A Risky Business Savita Kalhan

You’ve written a book that you think is good. Everyone you give it to thinks it’s good too. Your agent loves it. The publishers love it. So why is there a problem?

Unless you are an established children’s writer there are places that you cannot go because the risk is deemed to be too great. I write dark, edgy fiction for teens. With my first book, The Long Weekend, I went to the edge, but not over it because I write for teenagers, yet I recall some publishers asking for it to be turned into a simple story about two boys being kidnapped for a ransom. They wanted what made the book edgy and unnerving, and dark, removed from it. But it would have left the book soulless, so I kept it the way I wanted to keep it and waited for an editor who was willing to take a risk on it. I was lucky and found one.

So I went on to writing the next book, and yes, it is darker and edgier, and, in the words of one publisher ‘Powerfully written’. But far too risky. The perpetrator of the crime is from an Asian background, so is the main character, the victim. Maybe if neither of them were the book may have stood a better chance...

So I wrote the next book, and when it was finished and submitted, and the powers that be quote how good the first published novel was, and how dark and powerful the second, rejected, manuscript was, I wonder whether they will say that this one is a very good book, well written, great story, but isn’t dark enough or edgy enough. What do you do? (apart from tear your hair out!)

You move onto writing the book after that.

There comes a time when you sit back and wonder: What exactly is it that publishers want? Will that change? Does it change all the time?

There are lots of teens out there who scour the bookshops for books without magic, sorcery, vampires, demons and zombies. Honestly, there really are. They want edgier, more real fiction and there is space for choice if whole sections of bookshops weren’t devoted to black and red covers. It’s a shame their voices aren’t being heard because the books they want have already been written for them...

Dark and edgy is all the rage, vampires have had their say, so you would think dark edgy contemporary realism would have more of a chance. And it does. But just not if it’s too dark and too edgy...