Year after year, book publishers receive dozens of manuscripts. Not many of them are actually published in the end – and often there is one rejection after another. But rejection is not always the same, as the story of best-selling English author Mark McCrum proves.
“Inever imagined my career would go in the direction it did,” Mark tells me. Although he liked to write as a child and wrote a short play at the age of eleven, even quite a while later he did not think of pursuing a career as an author. After school and a so-called “gap year” in Botswana, Mark began studying English at the University of Cambridge. “I wrote plays, which I carried on doing after I left [university] and eventually got one performed for a run of six weeks at a fringe theatre in the West End of London when I was 28,” he recalls. The national newspapers rated the piece positively, but Mark did not make money from it.
Best-selling author McCrum: “I was very lucky”
After two subsequent attempts to get further plays put on, Mark reoriented himself and began to write a novel. “I kept fighting, though I wasn’t quite sure about my way by the time I submitted my first novel”, he remembers. Mark received a rejection from six publishers. One of these rejections, however, opened up new possibilities and paved the way for him to make a career as the author of many books.
“I was very lucky to meet a publisher who saw some qualities in my writing and commissioned my first travel book, Happy Sad Land,” he says. In May 1992, Mark flew to Cape Town to start research on that book, a portrait of South Africa through the eyes of the people, which was published in 1994. “I had no idea at that time whether I had a future career as a writer or indeed whether I would ever be published again,” he tells me. In reality, however, it was not long before Mark could call himself a best-selling author.
After No Worries (1996), Jack and Zena (1997) and The Craic (1998), he landed a contract to write 1900 House, a book about the first Reality TV show in England, which became his very first top ten bestseller in 1999. His second in a row, Castaway 2000, about another landmark Reality TV show, got to no 2 in the UK charts and was followed by an offer to write a book about world-famous star Robbie Williams. Mark accompanied Robbie Williams on his “Sermon on the Mount” tour through Europe in 2001. The book, entitled Somebody Someday, topped the bestseller charts for eleven weeks.
Mark McCrum: From ghostwriting to crime writer
The cover of Mark’s murder mystery The Festival Murders. © Mark McCrum
The following years Mark published one book after another, including, for example, the humorous guide to world etiquette, Going Dutch In Beijing (2007), which was translated into eight languages, or Walking With The Wounded (2011), the story of four wounded soldiers and their successful attempt to reach the North Pole. “Writing about worlds very different to your own is very stimulating, and I have learned about many interesting subjects that way,” he tells me. He also ghost-wrote a number of life stories for well-known people, where he was paid but took no authorial credit.
After Walking With The Wounded Mark turned away from commercial non-fiction and began to write a novel that takes place in the world of authors and writers. He enjoyed creating his own fictional world, he tells me. “I originally wanted to write about the goings on at an English literary festival, as I’d been to a few and thought it could be an interesting subject. But once I got going, I soon began to think that I needed something more powerful than mere literary rivalry to propel my readers through my story,” he explains to me, “so I came up with the idea of a murder mystery, with an unpleasant literary critic murdered in his bed and a number of writers as possible suspects.” The book became The Festival Murders, first published in 2014.
The following years Mark published one book after another, including, for example, the humorous guide to world etiquette, Going Dutch In Beijing (2007), which was translated into eight languages, or Walking With The Wounded (2011), the story of four wounded soldiers and their successful attempt to reach the North Pole. “Writing about worlds very different to your own is very stimulating, and I have learned about many interesting subjects that way,” he tells me. He also ghost-wrote a number of life stories for well-known people, where he was paid but took no authorial credit.
After Walking With The Wounded Mark turned away from commercial non-fiction and began to write a novel that takes place in the world of authors and writers. He enjoyed creating his own fictional world, he tells me. “I originally wanted to write about the goings on at an English literary festival, as I’d been to a few and thought it could be an interesting subject. But once I got going, I soon began to think that I needed something more powerful than mere literary rivalry to propel my readers through my story,” he explains to me, “so I came up with the idea of a murder mystery, with an unpleasant literary critic murdered in his bed and a number of writers as possible suspects.” The book became The Festival Murders, first published in 2014.
The cover of Mark’s murder mystery The Festival Murders. © Mark McCrum
The paperback version of Murder Your Darlings was released on January 31st
The cover of Murder Your Darlings by Mark McCrum. © Mark McCrum
Mark had not planned a sequel, but the fun of writing the first whodunnit led him to publish two more murder mysteries featuring his mixed-race detective Francis Meadowes. “As it happened, my journalistic work as a travel writer had just taken me on two high-end cruises, and this struck me as a perfect setting, as a ship is a closed environment, but one which is never dull as it is constantly on the move,” he tells me, explaining how he came to write the second book Cruising To Murder.
“The characters in my Francis Meadowes books are very real to me, and often have some basis in the real world too,” he adds. No wonder the third book in the series is also “loosely” based on Mark’s experience. In this whodunnit, Francis Meadowes is teaching a writing course in Tuscany, parallel to Marks’s work as a teacher of creative writing over many years. The paperback version of Murder Your Darlings was released on January 31, 2021.
Mark had not planned a sequel, but the fun of writing the first whodunnit led him to publish two more murder mysteries featuring his detective Francis Meadowes. “As it happened, my journalistic work as a travel writer had just taken me on two high-end cruises, and this struck me as a perfect setting, as a ship is a closed environment, but one which is never dull as it is constantly on the move,” he tells me, explaining how he came to write the second book Cruising To Murder.
“The characters in my Francis Meadowes books are very real to me, and often have some basis in the real world too,” he adds. No wonder the third book in the series is also “loosely” based on Mark’s experience. In this whodunnit, Francis Meadowes is teaching a writing course in Tuscany, parallel to Marks’s work as a teacher of creative writing over many years. The paperback version of Murder Your Darlings was released on January 31, 2021.
The cover of Murder Your Darlings by Mark. © Mark McCrum
Author Mark McCrum: “If you really enjoy doing it, you will persist”
Looking back at all his books today and naming a favourite one is hard because he enjoyed writing each book in a different way, he tells me. “Some, like me tour book about Robbie Williams was just huge fun to reasearch, travelling around Europe with Robbie and his band, seeing the rock and roll world from inside.” Others, such as his crime books, have fulfilled him in a different, more literary way. “I develpoed a fictional style and learned about the tricky art of writing satisfying murder mysteries.
He did not expect the adventures he has been able to experience over the years. “When I set out, straight from university, I thought I would be a novelist or a playwright and that would be that,” Mark tells me. Now, after his long and adventurous career, Mark lives quietly in rural Wales with his wife and two children and is happy to describe a day in his author’s life with the well-known phrase “9 to 5”. Remembering back to those six rejections for his first submitted manuscript he now thinks the publishers were right. “In retrospect,” he says, “they were sensible to reject it, it was mostly rubbish. I just couldn’t see that at the time,” he says.
The secret of an author’s success? Persistence. “Agents and publishers are obviously important, but they are not always right. I think all writers worry about their talent (or lack of it) and there are times when you can feel that your work is no good and that you are wasting your time. But if you really enjoy doing it, and think that your work has something special, you will persist. For writers, in any case, life seems empty without writing.”
Written by: Michelle Brey
Translated by: Ogechi Okoroji
