Angela Marsons and Bookouture enter their second decade of collaboration
The path to publication was an epic quest for Marsons, but the DI Kim Stone creator is stepping up a gear as she enters her second decade with Bookouture.
It takes just a few minutes after Angela Marsons appears on the video call from her Worcestershire home before we are talking about rejection. Getting knocked back is, of course, part of an aspiring writer’s experience, one that can morph into lore if it comes good in the end: 30 publishers said no to Stephen King’s Carrie, nearly 80 passed on Booker-winner Marlon James’ debut, John Crow’s Devil, and a dozen thought Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was not right for the market.
Never mind lore, Marsons’ struggles and eventual triumph have a near-Homeric epicness, as she chalked up thousands of rejections over a quarter of a century – including a patch when Marsons was so broke she was selling off furniture to pay her mortgage – before she made the breakthrough a decade ago when Bookouture released her first Black Country-set DI Kim Stone book, Silent Scream. Marsons proved to be a foundation stone for the then-fledgling, digital-first independent, which is now a division of Hachette: she has gone on to publish 21 more Kim Stone titles, a series which has shifted over 6.3 million units in English worldwide across all formats, with translations in 32 languages.
“I wasn’t really trying to be a rich or famous author,” Marsons says. “I just wanted to write, share stories and hopefully make a living out of it. When I was published by Bookouture, every dream I had – plus ones I hadn’t even known about – came true.”
The writing bug bit Marsons when growing up in Cradley Heath, a faded working-class industrial town about 10 miles west of Birmingham. She loved reading and was always scribbling in notebooks but the Damascene moment came at 12 when a supportive English teacher brought in some books by Andrea Newman (the novelist, who died in 2019, is perhaps most famous for the twice-adapted A Bouquet of Barbed Wire). Marsons says: “Those books provoked such an emotional response in me – that was when I realised that I wanted to be the person provoking that emotional response in other people.”
From her mid-teens she started submitting fiction to competitions and magazines and, after school, Marsons began writing full-length novels while working in admin and supervisory roles. There was little success: “I was just constantly submitting to agents and publishers. This was back before email so I would go down to the post office with 20 envelopes. And one by one, they would always come back, landing on the doormat with a thunk. But I’d just go through The Writers’ and Artists Yearbook and get another 20 back to the post office, because even if there was one submission out, there was hope.”
She was also buoyed by her partner, now-wife, Julie: “Julie always had more faith than I did. When I felt like falling down, she would always pick me back up and find some underhand way of getting me back to the desk.” Marsons had some wins. When she got her first shortlisting for a short story competition “it meant a lot because I didn’t go to college or take any courses. My background was not very aspirational; if you made it to an office job you’d done okay. That shortlisting was validation that writing was actually something that I could do reasonably well”.
But the years dragged on with no book deal. Frustrated, she changed tack and wrote Silent Scream in two months. She says: “I had been writing commercial women’s fiction because I thought that was what editors, publishers and agents would like. Silent Scream was my rebellion, where I wrote a book that I would love to read.”
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The Silent Scream manuscript caught the eye of Keshini Naidoo, then a reader for the Darley Anderson Agency & Associates, who told the agency to take Marsons on. Success at last? Marsons thought so: she was offered voluntary redundancy at the same time, so chucked the day job to concentrate on writing. But the agency could not find the book a home and a couple years later – when the redundancy money ran out – came a nadir with Marsons and Julie borrowing money from relatives and selling their possessions to pay the bills.
Then Bookouture founder Oliver Rhodes got in touch. Naidoo had left Darley Anderson to join the publisher and told Rhodes about this manuscript she thought was a winner. Rhodes agreed and was so keen he asked if Marsons had any others. Within a week, she had inked a four-book deal. Silent Scream was released in February 2015, became an immediate Kindle number one (Bookouture’s first time atop that chart) and her career was off and running.
Ten years and six million units on, it is still motoring. Marsons says she is “not a plotter, I just start with a subject that interests me and see where the story takes me”. This is remarkable, as several of the series’ books are intricately structured, such as 2024’s 36 Hours, which hangs on the premise of Stone and her team being given a day and a half to track down a murderer before he kills again. But there are indeed a number of wide-ranging, serious topics that underpin the murder and mayhem to keep the series fresh, such as the inequities of the care system (First Blood), generational trauma (Dead Memories) and homophobia (Hidden Scars).
Marsons suggests the success of the series is down to Stone herself: “From what readers say to me, I think not everyone likes Kim Stone, but everyone understands her.” If you met Stone in real life, it might be hard to warm to her. She is unrepentantly rude to most, with an irascibility that makes Ian Rankin’s John Rebus seem cuddly. But she is intelligent, indefatigable, fiercely loyal and darkly funny, particularly in her banter with her partner, DS Bryant.
But, apart from Bryant, Stone is unencumbered by other friends or love interests. Other than her dog, Barney, that is. I know what you are thinking: a beloved pet in a crime series? Surely one day Barney will get it in the neck for dramatic purposes. Not a chance, says Marsons. “This is a spoiler, but the books may end up with Barney being 43 years old – I’m never going to kill off that dog.”
Like Stone, Marsons prizes loyalty. She just re-upped with Bookouture for a huge new deal that will see her into 2032 and to the 36th book in the series. Of course, the publishers who knocked her back years ago have come calling, but she is ride or die with Bookouture: “I often say to Ruth [Tross, Bookouture’s executive publisher and Marson’s editor] that I was given the opportunity by Bookouture to tell my stories and they’ll need security to throw me out.”
Bookouture was initially digital-only, which has long since changed – though e-book and audio remain the main driver (Marsons has still sold a tidy 252,000 print copies for £1.5m through NielsenIQ BookScan UK). She says: “I like to say paperbacks pay the electricity, the e-books the mortgage. Every writer wants to see their books on the shelves – and I do now in Waterstones, or in the supermarkets here and there. But so many authors that are traditionally published are still doing full-time jobs, or at the very least part-time jobs. And early on [with Bookouture] I thought that if I was being traditionally published, there is every chance I would still be working 12-hour night shifts and not able to realise my dream of being able to write and call it a job.”
