You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
C J Daugherty is looking to publish books that don’t fit the mould via her new business, Moonflower Books.
The UK-based publishing venture is releasing its first titles this autumn and came into being “as an act of self-interest” after Daugherty, a renowned thriller writer, didn’t secure a UK publishing deal for her latest YA novel, Number 10, which she published herself last November. “After writing seven Young Adult novels, I had spent three years writing only for adults. Then I had an idea for a novel about the daughter of the prime minister and suddenly I was writing YA again. Now, though, the publishing landscape had changed, and it was much harder to get UK publishers excited about a YA thriller,” she says. “Even though the Night School books (Little, Brown) sold more than 100,000 copies in the UK, publishers didn’t want a new political thriller of this type.”
Daugherty’s agent, Madeleine Milburn, secured publishing deals for Number 10 in six territories, so the author felt she couldn’t “just throw it away”. That’s when the idea to publish the English-language version of the book herself was born.
Daugherty will run the business with her husband, Jack Jewers, and the pair are looking to publish work by other authors, with an eye on finding mainly YA and crime novels that don’t fit the “current publishing mould” in the UK. Books that are, perhaps, not trendy, she says. When it comes to crime novels, for example, she says the big publishers want dark psychological thrillers and police procedurals, but Daugherty loves private investigator stories, saying she would love to publish the “Dashiell Hammett meets Jessica Jones on a street in Hackney” type of book.
This autumn Moonflower is publishing Daugherty’s Codename Firefly, a follow-up to Number 10, and Blue Running by Lori Ann Stephens will be released in December.
Stephens submitted the manuscript directly to Daugherty when she heard about the new company and Daugherty says the novel is “exactly” the type of book she is interested in. It is set in a post-secessionist Texas and portrays violence, tyranny, police corruption, abortion rights and sexual assault. The main character is 14 years old but the book is pitched as a coming-of-age thriller for fans of Station Eleven and “Thelma & Louise”. It is definitely not a children’s book, she says. “It’s controversial, but books should be controversial. Art and fiction are where we consider these issues and decide how we feel as a society. Publishers should not be afraid to publish books like these.”
As well as Daugherty and Jewers, several industry stalwarts are involved in the business, including Karen Ball, who runs the Speckled Pen publishing consultancy. She edited Number 10. Author and editor Helen Grant did the copy-edits and graphic designer Jasmine Aurora is responsible for the cover designs, while Midas is in charge of PR.
When asked why the YA publishing scene has changed, Daugherty says: “When I first wrote Night School in 2010, YA was a massive market. Night School went to Frankfurt that year and sold in 19 languages during the fair, and that wasn’t really hugely unusual. People were getting huge publishing deals in the US for their fantasy trilogies. But with the ending of the Twilight and Hunger Games franchises, the market compressed. By the time I wrote Number 10, the Young Adult market was a shadow of itself. I think publishers are understandably cautious about what they print, and they don’t see YA as a big money maker anymore.
“Number 10 is a thriller about the daughter of the prime minister uncovering a plot to kill her mother—she has 10 days to find proof or it will be too late. It’s exactly the kind of book that would have done very well eight years ago, but we could not find a publishing home for it.”
Moonflower Books will release around two new books a year and Daugherty is also publishing her backlist, as books become available, with new cover designs (she recently got the rights back to the US English and Spanish-language editions of Night School), and this is a service she hopes to offer to other authors. Moonflower will redesign and rejacket an author’s previous books to ensure they never go out of print, she says.
She will “probably” publish all of her future YA books through Moonflower, too.
Daugherty says there is a good case to be made for experienced authors with a following to publish their YA books in the UK, and let their agents sell foreign rights. “You make more money that way, you have more control that way, and you can work directly with your fans to build up interest and excitement. Moonflower lets me do that.”