Chambers got ‘sense of identity back’ with success of Small Pleasures

Author Clare Chambers says she got her “sense of identity back” with the success of her novel Small Pleasures (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), after 10 years of being unpublished.  

Chambers was in conversation with her agent Judith Murray, Orion’s Waterstones account manager Esther Waters and Orion head of publicity Virginia Woolstencroft, chaired by Alice O’Keeffe, The Bookseller’s books editor, at the second Nibbies Salon event held at The House of St Barnabas in London on 8th November. 

In May this year Chambers won The British Book Awards Pageturner prize for her novel, which became a word-of-mouth hit during the pandemic. Chambers described Small Pleasures as her “breakthrough book”, telling O’Keeffe: “This book was my last throw of the dice, thinking will I ever be published again? I’ll just give it one more shot and see how it goes”. 

After going through “a period of depression and disappointment” with a different book, which was rejected by publishers, she was encouraged by Murray to write whatever she wanted, which “turned out to be the kernel for Small Pleasures”. 

Murray said it is “fatal for authors to try and write to a kind of recipe or try to follow a trend” and she felt “like I had something very special on my hands” when she first read Small Pleasures. In an unusual move, two different editors at Orion were allowed to bid for it, allowing Chambers to make the decision. 

Despite its publicity campaign launching as the UK went into lockdown, which “could have been a nightmare”, Orion’s Woolstencroft said the book’s “beautiful cover and title, which meant so much more to us than before the pandemic” actually helped to propel the book. Publicity teams were lucky enough to have physical proofs and ensured they emailed reviewers individually and identified “book champions”.  

When asked about the most unexpected thing about her success, Chambers replied: “It’s just earning money... earning money is a wonderful thing. That’s amazing. Getting back that sense of identity I had felt I’d lost. If you haven’t published anything for 10 years you stop feeling that you can call yourself a writer. It just gave me back that sense of mission, which was so important.” 

She is now more than halfway through writing another book set in the 1960s but is feeling “the anxiety of not disappointing people”.  

She concluded: “The life of a writer is just a series of perverse consequences. So, if you come to a little bit that’s going well you just have to enjoy it. You’ve only failed when you stop.” 

* The third Nibbies Salon will take place on 7th December, featuring Carl Anka, co-author with Marcus Rashford of the double-Nibbie winning You Are a Champion; and Phil Earle, author of When the Sky Falls and winner of The British Book Award for Children’s Fiction. Tickets may be booked here.