What can it be like for authors when the books they’ve written – and put years of work and a huge amount of love into – go out of print? In the case of Helen Smith, who noticed that this had happened to her first two novels, it pretty much amounted to an existential crisis. “I thought,” she says with a laugh, “‘If you can’t buy my books, does that mean I’m still a novelist?’ I couldn’t bear the idea that they were no longer available.” In 2010, she got hold of the rights of the books she had published a decade earlier – Alison Wonderland, in which the heroine joins an all-female detective agency, and its follow-up Being Light – and decided to self-publish them. “Without any expectation of selling many copies. I thought if I can sell half a dozen I’m going to be delighted,” Smith says. “And I sold six on the first night.”
Alison Wonderland went on to reach number one in the Amazon chart in the US. “I had never been published in America before and it was so exciting. It was amazing. I was reaching readers I had never reached before.” Smith was “bitten by the self-publishing bug”. Her books, including her current Emily Castles mystery series, are published traditionally in print form, but she also self-publishes them, along with plays and short stories she thinks her publisher wouldn’t want to invest in. She has sold more than 100,000 copies of her work.
The digital revolution in publishing has changed her career, perhaps even saved it. “As it had been a while since my first books had been published, I would have had to find a new publisher and reinvent myself,” she says. “But what I managed to do was just find new people to love them.”
She still loves physical books and bookshops, particularly the independent ones near her home in south London, but she says ebooks have also “revolutionised my reading habits – I’m reading more than I ever have at any time in my life except when I was a child and read voraciously. I don’t make a distinction between whether a book is available in print or digitally: a story is a story.”
Books have always been a vital part of Smith’s life. She remembers poring over the 1930s encyclopedias her grandmother bought from a door-to-door salesman. “I devoured those as well as fiction – Tom’s Midnight Garden, the Flower Fairies books. Then as soon as I could transition to grownup books, I started reading Agatha Christie. I think she’s a lot of people’s gateway to not just mysteries but the adult books.”
Smith revisited childhood favourites – the Borrowers and the Narnia books – when her daughter was born. “All those things about reading are true – it enhances your vocabulary, it teaches you empathy as a child, you can sit in the middle of nowhere never having met anyone who looks different from you or has different values but you can meet those people in books and have an understanding of them.”
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