During perhaps the most miserable winter season ever experienced - namely, the period in 2020 when none of us were permitted to leave our houses - one of the only places I found any solace was at my computer, writing about anything other than my current situation. It was in my childhood bedroom, at the desk I’d had for as long as I could remember, that the idea for a story came to me. This was a story about two brothers, the ghost they angered, and the titular magical circus that granted them escape from London and took them on a grand adventure across Europe.
The Butterfly Circus was the most important thing to me for a very long time; everything was secondary to thinking about this story, writing this story, and fantasising about how this story might eventually look on bookshelves. I had written plenty of novels before, while at school, but as I watched this book grow and evolve, it was the first time I seriously thought, Hey: this isn’t too bad. In fact, this is actually pretty good. This is something I could confidently put into the world with my name on it and be proud of it. So, once it was a completed novel, standing at over 100,000 words, I began to research how I might go about getting The Butterfly Circus published.
I found out quickly that I had plenty of things against me. I was young: I had only just turned 19 when I started sending query letters, and was making attempts at business with publishing experts far older than me.
Secondly, my novel evaded the conventional marketing strategies influenced by the emergence of BookTok: to find publishing success, as well as luck and a decent novel, one needed to fit the standards of TikTok’s preferred formulae for books.
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‘I could have gone to California. At this rate, I probably would have raised about half a billion dollars’
And thirdly, I simply wasn’t special - it took me a while to understand that these literary agents were receiving hundreds of stories in their inboxes every day, and no matter how much love and effort you may have poured into your novel, it is very easy to get lost in piles and piles of manuscripts, perhaps better than yours, perhaps not. As I was reminded countless times, publishing is perhaps the most subjective business out there, and certainly not for the faint of heart! (The faint of heart, of course, being 19-year-old me, who was painfully coming to terms with the fact that becoming the next Stephen King is not an easy, overnight process, and that rejections hurt!)
I rewrote and restructured The Butterfly Circus multiple times at the request of different agents, though every time I sent my altered manuscript back to them, it was as though I had been forgotten entirely. Feedback was limited, and often conflicting - sometimes, it felt as though no one but me had any sort of vision for what this story was supposed to look like. Nevertheless, I persevered! I sent e-mail after e-mail for the better part of two years before eventually concluding that the story I had worked so hard on was simply not fit for publishing, and that I should let it go. The publishing industry is a harsh, impenetrable one, and though I had dreamt about being an author since I was a child, and had wanted The Butterfly Circus to have the honour of being my debut novel, I gave up, and resolved to write something that would be fit for the conventional market.
But though I continued to write, I soon realised that nothing I produced was going to fit the standards of, say, the New York Times Bestseller List. I enjoyed (and still do) writing bizarre, genre-bending books that, at the end of the day, are written because I want to write them. There was an obvious solution as to how to get my books out into the world exactly as I wanted them, and that was of course to self-publish. I dived into researching the process, and discovered that, through Amazon, the whole thing is actually very simple. My book had been written and rewritten and edited beyond belief. I was ready to go.
While I have in no way disregarded the traditional publishing industry, or decided to never attempt that path again, there is something precious and liberating about having a published novel and being able to be in total control of the whole process. I had help, of course - I am incredibly grateful to all my friends who had numerous drafts of The Butterfly Circus e-mailed to them, and for my Dad, who did such an amazing job designing the book’s cover.
The Butterfly Circus comes out in eBook and paperback form on January 31st, which will hopefully be the first book of many.
