Taran Matharu's Blog - Writing Tips and Thoughts

Interview with Graham Marks

This was my first ever interview and was originally posted on hachettechildrens.co.uk, my UK publisher's website.

Taran Matharu is a debut author whose road to getting published is a story in itself. Here he tells Graham Marks how his new trilogy, Summoner: The Novice, went from a daily online post about the world of Hominum to an international hit.

How did this story begin?

I was studying at the University of Bath and I heard that someone from Penguin was coming in to speak to business students...I went, and one of their directors gave us a wonderful speech. I spoke to him after the lecture and I happened to mention that I was interested in writing and becoming writer. This was not for Summoner, this was for another book that I'd been playing around with at the time. He told me that I should put it on Wattpad, [which] he had also mentioned in the presentation, talking about how it was changing the way publishers were finding books and changing the way publishers were marketing books. I'd heard of Wattpad but I hadn't really looked into it at that point because I was too focused on getting a job.

Can you explain what Wattpad is?

It's effectively somewhere [online] where you can share books that you're writing with people from around the world, a chapter at a time...you tend to serialize it. Some people put the whole thing up at once, but, the way that the algorithms work, it's better to build a following over time rather than just put it all out there for [people] to read in a day and then forget about you. Readers can comment, there are forums where people can talk, and they can vote on your book. They can even comment...so it's a great place for feedback and for people to follow your writing.

What happened next?

I applied to Penguin Random House for an internship; there were 5,000 applicants for four roles and I managed to get one of them, which was really exciting. Throughout my time there, whenever I mentioned that I had book to someone relevant they'd say, "Well, you know, if you haven't tried [getting an] agent, why don't you try Wattpad. It's a new way of getting published."

My internship finished there and because I had heard so much about Wattpad, I decided to start writing. I had a month before I was going to go traveling in Australia, and this also happened to be National Novel Writing Month and I thought, "Well, I'll just write a chapter a day and I'll put it up on online and hopefully people commenting will get me inspired enough to keep going and I'll have a finished book by the end of it."

When was this?

2013...at that point, I think after about the fifth chapter, I had about 400 reads, which to me was amazing, the fact that people were reading it at all. There was this one guy called Achilles, that's what his online name was, who would comment on every single chapter and he'd give me a mini-review. Initially, I was solely writing for this one person to see what his feedback was. His English wasn't great because he was from Indonesia, I think, [but] it was just amazing to have someone telling you that they were enjoying your work. By about the fifteenth day I had something like 40,000 reads. There were a lot of people commenting, [which] wasn't massively unusual on Wattpad - there are plenty of books with millions of reads on there - but I did get excited. I thought, "Well, this means it's good enough. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to change everything but it's definitely doing well." 

By the end of the month, I had hit a 100,000 reads and I was about to go traveling so I told the readers, "Look, I'm going to upload a chapter a week now", because previously I was uploading a chapter a day. Some people were disappointed but they accepted it. I went traveling in Australia for about a month, maybe a month and a half, and wrote one chapter a week. I hit half a million reads after about two months, and I hit a million after four months; [then] I started uploading a chapter every two weeks as I was job hunting and doing other things. Once I hit a million reads, someone from NBC News got in touch and said, "Hey, we're looking to do a story on serialized fiction, can we interview you?" We had a very quick interview, it probably lasted about 15 minutes, and they used some of the concept art I'd had an artist do and was sharing with my fans.