Author Peter Kerr and his family
THIS week on the blog I am featuring the first of some occasional pieces from other writers, talking about their books and their experiences of getting into print.
Peter Kerr, best-selling author of the Snowball Oranges series of Mallorcan books, talks about his work. With a diverse background in record producing and beef farming in Scotland, Peter took the adventurous step of moving to Mallorca in the 1980s with his family to grow oranges, and he turned that experience into very entertaining books. He later wrote a series of mystery novels, and his latest work is an historical novel called Song of the Eight Winds.
Q: Why Mallorca and why orange farming?
A: We had a 50-acre beef and cereals farm in south-east Scotland but it wasn’t viable enough to make a good living when the recession hit in the 1980s. We needed to find another way of life – and fast. Fate intervened during a break in Mallorca, when my wife Ellie and I stumbled upon an orange farm for sale in a hidden valley of the Tramuntana Mountains, in south-west Mallorca.
We knew nothing about growing oranges, and although we didn’t consider ourselves to be creatures of impulse, we bought the farm on the spur of the moment anyway, seriously stretching our finances. This was to be one of those life-changing risks that few of us would gamble on, if we took time to think about it first.
A few months later, we had sold up in Scotland and were in our new Mallorcan home with our two sons – aged 10 and 19. The ups and downs of this venture are fully chronicled in the Snowball Oranges series. Foolhardy though this may have seemed at the time, the experience gave us a lot more laughter than tears, and a much broader outlook on life.
The first in the series of Peter’s best-selling Mallorcan books
Q: You were one of the first British writers to produce travel narratives about expat life in the Mediterranean. What made you want to start writing in the first place?
A: In 1990 I started jotting down random notes about the humorous aspects of our family’s experiences while trying to make a living growing oranges during the 1980s. Two years later, the jottings had morphed into the first book.
And there were plenty of disasters along the way that obviously made great anecdotes for the book, like the first morning, in December, after moving into our Mallorcan farm house. We woke up to find a neighbour banging on our front door, telling us the area had been engulfed in a freak snowstorm. To our horror, we went outside and found the orange orchards covered in a cold mantle of white, hence the title Snowball Oranges.
Q: While the first book became a bestseller, ironically it took a long time to get it published. Why was that?
A: It took eight years to get Snowball Oranges into print and in that time I was turned down by just about every publisher in Britain. I was told that the demand for this type of narrative travelogue had been exhausted by the huge success enjoyed by Peter Mayle’s Provence books (from the late 1980s). However, it seemed to me that there was still a huge demand for this type of travel book that hadn’t been fully satisfied. And my hunch turned out to be right. Snowball Oranges, without any special promotion, became an overnight bestseller when finally published by Summersdale in 2000, picking up a couple of book-of-the-year awards on both sides of the Atlantic, and spawning four sequels and a prequel, which have since been translated into twelve languages.
The Tramuntana mountains on Mallorca
Q: Your persistence in getting that first book into print will inspire others but what advice do you have for would-be authors in these difficult times for publishing?
A: Realise that writing ‘The End’ on the last page of your manuscript is, in many crucial ways, only the beginning of your work. Go back and revise everything over and over again until you can almost recite every page by heart. And then revise some more, ruthlessly cutting out or changing anything that you aren’t entirely comfortable with.
Publishers won’t read beyond the first paragraph of any submission that appears slapdash. This is even more important now that self-publishing is so easy to attain. However tempting it may be to take the fast track to seeing your work in print, make sure your manuscript is professionally edited and carefully proof-read before you submit it for publishing. This may cost you a little bit to achieve but it will end up being money well spent.
Q: The travel narrative genre burgeoned in the past decade. Do you think it has now run its course?
A: I think there will always be a demand for the ‘living the dream’ type of story. It’s human nature to suspect the grass is greener somewhere else, particularly if it also happens to be sunnier than it is at ‘home’. The market is flooded with these books now and only those with something different to offer will have the only reasonable chance of success.
Q: Your latest book is also your first historical novel Song of the Eight Winds, also set in Mallorca. What’s it about?
A: It’s an epic tale set in an interesting period of Mallorcan history, in the 13th century during the Christian Reconquista from the Moors. It’s a period of history that has fascinated me and I thought it was ideal for a fictional account. It’s also a new creative direction and proves the old adage: “When opportunity knocks, don’t look through the letterbox before opening the door.”
To find out more about all Peter’s books and to order, visit his website www.peter-kerr.co.uk and follow him on Twitter @AuthorPeterKerr
© Text and photographs copyright of the authors 2013
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