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| Kathleen Jones |
Today's guest blogger is Kathleen Jones, author of The Centauress, A Glorious Fame and A Passionate Sisterhood. Hers is the third in this series of blogs by writers with books in Outside the Box: Women Writing Women. Here Kathleen writes about the freedom of indie writers to step outside the box of traditional publishing genres.
~
Escaping
from the box
by Kathleen Jones
I
had a very unusual childhood. Brought up on a small hill farm in the
English Lake District, I drove tractors, milked cows and carried
around a Spotters Guide to motor cars (probably nicked from my young
brother). There was a blue German sports car that I lusted after. I
wasn’t conscious of being any kind of rebel.
When I won a prize
for English at school we were all asked to choose a book. There were
two piles on the staff-room table; one for girls and one for boys.
The girls’ prizes all had titles like Sue Barton: Student Nurse,
Anne: Air Hostess – there was even one about a girl who dreamt of
becoming a secretary! I kicked up a fuss and asked if I could choose
from the boys’ pile and eventually they relented. I chose a murder
mystery set on an oil tanker in the Middle East. I knew nothing of
feminism, but it was already obvious that I wasn’t going to conform
to anyone’s idea of what I should be. So, when I began to write
books, it was a safe bet that I wasn’t going to do what was
expected of me there either.
My
first book was a biography of one of the pioneer women writers,
living at a time when it was considered positively immoral for a
woman to publish anything. In fact, in the 17th
century, even getting an education was believed to injure a woman’s
reproductive organs and addle her brain. The marvellous, scandalous
Margaret Cavendish was only the beginning of my fascination with
women who lived ‘outside the box’. The biography was picked up by
Bloomsbury and it was the beginning of my life as a ‘proper
author’. 
I wrote about Christina Rossetti defying Victorian
conventions, and then about Catherine Cookson – an illegitimate
girl who was born into one of the poorest communities in the western
world, left school at thirteen and went on to become one of the
best-selling (and richest) authors of the twentieth century. One of my books was published by Virago – an account of the women who
lived with the stars of the Romantic movement, Wordsworth, Coleridge
and Southey – women who wrote journals and letters and the
occasional poem, living in a society that considered it off-limits
for women to write anything more.
But
I found myself, unexpectedly, in a box. Publishers wanted me to
continue to write about women, not men. I was a woman’s author,
they told me. My readers expected a certain type of book. Novels?
You want to write novels? Absolutely not! You’re a biographer.
One publication even categorised me as a ‘women’s literary
historian’. It was a strait-jacket I had written myself into and
longed to get out of.
Never
despise money. It buys freedom. One of my books became a
best-seller, serialised in the Mail on Sunday, and suddenly I had
enough money to be independent of that terrible killer – the
publisher’s advance. I could take a year or two out and write just
what I wanted to write. So I wrote the novels I’d been dreaming of
and scribbling bits of in my spare moments. The only problem was
that my agent didn’t like them. They didn’t fit any genre and
the heroines weren’t conventional. One of the plots even had a
lesbian in it. Shock! Horror! Would I consider taking that
character out? Stupidly I re-wrote it, but my agent still wasn’t
happy.
Neither
was I. But fortunately, at that moment, along came the E-book and
the self-publishing revolution. Instead of a dialogue with agents
and publishers (and marketing managers) I could have internet
conversations directly with my readers. I joined a beta-reading site
and my novel shot up into the top 5 books, competing with crime,
fantasy and romantic fiction. It had ecstatic reviews. I had one
last conversation with my agent and hit the self-publishing button.
The novel went on to win a Kindle award for historical fiction and I
carried on writing.
My
next novel was even more controversial, since it dealt with a
character who had been born ‘between sexes’ in the nineteen
twenties. The Centauress, the
novel which
is included in the box-set, was inspired by a wonderful woman I met
in Italy about fifteen years ago, who was very frank about her dual
gender, but who had obviously suffered intensely throughout her life
because of it. The other protagonist, Alessandra, is a biographer
like me – paid to poke and pry into other people’s lives,
fascinated by the detective aspects of research, but uncomfortable
with the elements of voyeurism.
I’m
fascinated by the interplay between biography and fiction because
there is no real boundary between them. A novel is a fictional
biography and a biography is a ‘found’ novel – you’re given
the characters, the plot and some of the dialogue and you have to
bring the hero/ine alive for the reader. Every novel and every short
story I write is influenced by my career as a biographer, researching
and analysing people’s characters and finding ways to bring them to
life.
Since
I became an ‘Indie’ author my own life has changed dramatically.
Instead of the cut-throat, competitive world of commercial publishing
I’ve become a member of a supportive, friendly tribe. We connect
with each other on social media and in groups such as ALLI, sharing
advice and information.
We’re all rebels, free to write the books
we want to write without being constrained by the false categories of
genre. So, I was absolutely delighted when I was approached by other authors whose work I had always admired to be part of a 7-book ‘box-set’, show-casing women writers, writing about extraordinary, genre-busting heroines. We aim to give traditional publishing a run for its money and our readers a mind-blowing read!
A movement that has freed and empowered authors is doing the same for
readers. They are free to choose what they read in a vast online
emporium of books that isn’t stocked by marketing managers and
where best-sellers can’t be ‘engineered’ by publicists.
Let’s
hear it for the revolution!
©
Kathleen Jones
~
Thanks, Kathleen. I'm happy to be an indie author too and to rub shoulders with such distinguished company.
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