Liz Nugent Attends Belfast Book Festival

Belfast Book Festival was on recently and I attended a Q&A session with Irish Penguin author, Liz Nugent. Liz was in conversation with David Torrents, owner of independent book shop ‘No Alibis’ to talk about her debut book ‘Unravelling Oliver’

Liz read a brief chapter from the book, the most lighthearted of the dark story which amused the crowd, before talking about her own writing journey and the issues she faced with her first book.

The main issues that she faced with ‘Unravelling Oliver’ was not only having to come up with the title, 43 names she and her father-in-law came up with but it was her husband that came up with the winning title to which she sent off to penguin and received a prompt reply simply saying ‘Perfect’.

Finding a publisher was difficult for Liz as they were unable to come up with a genre that it would fit into. It was definitely not female fiction, crime nor a thriller so the marketing people told her unless you can brand the book, we cannot sell it as it didn’t fit into any of those categories. The book was first published in Germany, Penguin wanted a longer lead in so they could judge the market and see how people reacted to the book and to judge whether it was really was investing in.

The book took Liz nine years to write, in between her time on Irish television soap ‘Fair City’ and parts on theatre.

For all aspiring authors out there, Liz had an encouraging piece of advice and it was:

“There are books for publishers and publishers for books, if you believe in it and work hard enough, you will find someone who will love it as just as you do”

You can buy [amazon_link id=”1844883094″ target=”_blank” ]Unravelling Oliver from Amazon [/amazon_link] and is available to buy from good bookshops.