I didn’t intend to be a writer. I was always a reader, voraciously consuming pages at any opportunity. As a child, I read through the bookshelves of my primary school quick smart and was granted special access to the headmistress’s cupboard of books for advanced readers. At nine years old, I was delighting in the adventures of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.
Sarah Walden
I always stayed up reading past my bedtime. At that time, my family lived in an oddly arranged bungalow near Newcastle airport. My tiny bedroom was off the kitchen and I used to believe that providing I turned my bedroom light off the minute I heard someone enter the kitchen, I would be safe from discovery. It’s only in later years that I realised that the golden yellow strip of light showing under my bedroom door was plainly visible to anyone entering the room.
Harrogate Library fuelled my obsession further. I used to borrow my sister’s library card so I could take out 12 books at a time and still have finished them two days before my mum was prepared to drive me back. I discovered Tamora Pierce, an American fantasy author published by Scholastic who I was lucky enough to meet in my future career, who was edited by a young man called David Fickling, who went on to edit and publish Phillip Pullman’s masterpiece, His Dark Materials.
By the time I was a teenager – proper YA fiction didn’t exist in those days – I was consuming my mother’s bookshelves. Jilly Cooper, Alistar Maclean, Desmond Bagley, Jeffrey Archer, Mary Stewart, Georgette Heyer, Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh all formed part of my teenage world. Even the more illicit Shirley Conran’s Lace, which my mother had explicitly told me I should not read until I was older, was fair game for hiding under the duvet with my torch. We’d moved house by that time, and my bedroom was upstairs. Creaky stairs which signalled exactly when one of my parents approached…
At school, I loved English, although much preferred Literature to Language. I found the creative writing part of language hard. I had flirted with the idea of studying law, but once I started English Literature at A-level, my mind was firmly set on an English Literature degree. My father, who was incredibly supportive of both my sister and I − relatively refreshing for a north-east male of his age − was only a trifle concerned about my future career prospects. Having ruled out teaching, or being a librarian, the only other direction that seemed to make sense, was to head into publishing.
From the moment I started my degree at Newcastle University, Dad was scouring the papers (online didn’t exist in those days) for job ads related to the world of books. He came up trumps though, with an advert for a summer internship in the Puffin Books Children’s Marketing Department. I drafted a letter, typed it up at my Dad’s office and sent off my application. Imagine my surprise when I was offered the role. I loved it. Working at Penguin HQ at Wrights Lane, Kensington, I met so many inspirational people in just a few short weeks. I went back to university with an even larger overdraft than the one I had when I arrived in London and lots of books.
But I was hooked. Publishing was the way forward. Only, not as I had originally thought, into the editorial department. What I loved was sales and marketing – I was fascinated by how publishers got books into the hands of their customers and readers. I found the editorial process too slow – perhaps that was just my youth, or perhaps it’s a characteristic I have always had – and wanted the buzz and excitement I could sense in the sales department.
Life intruded. I finished my degree and got engaged. My husband to be (also an English literature student, who had completed his masters while I did my final year) had got his first ‘proper’ job working as a computer games tester in Banbury – computer games were his passion. We bought a house. The concept of commuting to London at that point wasn’t realistic, but I was optimistic. Oxford wasn’t far and there were a number of publishers I could approach. Then six weeks before we got married, I spotted a small advert for an editorial assistant, Scholastic Book Clubs, Leamington Spa.
It was a sign – I sent in my CV and covering letter, and three days before my wedding, my Dad drove me to my first interview. I remember sitting nervously in reception waiting to meet the two book buyers. I flicked anxiously through the catalogues on the table, spotting in delight a paperback version of a new Tamora Pierce fantasy series, feasting my eyes on Goosebumps and Point Horror titles. I rapidly revised my literary pretensions and started thinking commercially instead. I thought the interview went well, but I was getting married in less than 72 hours so my mind wasn’t completely on my future career.
A day later, there was a phone call – on my parent’s landline – the only mobile phone in the family was a clunky car phone my Dad used for work – from one of the buyers I had met, who went on to become a good friend. Would it be possible for me to attend a second interview? Well of course, but only after I had returned from my honeymoon. That interview went well – I wore my cream linen going-away outfit – and felt very glamorous. I started my first job in publishing on the 15th August 1996.
Five years later, I had worked my way up to Senior Buyer, Scholastic Book Clubs, had been on trips to the Scholastic head office in New York, had attending buying meetings with Scholastic Book Fairs in Florida. I’d been to Bologna Book Fair and loved being a buyer in the children’s market. I attended Warwick University to gain my master’s in children’s literature. Then I was approached by Penguin to be part of Puffin Book Club’s revitalisation.
As a buyer, you see every publisher under the sun. You become adept at working out which books will work and which won’t. You don’t get it right 100% of the time, but my favourite salespeople were the ones who accepted my swift decisions and let me get on with it. It was here that I first had some creative input into decision-making. I was lucky enough to attend the Puffin Acquisitions meetings and feed in with sales figures and have input on covers, but I was still a reader, not a writer.
Puffin Book Club was sold to The Book People and I went with it. Working with Ted Smart and Seni Glaister was an incredible experience. The Book People was as disruptive as you could get in 2008 and was putting millions of books into the hands of people who didn’t buy books from traditional booksellers. The buying continued, only this time I was buying adult titles as well as kids. The responsibility and remit increased. I spent my life in spreadsheets dealing with numbers and stock – my favourite programme was Excel. I couldn’t be further from a writer at this point.
After a brief stint at a wholesaler, I returned to the Book People, now under new management and ultimately ended up being responsible for all purchasing and stock, merchandising, the call centre and the schools sales channel. It was a huge job and one that unfortunately came to an end with the collapse of the business in 2019. That was the point where I needed to make a decision about my future.
Should I seek out another corporate role? The book buying function was shrinking as players left the market and flipping publisher side seemed challenging. I knew I didn’t want to leave books behind – although for one desperate moment, I did consider a senior position in a lawn-mower company! The lure of working for myself in my own space was incredibly strong. My husband, now a children’s author, had been working for himself and from home for almost 15 years and until then I had always felt we needed a regular income from one of us. But if I didn’t take the plunge now, I never would. I was 46 years old with a teenager at home. I thought I had reached the pinnacle of my career at the Book People, and I now needed to start again from scratch.
Could I turn the tables? Could I start to create content? I certainly had seen enough of it over the years to understand what would and wouldn’t sell. I felt that children’s books would be a natural fit for me to start with – and with a willing children’s author in a shed down the bottom of the garden, I ought to be able to come up with something sensible.
I started talking to friendly publishers about what I might be able to do for them. I worked on some concepts. Data was my friend. I poured over TCM sales information, mining for nuggets to work out what we should be creating. We settled on four non-fiction series suitable for different ages and were lucky enough to sell them all to a children’s publisher on a packaging basis – where we created the content, but the publisher was responsible for manufacturing them. But the only way we would make enough income from the books was if we wrote them ourselves…
My husband was pretty confident he would be able to make that work, but soon realised that writing novels for kids wasn’t anywhere near the same thing as writing authoritative non-fiction books, regardless of the amounts of humour or puns we included. It was up to me!
I set out creating two journals, and then my most challenging book so far, How To Outthink A Grown-Up. This would give an introduction to the big ideas children should be considering, from critical thinking to philosophy and politics through history, journalism and into economics. All for 9-year-olds. To my surprise, I found I really enjoyed writing non-fiction. Researching content and working out the best way to convey the information at the right level, while making it interesting and inspiring, gave me huge amounts of pleasure. The satisfaction when my editor was pleased with the result was huge. Of course, there were niggles and fact-checking and we ditched an entire chapter on psychology because I couldn’t make the content work, but ultimately I created a book that I was proud of.
We sold more books to the same publisher, taking us to a total of 27 books, including a series of baking and cookery books which I wrote and baked and cooked for the photoshoots in our conservatory. The other series were sticker activity books. Don’t ask me about stickers. They are not fun to make, even though kids love them.
We wanted to broaden our client base, and sold an aspirational career-based activity series to another publisher. Now at 31 books. Then Covid hit. Everything slowed down. I was frustrated at how slowly things were progressing, so I started working on some adult concepts. We sold two humour titles on dogs and cats to an adult publisher. Now 33 books. I sold another children’s title to Hachette. So 34 books written and delivered. We picked up some licensed packaging work from Penguin, although we weren’t writing the content for these.
But I had learned that packaging for other clients had its own frustrations, I still wasn’t in complete creative control. Don’t get me wrong, the packaging process had certainly taught me how to make books – something that I thought I knew when I started but didn’t fully appreciate until I had gone through the process numerous times – but I wasn’t making the books I wanted to.
So, it was time to take Noodle Juice into the world of publishing in its own right. Someone once said if you don’t start, you’ll never finish. So, I put a list together. An ambitious programme that I would create with a little help from my husband. I appointed a sales agency. I contracted with a rights agency. I found a distributor and was recommended a printer. All I had to do now was write the books. So far 16 of the 34 books we’re publishing next year have been written and illustrated.
Which takes me to a total of 50 books since May 2020… so it looks as if I have accidentally become a writer after all!
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