Legend of the Selkie

‘Legend of the Selkie’ started as a short piece for the Creative Writing Masters at UCC, Cork. After finishing the course, I decided to mould this short piece (3k words) into a novel. But as I began to write, I became more interested in my main character’s journey than that of the mythical beast or the whacky shape-changing romance I thought I was heading towards. It set me off on a new direction; after all, genre tags aside, characterisation is the key to all good fiction. I sent the finished novel off to many publishers, to no avail. But finally, I got a response from Susannah Hamilton, who was with Bookouture at the time, asking would I like to try to write for them. She said my writing was ‘of publishable quality’, but the content of that work was too literary for the imprint. She added that she looked forward to seeing Legend of the Selkie in Waterstones. After a few hiccups, I produced ‘The Irish Key’, which led to a contracted series. Ironically, ‘The Irish Key’ ended up in Waterstones, while more ‘literary’ Irish publishers carried on rejecting ‘Legend of the Selkie’. So I self-published it rather than see it languishing in my cyber cupboard. The same readers who like the Bookouture series seem to enjoy this work. It has now been read by thousands through Amazon KDP select, presently has 1566 reviews on Amazon and a 4.5 star-rating on both Amazon and Goodreads. I’ve just finished number five in the ‘Emerald Isle’ series, to be published in May this year. I suspect it will generate enough income for me to pay someone to translate ‘Legend of the Selkie’ into Irish – which is definitely not a commercial proposition!