ANGELA MARSONS
Early WM competition wins spurred the crime author on to ignore publishers’ rejections. Over 1m sales later, she talks to Margaret James
Anyone who makes a habit of checking out the Amazon Kindle Top 100 can’t fail to notice that novels by the millionselling crime writer Angela Marsons are regularly featured there. Angela’s Lost Girls – the gripping third novel in her DI Kim Stone series – has hundreds of rave reviews, and in this story Kim needs to trace two kidnapped girls before kidnap turns into murder. There’s an added complication, too – Kim is dealing with a criminal who pits the girls’ families against each other. Whose parents will bid higher to save their own daughter?
Angela is hugely successful nowadays, but her road to success has been a long, difficult one. So, if there’s a single lesson to be learned from her experiences, it has to be that we should never give up.
‘I tried for 25 years to share my work with readers,’ says Angela. ‘But the response from mainstream publishers was always along the lines of we like it but we just don’t love it. I didn’t always believe in myself, but luckily my longterm partner did, and I carried on writing because I had no choice. It’s part of who I am, so the pencil never stayed still for long.