Wise Words: Laura Pearson
The author Laura Pearson has resilience on a scale many of us can probably only dream about. This fact, linked with her beautiful story-telling, has brought her incredible book sales of over 250,000 and rising.
These figures are for her novel The Last List of Mabel Beaumont and, in book terms, are over a short time span of a few months and at near vertical trajectory.
She is the first to admit the road to publication has been bumpy but her love of reading right from childhood helped.
Laura’s parents were both big readers – philosophy and classics for her dad and more general fiction for her mum.
She said: “As a pre-teen, I was reading Point Horror books and then I decided to take Jane Eyre from my parent’s shelves and didn’t really enjoy it.. I wondered if I just didn’t like ‘proper’ literature but then I read The Catcher in the Rye and thought it was brilliant. I realised it was modern literature that appealed to me.
“Being a writer myself was always something I wanted to do but I didn’t dare to believe it was possible. I also had no idea how hard it was.”
After a degree in English at Southampton University Laura worked in admin for Portsmouth University while doing an MA in Creative Writing. This was followed by a move to London and copywriting for the QVC website, promoting everything from mascara to gardening tools.
During a decade in the capital working for organisations such as Expedia, EE and the Ministry of Justice she wrote and finished her first novel Nobody’s Wife. (This will be published by her new publisher Boldwood Books in June this year.) It was inspired by the Leonard Cohen song, Famous Blue Raincoat, which has the book title in the lyrics.
Nobody’s Wife is a novel about two sisters who are very close and fall in love with the same man. It started as a short story but Laura’s MA University tutor said it read like the end of a novel so she developed it into a full length manuscript.
Looking back, she admits this feedback gave her courage to write creatively but without some essential skills she has now developed. She was writing intuitively rather than with any formal knowledge of structure or viewpoint.
Laura said: “My husband Paul and I moved to New York and it was in the days of sending hard copies to agents so I submitted to agents in the US as well as the UK by post so it took a while! I got lots of rejections. Then we moved back to London and I was signed by an agent but after two years of writing and editing a second novel we still didn’t see eye to eye so parted company.
“I now had two finished drafts, Nobody’s Wife and Missing Pieces, about a family’s secrets, under my belt. However, as I struggled to be signed by anyone I felt a connection with, I thought I needed to write a third novel to get signed.
“At this time, I had my son, Joe, then a couple of years later I was diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant with my daughter, Elodie. I wrote a rough draft of my third novel, I Wanted You To Know, during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) that year. I was exploring the worst that could have happened to me through fiction.
“I’d suffered so much rejection at this point and I thought I don’t know how many more times I can pick myself up. I can remember thinking I wanted my two children to know things are sometimes not easy in life but you must still work hard to achieve your dreams.”
While her health recovered, she continued to write and develop her writing career. She eventually found a publisher, Agora Books, for all three of her novels, and they were published in 2018 and 2019. After this, however, she had another period of struggling to get published.
Then in quick succession she found an agent, Jo Williamson from Antony Harwood, and got a five-book deal with Boldwood Books. She has since signed with Boldwood for a further five books.
The journey to publication with Boldwood has been fast and furious with over 1,000 pre-ordered copies of The Last List of Mabel Beaumont, Laura’s first novel with them. It got to number one in the Amazon Kindle chart and was in the top 100 for seven months and is still in the top 200.
Meanwhile Laura’s latest book The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up had even more pre-orders and is selling well.
Laura said: “Mabel coming out was big enough for me to feel proud but the on-going success is fantastic. Some of the loveliest moments have been my favourite authors like Louise Beech talking about my novels and being supportive.
“My editor Isobel Akenhead read my draft manuscript in her first week at Boldwood. This was very lucky as she was working on it from the outset and loved Mabel.”
Laura has written 11 novels to date and is a definite advocate for the advice the longer you do something the better you do it. She also believes you never finish learning. Her advice for other authors who are not published yet is to carry on believing you will find the right person to champion your work.
Practical tips she finds useful to write great fiction are using a facility on word to have your words spoken out loud so you can identify repetition or clumsy sentences. Changing the font on a document or sending it to your Kindle can also help you see where language can be improved.
For her, a great book is one that has beautiful language and where you forget you’re reading and are swept away. Laura said: “A great book gives you a fuzzy feeling in your stomach and it’s the best way to lose hours.”
The Stand-Up Mam is full of funny family stories. Do you have any to share?
“My son was three or four and he said ‘Mummy, I told everyone at nursery that you’re Australian.’ He was amazed to find out I wasn’t, I had just been there on holiday!
“He is quite a big boy and was going into the ball pool at nursery. His comment was ‘I didn’t land in the ball pool, I landed on Matilda’, who was a tiny girl! Poor Matilda.