How a manuscript assessment from Jericho Writers led to my debut novel becoming an international bestseller

I first joined Jericho Writers in about 2015. I’d just started writing that story I’d been carrying around in my head for years, but I knew nothing about writing, and not one person in the writing world. I was also recently redundant, at home with a baby recovering from critical illness, and grieving my mother’s death. So ‘getting out there’ wasn’t an option – but Jericho Writers gave me a whole world of writing advice, helped me feel less alone, and reassured me I wasn’t entirely bonkers to be doing this – trying to create something beautiful – because it turned out lots of other people were doing the same thing, meaning at least we were all the same kind of crazy.

When I got to the end of the first draft, I hadn’t the first clue what to do next. Most importantly I wasn’t even sure I’d written a real book. I come from a background of poverty and addiction, which had left me with the ingrained belief that someone like me doesn’t get to write. So when I booked a manuscript assessment, what I was asking before anything else was – is this a real book?

I can still remember the day the report came back – it’s one of the few days in my life I can honestly describe as life-changing. My husband had just returned from a work trip, I was exhausted from solo-parenting three small children, and then Philip Womack’s report arrived. And it was so thoughtful, encouraging and above all kind, that for the first time in my life I had an attack of vertigo. I couldn’t see straight, and like a Victorian lady with her fainting couch, I had to go lie down. It meant that much to me, that someone else had read it (all of it!) and put together so many insightful suggestions on how to make it better. (It’s why I always say that if I could only have one kind of writing support, I’d pick a manuscript review because it’s laser-targeted on your writing and what’s holding your story back.)

After that report, it looked at first like I might be one of the lucky ones – I re-wrote the story based on the feedback and found an agent in London; only for the book to fail on submission, and the agent to leave the agency, sending me right back to square one. But I still believed in the story, so I edited it again, submitted it directly, and this time got a two-book deal with a small fantasy publisher. For a year then, I worked with them on editing, copy-editing, type-setting – only for the publisher to go bust on publication day. Leaving me with one book (sitting on pallets in a warehouse somewhere), a draft of a second book, and no home for either.

During this time, Jericho helped me keep going – I went to the Festival of Writing and had the best time, feeling simultaneously supported, (a smidge) envious, but also inspired. I went to a self-publishing day in London and appreciated so much, how hard they worked to demystify something that scared the pants off a techno-klutz like me. But I decided to give traditional publishing one last try, found a new agent and went on submission in 2023 – not knowing that in the interim the market for romantic fantasy had exploded thanks to books like Fourth Wing. Meaning that after a mere eight years of rejection my series was in demand, and in 2024 we signed a three-book deal with Penguin Random House. Since then it’s sold in multiple territories, and when it published in March, it was a bestseller in Ireland, the UK and the US.

But absolutely none of this would’ve happened without that first manuscript assessment; it gave me the confidence to believe I’d written a real book people might want to read. And that initial belief helped me keep going through years of rejection because I knew I had the kernel of something worthwhile; and it was getting better with every iteration as I slowly, painfully, learned my craft.

And if I had to take one piece of advice from those years of rejections, rewrites and resubmissions: it is that editing is a super-power. Writing in itself is already a form of magic, because it lets you turn the inchoate mess in your head into something beautiful. But editing, I’ve learned, is that, squared. A way of taking the very best of your ideas, sentences, words – all bubbling up at different times, often over many years, but which, when edited down together on the page, creates something that’s the best of you across time.