It is my pleasure to welcome Charlie Tyler back to the blog today to discuss her experiences as a published author. Thank you for your time today, Charlie.
For a lot of authors, it’s often a difficult and slow journey to publication but once started, a dream which is impossible to give up. After my novel The Cry of the Lake was published with Darkstroke (2020) I secured an agent and for several years we worked on a set of new characters and storylines for a series of cosy crime mysteries. I then spent over one year waiting for a well-known publisher to decide whether to sign me… in the end they said no, and I went into a corner and cried for a bit, but the skin of a writer thickens with time and, as I was already in the process of writing the fourth in the series, I ploughed on.
Then my agent left for an in-house editorial job, and I didn’t know what direction to take next, but I remembered Val Penny being very happy with her publisher and so I sent off the first of my MSS to SpellBound Books not really expecting anything to come of it. Fast forward a couple of months and I was having zoom meeting with director Sumaira Wilson. She was so welcoming and friendly, I immediately felt like my stories would be taken care of and signed a four-book deal for The Welland Valley Murders. Now I’m into the editing stage for the first book which comes out in December this year.
Changing publishers and having another editor jumping aboard is part of the writer’s life and I love the feeling another pair of eyes can make on the overall shape of a novel. The first one is called The Tangled Mane and is set in a fictional version of my own village in Leicestershire where a PI, with a partner in the police force, is undercover investigating missing merchandise in a hotel. When a bride is found dead in the bath, her sleuthing takes a more sinister turn.
There’s still a lot to do before the book hits the market but it’s such a buzz to be doing it with the right support behind me. Of course, one of the most exciting prospects is seeing what the team come up with for the covers. I’ll keep you posted.
The Author
Charlie signed with Darkstroke Books in May 2020 and The Cry of the Lake is her debut novel. Her Welland Valley Murders series will be published by SpellBound Books from December this year.
Charlie lives in the UK and is very much a morning person. In fact, she likes nothing more than committing a fictional murder before her first coffee of the day. She studied Theology at Worcester College, Oxford and now lives in a Leicestershire village with her husband, three teenagers, golden retriever and tortoise.
She is currently working on her next novel 'The Serpent Noose'. A dead body is found down a sealed up priest hole within the grounds of Collyhurst Convent; a sixth-form boarding school for girls run by nuns. It is the charred remains of Mother Agnes who went missing ten years ago and is found with an emerald cross stuffed inside her jaw. DS Cally Simmonds is sent in, undercover, to investigate. She must puzzle her way through well-dressed scarecrows, bonfires, emerald crosses and fallen oak trees before she breaks the wall of silence and discovers exactly why Agnes was killed and by whom.
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