AN author from Milngavie says she is “really really excited” ahead of the release of her next book with a leading publishing house this month.
Julie Shackman secured a two-book deal with HarperCollins last summer following the success of her first book with the company, A Secret Scottish Escape.
A Scottish Highland Surprise will be released on e-book this month and Julie says she can’t wait to see what the readers think.
She said: “I hope the readers enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it and it’s just great to see your work out there.
“When people come back to you and say, ‘I really lost myself in your writing and I felt like I was able to escape from the real world for a little while’, that’s the biggest compliment I think you can get.”
She added: “This one features a mysterious crockery set.
“I’d been reading something online about crockery and the different sort of stories that it has and the different families sometimes it’s passed down to and that just triggered an idea for it, that’s where I got the idea for A Scottish Highland Surprise.”
The 52-year-old says she has always wanted to be a writer but it “fell by the wayside” when she had her two children.
Julie said: “I trained as a journalist years ago and I studied communications and media at college but I’ve always wanted to write novels and I was a really keen book reader right from when I was small.
“I grew up surrounded by books, my mother and my grandmother were avid readers and were always down at the library, so it’s just something I’ve always grown up loving.
“I remember I must have been about 13 and I read Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz and that had a real impression on me, and I thought ‘I would love to be able to do something like this’ and it’s just always stayed with me.
“I had two sons and it kind of fell by the wayside a little bit, they took a lot of my time, and then once they were a bit older, I had time to go back to it.”
Julie’s first two books were published in e-book format in 2014 by a small digital publisher.
Then in 2017, she was taken on by Australian literary agent Selwa Anthony who got her book A Room at the Manor published by Allen & Unwin in 2018 and A Secret Scottish Escape published by HarperCollins Imprint in May last year.
Speaking about the resulting two-book deal, Julie said: “I found out they wanted two more books from me which was terrific, it took a while to sink in to be honest.
“I think it’s something all writers aim for.
“My agent’s brilliant and she’s always been in my corner so when I got the email from her that HarperCollins Imprints want the next two books it took a while to sink in, it was fantastic.”
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The second book in Julie’s two-book deal is pencilled in for release in November this year, and as the ideas keep flowing, she’s already started work on another two.
For any other budding authors out there, Julie’s advice is simply “go for it”.
She said: “Just do it and don’t let anybody put you off, anybody can do it.
“It’s a vocation where it doesn’t matter how old you are and even if you only have half an hour a day here and there, just get the words down, you can polish and edit it afterwards.”
A Scottish Highland Surprise will be released in e-book form on April 22 and in paperback on July 21.
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