Time once again for a successful author to tell us how she chose to write what she does, and this month we go across the wide world to ask the question of Australian author Elizabeth Storrs. Elisabeth has a great love for history and myths. She is the award-winning author of A Tale of Ancient Rome trilogy which was endorsed by Ursula Le Guin, Kate Quinn, and Ben Kane. Now her obsession lies with Trojan treasure and twisted Germanic prehistory in her new release, Fables & Lies: A World War II Novel. Elisabeth is also the founder of the Historical Novel Society Australasia and the $155,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize. She lives in Sydney with her husband in a house surrounded by jacarandas. Check out Elisabeth’s web site at https://elisabethstorrs.com/buy-books/

Connect with Elisabeth through her website or Triclinium blog. You can find her on Facebook Instagram Goodreads, Amazon Pinterest LinkedIn and Bookbub. Subscribe to her newsletter for monthly inspirational interviews

Never Give Up

Elisabeth Storrs

I’ve written four historical novels, two of which took ten years to write and publish. The other two were finished under two years. So why did it take a decade to complete a work? Because life had a habit of “getting in the way” of my escape into the happy place of my imagination and historical research.

My A Tale of Rome trilogy features a Roman treaty bride, Caecilia, married to an enemy Etruscan nobleman. The first book, The Wedding Shroud, depicts a fearful and gullible girl navigating her way through an alien yet unexpectedly seductive environment. The Golden Dice and Call to Juno continue Caecilia’s story as she matures and becomes a mother during a ten-year war, together with the plights of other strong female characters such as a Roman tomb whore, Pinna, and an Etruscan servant girl called Semni.

It took me a decade to research, write and publish The Wedding Shroud, when I was part of the “sandwich generation”, squeezed between raising children and caring for elderly parents. I had a busy job and was coping with myriad other pressures that women experience in our various roles of spouse, mother, daughter or sister. Apart from a few precious periods where I could devote solid blocks of time to writing, I only had a minimum of two hours per week to spare on Thursdays which I diarized. I kept those diary dates religiously by hiring a local schoolkid to childmind while I wrote. Meanwhile I kept a notebook to jot down ideas whenever they came to me – often at 4am in the morning! Back then, I produced paper manuscripts so I would edit on my daily train commute (if I was lucky enough to score a seat), and in my lunch breaks.

My first agent couldn’t sell the book but I was advised to submit again if I changed my focus to emphasize the love story and explore a clash of cultures.

I rewrote the manuscript with a revised plot and did further research. No luck.

I rewrote it a third time in a different style with the help of a mentor. My new agent got the book over the line! I will never forget my disbelief then exultation at hearing I’d been offered a contract with an Australian publisher. To add icing to the cake, I was also commissioned to write the sequel, The Golden Dice. My next big excitement was to gain an endorsement from the legendary Ursula K Le Guin!

However, debut authors are naive. We have high hopes our books will be “the next big thing”. We expect our publisher to pour dollars into marketing to ensure our novel has the best chance of success. The sad truth is the publishing world works on what I call the “spaghetti method” – they throw debut novels against the wall like pasta. Those that stick are given more marketing dollars. The rest slide down the wall and are tipped into the bin. It hadn’t dawned on me publishers sell books directly to booksellers not readers. An author’s fate is in the hand of a bookstore owner who has limited space and razor thin margins. The shelf life of a new release is 12 weeks at best – thereafter your book baby faces being returned to the warehouse and ultimately pulped.

The Wedding Shroud was released in 2010 at exactly the time the Borders empire collapsed and the Red Group (an Australian book group) also hit financial difficulties. My novel sank without trace. I found the experience bewildering. The book I’d slaved over for ten years had been relegated to the dustheap in the space of a few months. But hope springs eternal, I concentrated on finishing the sequel within 18 months. I made the deadline but heartbreak followed. My publisher closed its fiction imprint. The deal for The Golden Dice fell through.

The adjective “stubborn” suits me. I now had two books without a home, and was determined that all my efforts would not go to waste. I decided to self-publish. To my great good fortune, a group known as Historical Fiction Authors Co-op reached out to me through the ether to ask me to join them. They were a collective of both traditional and self-published authors (including the lovely Donis Casey), many of whom had successfully cracked the market. The group was led by the amazing M Louisa Locke whom I learned was a guru in self-publishing circles as an expert on Amazon keywords and categories. Using her advice, I launched The Wedding Shroud in 2013 and The Golden Dice in 2014 as e-books into the Amazon eco-sphere at a time when the goliath supported Indie authors. Kindles were bright new shiny toys ready to be filled. By using very short windows of opportunity (3 days) to offer books for free, Indies could gain visibility to compete with legacy publishers. Through this marketing method, my books were bumped into the Historical Fiction popularity lists for months at a time alongside traditionally published heavy hitters. Suddenly I was selling thousands of e-books, rising in the rankings, and garnering reviews. I was part of the “Indie Gold Rush.” I began to plot the third book, Call to Juno.

There is a saying that success occurs when preparation meets opportunity. Out of the blue, I was contacted by Jodi Warshaw, a commissioning editor from Lake Union Publishing, an Amazon Publishing imprint. (In fact, I thought her email was simply an Amazon book recommendation so I was glad I didn’t delete it!) Jodi’s team had noticed my indie sales and wanted to buy my first two books, and commission me to finish Call to Juno. The offer was too good to say no, especially as audio editions were also to be produced. I am forever grateful for Jodi’s support and caring advice. The Wedding Shroud and The Golden Dice were re-released in 2015. I finished Call to Juno within 12 months. The ability to write it quickly (at least quickly for me) was because I was building on research I’d already done. I had also improved my skills in creating a narrative structure and establishing characters. Practice does help.

Readers are the most important people in an author’s writing life. The next unexpected email to land in my inbox was from an Italian fan who loved Call to Juno. He enthusiastically recommended my trilogy to his publishing colleague from AltreVoci Edizioni. It has been a dream come true to have my Roman books translated into Italian as Il Velo Nuziale, I Dadi D’Oro and Il Patto di Giunione.

After I finished Call to Juno in 2016, I turned my attention to Priam’s Treasure, a fabulous cache of gold found at Troy by archeologist, Heinrich Schlieman. After smuggling the trove out of Turkey, he bequeathed the Trojan gold to the German People and displayed it in the Pre and Early History Museum in Berlin. The gold was subsequently plundered by the Soviets in 1945 and disappeared for 50 years.

When researching the Trojan gold’s disappearance, I discovered the German museum curator who braved air raids to protect the priceless exhibit was a Nazi who joined Himmler’s Research Institute to protect himself from rivals and advance his career. This led me to learn more fanatical scholars promulgated the “Aryan Myth” to justify conquest, dispossession and genocide. I decided to rewrite Fables & Lies as an historical novel which not only tells the stories of the museum curators who saved their national treasures but also how the Himmler’s scholars twisted history to serve power.

My protagonist, Freyja Bremer is a patriotic museum assistant raised on Nazi dogma. Through her love affair with Cambridge educated archaeologist, Darien Lessing, her eyes are opened to the rot beneath the Regime’s lies, as they both strive to protect Priam’s Treasure and other antiquities. Intertwined is Freyja’s forced marriage to Kaspar Voigt, one of Himmler’s racial studies experts, and her quest to discover what her husband’s malicious research entails.

Little did I know that when I set out in 2016 to “walk the ground” in Berlin, it would take me another ten years before Fables & Lies would be released! I found it very challenging to research modern history after a decade of being immersed in C4th BCE Rome and Etruria. Previously I was dealing with a scarcity of written sources, now I was faced with an avalanche of them. I confess I often find myself in the tarpit of research because I become so interested in too many topics! I also felt like I was starting from scratch in terms of structuring the narrative and understanding the mindset of German civilian characters. Even so, I never thought I’d take eight years and another two to find an agent and publisher. I was repeatedly told I’d missed the crest of the WW2 craze and that no reader would be interested. Luckily, I finally found two UK publishers, The Book Guild and Bolinda Audio, who believed in a novel that is not about epic battles or organized resistance movements. Instead, it shows how courage can be found in quiet acts of defiance by ordinary people.

On a personal note, it also took years to finish the book as I was battling multiple family crises including severe illness, an untimely death, and caring for an aging mother-in-law with dementia. On top of this I was running the Historical Novel Society Australasia organizing six biennial conferences as well as introducing the $100,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize to the Australian literary scene. Once again, life got in the way! I think many authors experience the same competing forces but my advice to aspiring writers is to keep finding pleasure in the act of writing itself. Finally – remember the 5 Ps to success – patience, perseverance, preparation, practice and perspiration! In other words – never give up!

Connect with Elisabeth through her website or Triclinium blog. You can find her on Facebook Instagram Goodreads, Amazon Pinterest LinkedIn and Bookbub. Subscribe to her newsletter for monthly inspirational interviews

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