YAtopia Blog Invasion: Guest Author Shirley Marr & Book Giveaway

Hi my name is Shirley Marr and this should be YAtopia Contributor Sharon’s post, but I am hijacking it today, muahaha! I’ve snuck in wearing a disguise and locked Sharon in the YAtopia basement. See, I won an auction on Authors For Queensland to raise funds for the Flood Appeal, allowing me the privilege of doing a guest post. So who am I? I’m an author of YA fiction. My debut novel is Fury, which came out in May 2010 and is published by black dog books. Make sure you stick around till the end cos I’ll be giving away a signed copy of my novel – and it’s open to international readers. Horrah!

So what can I say about myself, do I have any interesting stories hmmm? Actually why don’t I share my publication story, I hope you find it inspirational.

Flashback to 2009. This is future-me asking me-from-two-years ago these questions: What does querying a novel mean? No idea. What is a slushpile? I don’t know. What is an agent? Don’t know either… hang on, isn’t that something Hollywood stars have? As you can tell, I didn’t know much about the publishing industry. All I knew was that I loved writing and I’d been writing, like, forever.

My plan was this: write something I think is decent. Send it to a publisher I like the sound of and then get published. I considered myself an “okay” writer. This was going to be easy! I was working on a manuscript that through a long-convoluted-story (I’ll save that for another day) turned out to be YA, even though I was completely unaware that YA was this massive, super-popular lucrative market. I mean, I had read all the Harry Potters, but apart from that I kinda didn’t read books that were published beyond like… 1970…

So you’re thinking, okay, Shirley is delusional, this is going to end in disaster. I printed out the first three chapters of my manuscript (yes, I printed them, that’s probably extremely old school) and I sent it off.

Effectively I was sending it off to a slush pile without even knowing what one was. A few weeks passed and I got an email from Editor Melissa Keil from black dog books expressing interest. I was virtually thrown head first into editing, re-editing and even more re-re-editing and in less than I year had given birth to a shiny novel I was actually holding in my hand going “Oh my… I think I’m an author!”

So if you are a writer reading this and you really, really want to get published and maybe you want to give up – don’t – because in my naivety (which I later discovered was a good thing) I learnt…

1. You don’t have to write in a particular genre or a certain type of story just because it’s popular.
2. You don’t have to be represented by a flashy agent (or a crappy agent for that matter).
3. You don’t have to read a billion books or blogs telling you how to write.

Just write. Don’t overthink it. Because if it really is good, someone will see it and it will get published. Think of your talent and what you can offer readers rather than what the industry can offer you if you pander to them. That’s how authors break new ground and new moulds get created.

Okay – we’ve reached the end of my post, so it’s book giveaway time! You can check out the end product of my journey for yourself. Fury is my debut novel and it’s written from the point of view of 16-year-old Eliza Boans who is sitting in a police station making a confession. Her opening line is: “My name is Eliza Boans and I am a murderer”. She’s an anti-hero, she’s mean and snarky, but dig a little deeper and she might just be loveable. It’s dark, it’s funny, it’s dramatic and I hope it makes you cry too.

I’m going to give away a shiny signed copy, posted anywhere in the world, if you can tell me why you want to win a copy and leave it as a comment below. The answer I like the best wins! Enter way! You have until Saturday 20th February to enter.

To find out more about me and my novel Fury, visit:

My Website: Shirley Marr’s Official Website

My Blog: Life on Marrs

Thanks everyone one! Sharon will be released for her regular Thursday postings in two weeks.