I have a secret page on my website that only those that search carefully can find. I call it The 50/50 Project ...
It is a list of all my hopes and dreams - both possible and impossible - & all the places I hope to one day go and all the things I hope to one day achieve. I call it The 50/50 Project because I hate the term 'bucket list' (so inelegant). Yet, like many such lists, it is was inspired by the inching closer of my 50th birthday and the realisation that there are still so many things in the world I want to do (I found 50 of them, hence the title). The idea is that - as I go somewhere or achieve something - I'll blog about it, and gradually be able to cross off some of these dreams.
So its very exciting that my very first blog post for The 50/50 Project is:
No 33: Sell a million books (or more!)
I have written quite a few books - more than thirty at last count. Both books for adults and books for children, ranging from picture books to young adult fiction, plus one collection of poetry. All my books have sold well. Some have sold extremely well. Yet I still had not cracked total sales of more than a million copies.
Until Bitter Greens, my retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale. I wrote this novel as the creative component of a Doctorate in Creative Arts, along with a 30,000 word exegesis 'The Rescue of Rapunzel: A Mythic Biography of the Maiden in the Tower.' It was published in 2012, the 200th anniversary of the publication of the Grimm Brothers' first collection of fairy tales, a time when interest in fairy tale retellings was at a all-time high.
The book has since been published in all English speaking territories, particularly Australia, the UK and the US, as well as in Russia and as an audio book. It won the American Library Association (ALA) Award for Best Historical Fiction, was a Library Journal US Best Historical Novel, and was shortlisted for the Aurealis Award, the Ditmar Award, and a Norma K. Hemming Award (for which it received an Honourable Mention).
It has sold strongly all over the world, but particularly well in Russia, where I sold in excess of a quarter of a million copies in just two weeks. Thanks to my Russian readers, I have finally cracked the Million Copies Sold glass ceiling. Let's hope I sell my next million much, much faster!
So HOW did it happen? I really do not know ... except that I poured my heart and soul into this book! I spent seven years researching and writing it, I took an enormous risk by writing something very different from the books I was known for, I constantly thought to myself 'how can I make the book better? How can I push myself to be bolder, more daring, more innovative, more surprising?' and I brought to it everything I know about storytelling and writing. I think it has paid off (big happy smiley face!)
I talk about how I found out about my Russian bonanza in this Youtube interview with Booktopia :
Keep an eye on my blog for other updates to the (now-not-so-secret) 50/50 Project!
