Stuff of fantasy: The Kiwi authors earning big overseas
We know the big names, the ones who win the Ockhams or other major awards. We know Eleanor Catton and Maurice Gee, Becky Manawatu, CK Stead and Emily Perkins. Fewer of us know Sarah A Parker, Kate O’Keeffe or Jayne Castel, yet all three are among a small handful of New Zealand-born authors who make a better-than-good living solely from their books.
Kiwis are readers – more than 85,000 people attended ticketed events at the recent Auckland Writers Festival, and between them bought 11,000 books – but there just aren’t enough of us to support our own fiction writers.
For Aotearoa-based authors to be commercially successful, they must look internationally: Stacy Gregg signed early on with HarperCollins UK for what would become multiple series of pony-themed books for tweens; Nicky Pellegrino is represented by Hachette UK for her novels, often set in Italy.
Genre romance writer Nalini Singh sells multitudes internationally for the Harlequin imprint; crime writer Ben Sanders has a deal with HarperCollins and has been shortlisted five times for crime fiction’s Ngaio Marsh Awards. His 2015 novel, American Blood, was optioned by Warner Bros, but Sanders still earns his main crust as a structural engineer.
Over the past decade, other writers have turned to self-publishing online, writing to market and maintaining a ferocious output that keeps readers wanting more. In most cases, those readers want more romance books, and Parker (fantasy), O’Keeffe (comedy) and Castel (historical) all offer variations on a theme of love.
“Romance writers are our most professional and best-earning writers,” says Jenny Nagle, CEO of the New Zealand Society of Authors. “In some ways, the book world is sniffy about genre fiction, but I’ve spoken at the romance writers conference and they are such glitzy, professional affairs. They’re incredibly well organised and always have international speakers and publishers who come in looking for new talent. They’re the most sophisticated book marketers we have, probably 10 or 15 years ahead of everyone else.”
Three of our most successful, Parker, O’Keeffe and Castel, interrupted their schedules to talk to the Listener.
Sarah A Parker
‘Sorry if you can hear honking and stuff,” says Sarah A Parker from the other end of a Zoom call. “We’re in Beverly Hills and it’s very rowdy. And I’m so sorry about my voice. I had a big signing and it was a four-day event; by day two my voice was gone.”
It’s an unselfconscious flex from the author, whose latest novel, When the Moon Hatched, has just been picked up by Harper Voyager. The book is why she’s in the US. After Beverly Hills, she’s off to Huntington Beach then New York, before heading home to Australia with husband Josh and their three kids.
If the frog-throated glamour of an international book tour seems a long way from the south Wairarapa farm where Parker grew up, it isn’t, really. There’s a direct link between that rural childhood and the epic fantasy romance books she writes as an adult. “My earliest memories of fantasy are going to my nana’s place,” Parker recalls. “She had a flat on the farm and I’d trudge over in my gumboots and kneel before her coffee table, where she’d have a stack of fairy books. I’d go through them for hours and hours.”