fifteen rugs in the background, hanging them on the line each hour and washing more. We might go for an evening walk and a drink in a pub garden with Otis, the miniature dachshund and I’d sleep through, not disturbed by insomnia. Same again on the Sunday. I think I may be a workaholic, but I know I function best when I’m busy!
A TV show you’d recommend…
Breaking Bad is compelling viewing for learning how to create a character who is good but does bad things for good reason and how the viewer/reader can end up rooting for them. The dialogue is a masterclass. Also the best example of mixing comedy with heartbreak.
Thanks for your time Kate.
You can buy her book at bookshops, Amazon or direct from the publisher. Or a signed copy direct from Kate, by subscribing to her website.