Anyway, despite thirty ‘being just a number’, inside I had a sense that I hadn’t really done much with my life – not unless you count being pretty good on the PlayStation and carefully cultivating a palate for ice cream, which most people wouldn’t. I figured I could either meander through the rest of my life and wonder what I might have managed to do had I bothered, or I could actually try to do something.
So I made a list of everything I reckoned I was half-decent at, thinking that if I failed at the first then I’d move onto the next until I found something that made me happy.
It seems a bit crazy now but I never got beyond the first thing on that list – writing a book. I always thought I could, not because of the saying that ‘everyone has a book in them’ – which I don’t believe is true – but simply because I had a lot of ideas.
Over the next few months, each time I heard, saw or thought of something I found vaguely interesting, I wrote it down. Sometimes it was something as small as a name I liked, other times a news story, or perhaps a small flash of an incident. After a while, I had many Post-it notes littering my side of the bed and my car.
Back at school, my most impressive works of fiction had been the excuses I had for not doing my homework, why I was late, why I had missed a lesson, or why I was generally being disruptive. I hadn’t written anything even approaching a story since then but soon thought I had enough to start stringing something together.
I’ll leave out all the boring sitting-around-on-the-sofa-while-typing bits – because they basically involve me being boring and sitting on a sofa. It may well be what you’re doing now. It’s pretty boring, isn’t it? But it was a good feeling when I finished something so completely different to anything I had done before.
If I had written it a year earlier, there is every chance the document would still be sitting on my laptop now, gathering digital dust. As it was, I was messing around on Amazon.co.uk one day when I saw a ‘self-publish with us’ link at the bottom. I had a quick read and figured I may as well give it a go.
There are a lot of books on Amazon, over a million in fact, but with mine something strange began to happen: people bought it. I’m still not entirely sure what started things rolling but I began receiving emails from strangers within weeks, saying they had read it and wanting to know if there was another one coming.
My Giant Pad of Ideas, which by this time was actually a pad, had plenty left on it and was continually being added to. I have written more or less every day since – sometimes for half an hour, one time for eighteen – but I always have something on the go.
The most astonishing thing is that people have bought, and continue to buy, the Jessica Daniel stories. Within three months, I had the number one fiction book – not just ebook – on the whole of Amazon UK. The sequel to Locked In, Vigilante, was second only to its predecessor in the crime chart. Somehow I was in Amazon’s top ten list of British authors worldwide for 2011, despite not having a book out in the first seven months of the year.
Everything happened incredibly quickly, culminating in Pan Macmillan buying the rights to the Jessica Daniel series in early 2012.
If you like what you have just read, books two, three and four should all be out with more to come.
Essentially, almost everything that has happened to me over the course of the past year and a bit is down to readers such as yourself. Saying a simple ‘thank you’ doesn’t seem quite enough. You might say that to the person who held the door open for you this morning, or whoever made you a brew – even if they did put too much milk in it. The words themselves become a cliché, so you’ll have to take my word for it that I really do appreciate everyone who has bought the books and liked them enough to tell someone, buy the sequels, leave a review, or write me an email, tweet or Facebook message.
I’ve had emails from teenagers and parents alike; people who have heard about Jessica from their nieces, nephews, cousins, uncles, aunties, grandparents, parents and children; someone whose cab driver told them about my books, someone who read one while recovering from a serious illness, someone else whose midwife talked about the books . . . and so on. Lots of very normal people reading and passing the message on.
Essentially, the last few months have shown me how fundamentally great the majority of people are.
So these few rambling paragraphs are to offer my appreciation to all of you readers who have been so involved in making Jessica’s stories as popular as they have become.
Thanks to you all.
Kerry Wilkinson
Kerry Wilkinson is something of an accidental author. His debut, Locked In, the first title in the detective Jessica Daniel series, was written as a challenge to himself but, after self-publishing, it became a UK Number One bestseller within three months of release. Kerry then went on to have more success with the second and third titles in the series, Vigilante and The Woman in Black. His new book, Think of the Children, will be available in both paperback and ebook soon.
Kerry has a degree in journalism and works for a national media company. He was born in Somerset but now lives in Lancashire.
For more information about Kerry and his books
visit his website: www.kerrywilkinson.com
or www.panmacmillan.com
Locked In first published by Kerry Wilkinson 2011
Vigilante first published by Kerry Wilkinson 2011
The Woman in Black first published by Kerry Wilkinson 2011
This electronic omnibus edition published 2012 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
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www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-4472-3536-1 EPUB
Copyright © Kerry Wilkinson 2011
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