I was written off at school – now I’m a best-selling author
TV AGENT WHO BATTLED DYSLEXIA FINDS SUCCESS
A TOP celebrity agent who has worked with some of TV’s best-known soap stars has defied the odds to become a best-selling novelist.
In 2011, Stockport-born Melanie Blake was driven by tragedies into making a career change.
Melanie, 45, says it was the death of her mum Mary, aged 52, and the loss of close friend that jolted her into pursuing her dream of becoming a writer.
But she had to overcome severe dyslexia after leaving school with no qualifications and being told by teachers that she would never succeed.
Melanie said: “One teacher said ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering to submit stories at all, you’ll never write anything but the labels on the boxes for the factory you’re working in.
“I don’t have a problem with people working in factories but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
Finally, in her 30s she was diagnosed with dyslexia.
“I was working with a doctor on a TV programme and they said I had the worst form of it,” she said. “It means I have to work 10 times harder.”
In 2019, her first book Thunder Girls, about the rise and fall of a reunited eighties girlband inspired by her time in music management after working behind the scenes on Top Of The Pops, was published and it was made into a play starring Coronation Street’s Beverley Callard and Coleen Nolan.
Melanie, whose clients include Emmerdale icon Clare King, EastEnders legend Gillian Taylforth, Dynasty glamazon Stephanie Beacham, Coronation Street and EastEnders star Michelle Collins
and Patsy Kensit, thought her first novel, which is now being re-released and written as a trilogy, would become her legacy after being made into a play.
But in lockdown she went on to pen the glamorous bonkbuster thriller Ruthless Women, which became a number four Sunday Times hardback bestseller and an ebook bestseller in 2021, selling 250,000 copies and translated into eight languages.
She has followed this with Guilty Women, her second novel about the cast of the fictional soap, Falcon Bay.
Reflecting on her painful time at school while growing up in poverty, she said: “We stood in line with a token to get food in front of the ‘normal’ kids like we were in Oliver. I was told I was an idiot and was stupid and would never go anywhere in life.
“When I was 15 I got work experience at Kingbee Records in Chorlton and it was held up as an example of what not to do. But two years later I was working on Top of The Pops.
“I was working from when I was 12 years old and I had five jobs and I learned more working in shops than I did in school.”
Melanie says her novels, about the behind-the-scenes scandals on the drama Falcon Bay, shine a light on the world on TV. “It’s the closest you will come to what it’s like in real-life,” she said. “The catfights, the secret WhatsApp groups and the Mean Girls behaviour, and the men who don’t like the women they work with.”
She added: “There will be a soap MeToo. It takes just a couple of monsters to stalk the corridors and spoil the atmosphere.”