The five year plan I made five years ago

Gareth P Jones

When my first book was published in 2007, I set the goal that in five years’ time I would be a full time writer. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not big on goal setting and I had no idea if it was realistic but what was the harm in dreaming?

At the time I had just started working as a producer on the Richard & Judy Bookclub (back when it was a small part of a daily TV show rather than a large part of a WH Smiths marketing campaign). It was a good job. I read a wide range of books and helped select the final list. I travelled the world, interviewed the chosen authors and made little films about them.

Working in TV can be a lot of fun too. It's social and collaborative whereas writing is a necessarily solitary activity. Anyone who has met me will tell you I'm a pretty sociable person, but any who have worked with me will readily testify that I'm far more suited to dealing with fiction than with anything remotely real.

Hence the five year plan.

If you'd asked me in 2007 what I did for a living I would have told you I was a 'TV producer who writes books.' By 2012, I wanted my answer to be 'Author'. Of course, it's not that easy. Not for most of us. The majority of authors' experiences are not those of J.K. Rowling or E.L. James. (If only I'd initialed both my names goddamit).

You'll often hear authors talking about the moment when they first found their book in a bookshop. Fewer tell you about the point they went back to that same bookshop, perhaps a few years - and several publications - later, only to find it devoid of any of their titles. I was used to making TV that was, by its very nature, ephemeral. Books were supposed to be more solid. Books last forever. Don't they?

By 2011, my five year plan was not looking good. My series The Dragon Detective Agency had been enjoyed by those who read it but failed to find a significant place for itself in the market. My first stand-alone book, The Thornthwaite Inheritance had been well received but my follow up, Space Crime Conspiracy had been roundly ignored (much to my wife's chagrin as it remains her favourite). The Considine Curse had come out in August 2011 and, in spite being a return to the kind of gothic humour that had done well for me, I also found it depressingly absent from bookshops. I did have a new series called Ninja Meerkats with Stripes but it was too early to say how that was going to pan out. Oh, and I'd taken redundancy from my TV job.

Was I stumbling inevitably towards being an 'ex-TV producer who wrote a few books once'?

And then in October, Bloomsbury rejected my new book. It had been the most difficult book to write yet. It had taken me a year to complete. And it was never going to see the light of day.

So when, in December 2011, The Considine Curse was nominated for the Blue Peter Book of the Year, I felt like I had been thrown a lifeline. A few months later I got the phone call saying it had won. That day my face ached from grinning. Having spent the last ten years working behind the scenes of live TV, I was up in Manchester, watching the researchers and floor managers buzz around the studio, while I waited for the moment I would burst through a book cover to accept my award.

I was writing a new book too. And one I was excited about. The idea had come to me while sitting in a local coffee shop opposite a funeral directors by the name of Constable & Toop. I found it such an evocative name that when I wrote it down the story very quickly formed on the page in front of me. When I wrote the sentence, 'They're killing people because they need the ghosts' I knew this was going to be one of my better ideas.

As we approach the end of 2012, Constable & Toop has just been published by my new publisher, Hot Key Books and there are currently six Ninja Meerkat books out with four more coming next year.

So what about the five year plan?

This year I spent a quarter of the year working in TV and the rest of the time writing and visiting schools to talk, read and sing about my books. It's a good balance. This year I am an 'author who also works in TV sometimes'.

And I quite like the sound of that.

Read our review of Constable & Toop

Watch a video of Gareth performing the song he wrote to accompany Constable & Toop: