Six best-sellers ...aged just 22!
Interview by Emma Cowing
WHEN Estelle Maskame turned 13, she started spending a lot of time in her bedroom. So much time, in fact, that her mum and dad began to worry.
‘My parents joke now that they thought I was antisocial when I was younger because I was always locked in my bedroom,’ she says.
‘But what I was really doing was writing a story.’ That story, and the ones which followed, have turned Maskame into a literary sensation.
At the ripe old age of 22, the Peterhead native has published six novels, and is about to embark on her seventh. Her books have been translated into 11 languages and become worldwide bestsellers in the popular Young Adult genre.
A trilogy known as the Did I Mention I Love You series, the first part of which she started all those years ago in her bedroom and which was snapped up by Black & White Publishing in a threebook deal when she was 17, has sold more than one million copies. It means she already has the sort of social media following that pop stars on their third album might envy.
In short, Maskame is one of Scotland’s most exciting – not to mention prolific – new authors. No mean feat given she left school only four years ago.
‘For a long time I didn’t believe it was real,’ she says. ‘When I first got my publishing deal, I asked my publisher, “Is it going to be in bookstores?” I couldn’t comprehend what was about to happen, that I was actually being published. I kept thinking there must be a catch.
‘It wasn’t until I saw my first book in Waterstones that it hit me that this was really happening.’
Part of Maskame’s appeal to her young readers – many of whom are teenagers – is her willingness to interact with them online. Between her Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts she has hundreds of thousands of fans who avidly follow her antics, tell her how much they love her books and excitedly discuss plot lines among themselves.
‘People are constantly sending me messages and tweeting me their thoughts. It’s amazing to see,’ she says. ‘Every day I get to hear what people are thinking. It’s nice to be able to interact with them online.’
It’s a long way from the days when authors were lofty, mysterious figures, occasionally spotted at book festivals but otherwise unknown to their readers.
‘It’s much better now,’ says Maskame. ‘Before, readers didn’t know anything about the author other than the name on the cover. But I share my entire life with my readers. I feel like they actually know me as a person.’
It is perhaps this – along with the wildly engaging and fast-paced teenage dramas she pens – that has inspired such devotion among Maskame’s fan base. During a recent trip to Paris she was overwhelmed when so many readers turned up to meet her that the queue was four hours long.
At another event in Barcelona, hordes of girls arrived with flowers to give her, along with copies of their books to sign. And then there is the astonishing, some might say alarming, trend among her fans for a very specific tattoo.
‘Quite a lot of readers have had a quote from my book tattooed on them in my handwriting,’ she explains.
‘It’s absolutely insane, but it’s become a real tradition. The quote is “no te rindas”, Spanish for never give up. I’ve had one done now too, as I felt I had to join the party.
‘I don’t know if it’s creepy or not but for them to support the books and me so much that they’re willing to get something in my writing on their bodies, it does mean a lot.’
Sure enough, scroll down on Maskame’s popular Instagram page and there is a post, from last June, of Maskame showing off the tattoo, elegantly looped above her hip.
Maskame grew up the younger of two sisters in the fishing town of Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, where she still lives with her parents Stuart, a funeral director, and Fenella, a shop assistant.
Ever since she can remember, she says she has been an avid bookworm who loved to escape into the world of books whenever she could.
‘My mum used to take me to the library a lot when I was younger,’ she says. ‘She was a big reader as well and she really encouraged me. I used to love collecting books, and I’d always buy myself a new book with my pocket money. I was always reading.’
It didn’t take long for her love of books to spill out into a desire to try writing something of her own.
‘I remember being in Primary 4, so about eight years old, and I used to write little stories and bring them into class and my teacher would put them on display in a book for all my classmates to read.
‘Even when I was really young I just loved writing a story and sharing it with people. That’s probably my first memory of writing.’
She started writing ‘seriously’ at the age of 11, when she wrote a novel that she says is now ‘locked away somewhere, never to be seen’, and at 13 began the Did I Mention I Love You series.
‘I just got a brief idea and I sat down and started writing. I thought it was going to be one book as well. I didn’t know it was going to turn into a series at that stage. I had no clue what it would actually turn into.’
Nervous to share her writing with family and friends, she instead started posting her work online, on the creative writing website Wattpad.
‘I was a little bit embarrassed to show my friends and family because I was only young and I didn’t think it was the coolest thing in the world to tell people I was writing stories in my bedroom. So I kept it a bit under
‘I’d always buy a new book with my pocket money’
‘I don’t feel much like an adult yet’
wraps and I found it easier to post it online and let strangers read it.’
Online she established something of a following, and found that her writing was being taken seriously by fans.
‘Every time I finished writing a new chapter I would post it online, and I kept doing that for several years. It wasn’t until I’d actually finished the series and was working on rewriting it and making it a bit better that I actually got discovered.
‘I didn’t go out looking for a publisher, it just came to me, which was a total surprise.’
She was halfway through her sixth year at Peterhead Academy when she was offered her book deal, and at first she kept on her part-time job at Asda while writing the first book.
‘The book deal came just at the right time,’ she says. ‘I had never fancied university and I was trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life, so it has all worked out perfectly.’
One of the surprising things about Maskame’s books is that none of them are set in Peterhead, or even in Scotland. Instead they are all set in America, in places where she has never been.
Her latest novel, The Wrong Side of Kai, is set in Westerville, a suburb of Columbus in Ohio, while much of her trilogy was set in California.
She does her research online, reading up on the places where she sets her books and working hard to ensure that every last detail (even the spellings in the book are American) is right.
‘If I wrote about Scotland, it wouldn’t be that exciting for me because I live here,’ she says.
‘This is my everyday life and I love Scotland but for me when I write I like to escape from what I’m used to and I like to learn about new things. America is so universal. Everyone in the world knows about the US and there’s something about American culture that I find really interesting.
‘All my books so far have been set there, and all my future books will be too.’
The Wrong Side of Kai is, at heart, a high school love story, but it is also a bold and relevant commentary on the troubling new trend of revenge porn, particularly in schools, and the devastating impact it can have on both teenage girls and boys.
It’s also racier than one might expect from a Young Adult book, but that, says Maskame, reflects her own growing maturity.
‘These things do go on in real life. Every high school deals with these issues and I know those sorts of things happened at my school when I was there, so I found it an interesting topic to write about.
‘My writing is getting a bit older because I’m getting older, so I wanted to deal with a topic that was slightly more mature than what I’d written before, but I also wanted it to be fun at the same time.’
She says she never writes from personal experience but as a way to ‘experience something new’, and is, for now, committed to writing Young Adult novels.
‘I don’t feel much like an adult yet,’ she admits. ‘Maybe down the line that might change but I do still see myself writing Young Adult fiction for at least the next few years.’ She does most of her writing at her publisher’s office in Edinburgh, commuting from Peterhead and staying in a hotel Monday to Friday, before returning home for the weekend.
In between intense writing stints (at home, she writes in her pyjamas) she likes to travel. Indeed, she has just returned from almost two months in the US, the first few weeks working at a summer camp, the rest travelling to places such as Los Angeles, all of it recorded, of course, on her social media. She is understandably coy about her finances but her sales, plus a lucrative book deal, suggest that her income from her novels so far is well over six figures, and with another book on the way, her coffers are set for another boost.
‘I’m very lucky to be in a position where I can still write full-time,’ she says.
‘I’ve been a full-time author since I got the book deal at 17 so I’m really lucky. A lot of writers don’t have that opportunity, and have other jobs on the side. So I’m really grateful.’
She says she wants to keep writing and is interested in exploring other formats, such as drama for television. For now, though, she’s happy to keep on living in Peterhead with mum and dad, and writing the books she loves.
‘I’m just so grateful for now that I’m able to do this, so I’m just taking it as it comes and enjoying it while I can,’ she says. ‘We’ll see what happens when the future does roll around but for now I’m really content with everything.’
With six books to her name at the age most 22-year-olds are starting their first job, and a worldwide fan base sporting tattoos in her handwriting, who can blame her?
▪ The Wrong Side of Kai, by Estelle Maskame, is published by Ink Road, £9.99