Crowdfunded tale of the sea earns writer Costa prize win after wave of publicity
Award came after years of ‘abject poverty’ for author who used public-funded campaign to advertise book
AT THE beginning of the week, Monique Roffey’s rent cheque bounced. Today she is celebrating after her crowdfunded novel won the £30,000 Costa Book of the Year.
Roffey’s book, The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story, was hailed by the judges as “an extraordinary, beautifully written, captivating, visceral” work.
The story, based on an ancient legend from the indigenous Caribbean Taino people, is Roffey’s sixth novel and published by the tiny Peepal Tree Press.
Fearing it would be lost amid a sea of high-profile releases from major publishing houses, she launched a crowdfunder to finance a publicity campaign.
With donations from readers and fellow authors she raised £4,500, which enabled her to hire a publicist to get the book mentioned in print and on radio. “Without the oxygen of publicity, I fear my mermaid might well disappear back into the sea. So I’m asking for your help to get her read and seen, and her story known,” Roffey said in her appeal.
In return for their contributions, donors were offered rewards, which ranged from an acknowledgement in the book and a signed first edition to a home-cooked Caribbean lunch and a novel-writing tutorial.
Roffey, a Trinidadian-born senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University’s writing school, said she
‘There have been boom times and there’s been abject poverty. My rent has just bounced for this month’
was “flabbergasted” by her Costa win.
She was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2010 with The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, and was previously published by Simon & Schuster.
But the writer’s life is financially precarious for all but a select few. Roffey’s advance for The Mermaid of Black
Conch was a modest £2,000. She said: “There have been boom times – when I was shortlisted for the Orange Prize – and there’s been abject poverty. My rent has just bounced for this month.
“When I was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, Orange was my phone provider, and I couldn’t pay my phone bill. I rang them up and said, ‘But you can’t cut me off, I’ve just been shortlisted for the Orange Prize!’ They said, ‘Thank you, Madam, we’ll make a note of that,’ and then put the phone down and cut me off. It’s wonderful to have these big prizes but the reality of working writers’ lives is that I have three or four other jobs.”
Explaining how she took the publicity campaign into her own hands by launching the crowdfunder, Roffey, 55, said: “All independent presses have limited capacity. I just decided I wanted to arm this book as best as possible.
“I knew it was very unorthodox. I did ask all sorts of well-known writers what they thought, and some were like, ‘No, don’t do it,’ and several said, ‘Yes, go ahead.’ I really recommend other writers do it who are in my position and want their book to be widely seen and read.”
The novel has sold around 10,000 copies so far, most of them after it won Costa’s Novel of the Year category during an earlier stage of the award.
“We can’t estimate how many more we might have sold if the bookshops were open. Bookshops maybe aren’t going to be open until April or May, and that’s a long way away – there are books we will never sell, any of us,” Roffey said.
As someone with a rare autoimmune disease and asthma, Roffey was shielding for three months of last year. Today she will receive her first vaccination.
“I’m on the clinically extremely vulnerable list, and to be honest it’s a tossup between what’s more exciting: getting vaccinated or winning this prize,” she said.