February 24, 2012

Despite never speaking to anyone at the paper, I am featured in a piece in today’s Daily Mail written by Liz Thomas.

I’ll make the obvious point that, if they wanted to write about me, I am one of the easiest authors to contact. If you Google “Kerry Wilkinson”, this site appears first. That “email me” tab directly above this is a very simple way of doing so.

Anyway, I wouldn’t mind, of course, except for the fact they have lifted quotes from a different interview and then taken them very much out of context.

Their intro is: “It’s one thing writing a book. But as any aspiring author will tell you, the real work is in finding a publisher.

“Now thousands of fed-up Britons – who have tried and failed to find someone to print their work – are turning to self-publishing in the hope of being discovered.”

So far, that is fine. That’s not my story but OK.

The problem is when it comes to “my” quotes. They allege that I say: “After a couple of rejection letters I just decided, “What the hell”, and self-published through Kindle and Lulu (for iTunes).”

Those quotes are actually lifted directly from a piece on the Lancashire Writing Hub which was written last August – long before I had sold 250,000 copies and reached No.1.

My problem is that they have been lifted with a naughty piece of editing. The quote actually reads: “And so, after a couple of rejection letters from agents (while I was busy writing a sequel I should add), I just decided, “What the hell”…”

The key part about AGENTS has been edited out of the Daily Mail piece to fit with their intro about publishers.

To re-iterate I was never, at any point, rejected by a publisher because I never went to them. I may as well clarify the agent point too. At that time, I had no idea what I was doing. I did the whole three chapter print-out thing and mailed it to two agents while I wrote Vigilante. I got the standard “thanks but no thanks” around a month later, which was what I expected. It was never a big deal. As I have said before, I never wrote these books to be published as such, I wrote them to show myself that I could. Basically, for something to do.

Their caption (see the screengrab) reads: “Debut: Kerry Wilkinson’s first novel sold 250,000 copies after she self-published. Now a number of publishers are vying for the sequels”.

I can see at least one major error in that too…

Afternoon note: The Mail have now fixed their caption. Still no contact though.