Catherine Ryan Howard on self publishing and finding her genre

Offering insight into various creative processes and advice towards aspiring and emerging writers, here’s a quick-fire interview with the author of several bestselling crime novels, Catherine Ryan Howard.

Catherine Ryan Howard is an award-winning, internationally bestselling crime writer from Cork, Ireland. Her debut novel Distress Signals came out in 2016 and was an Irish Times and USA Today bestseller. Her subsequent novels, The Liar’s Girl, Rewind, The Nothing Man, 56 Days, Run Time and The Trap have received huge commercial success, being shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel. She has had two No. 1 Irish bestsellers, her novels have been translated into 19 other languages and a number have been optioned for screen. Her latest thriller is The Trap, which debuted at no. 2 in the Irish bestseller charts after only 3 days on sale and the following week took the no. 1 spot. It is currently shortlisted for Irish Crime Novel of the Year and Catherine is also nominated for Author of the Year in the An Post Irish Book Awards 2023.

Sinéad: Can you tell us a bit about how you got into writing?

Catherine: I always wanted to be a writer, ever since I figured out that that’s who was making books appear. I work with a picture on my desk of me aged about seven and a half, taken on Christmas morning 1989, tapping away at the Petit typewriter Santa has just delivered. At school I was always the girl starting her English essay before she even went home (but never really bothering with any other homework). I wrote my first novel, an absolutely terrible YA one about studying for the Leaving Cert, instead of studying for my own Leaving Cert, and throughout my teens and 20s was absolutely obsessed with getting published – but after The Awful YA One, I never actually did much writing. I went off and had a few adventures instead, including working in Walt Disney World, Florida, and when I got back I self-published a memoir about my time in Orlando. That kept me in the coffee and ink cartridges I needed to write a novel – because I’d finally had an idea for one. That was the book that became my debut, Distress Signals. I finished it just a few days before I started at Trinity College as a mature student – a great deadline. Six weeks later I got an agent and six months later, she got me my first book deal.

Sinéad: I understand you used to work in a publishing house! Did this help you understand your own career as a writer?

Catherine: That’s overstating it a bit. With self-publishing, I happened to be very much right place, right time. Amazon had just started automatically converting Word documents into MOBI files (so you didn’t need any technical prowess to publish an e-book) and CreateSpace enabled anyone to sell a print-on-demand paperback online. There was a bit of a self-publishing gold rush going on. I used social media to sell my books and a whole new online world of readers was opening up with book blogging, Goodreads, Twitter, etc. I had had a few meetings with an editor at Penguin Random House Ireland and, at one of them, I was offered a project: applying the same social media strategies that I used on my books to one of their titles. That book ended up going to no. 1 in the iTunes e-book chart, although I have my doubts that was anything to do with me. That turned into a job as a freelancer that lasted for a few years – I only stopped it after I got a book deal. I’d always been interesting in publishing so it was fascinating to get closer to it.

Sinéad: Did you dabble around in genre before finding your voice in thriller and crime?

Catherine: I did go through a phase of trying to write what we might call women’s commercial fiction – I know some people hate that term but I like that we have something just for us, about us and by us – but that was so misguided. I was only doing it because I thought that’s what publishers wanted. I had no real love for the genre. Crime fiction was what I loved the most and always had, but I had strange notions that I wasn’t able to write it or I was too young to write it or you could only write it if you knew someone in the FBI (?!). But then I got an idea for a serial killer on a cruise ship and, when I sat down to write that novel, there was practically an audible click. It’s what I should’ve been doing all along: writing the book I wanted to read.

Sinéad: I saw you recently did a DIY writer’s retreat! Can you talk a little bit about this structure and the importance of setting aside time for your writing?

Catherine: Inspired by what author Danya Kukafa (Notes on an Execution) calls ‘Full Fridays’, where she writes for 3 hours in the morning, 3 hours after lunch and 3 hours after dinner, I cleared my schedule and tried to do that at home 5 days in a row. Spoiler alert: I didn’t. I think I managed 2 x 3 hour blocks each day but still, it was something. When you write full-time it’s very difficult to actually find the time to write, which I know sounds mental but there’s so much else involved with publishing books, especially when you do one a year. I think what I’ll take away from that week is that it’s relatively easy to commit to 3 hours writing time so even if I just do that every weekday going forward, I’d finally have something resembling a routine.

Sinéad: What does your writing process look like, on average?

Catherine: I have an idea, I let it stew for a while, I map out the main plot beats, I waste nearly all the time I have available to me to write it, I write a raw first draft – a vomit draft, really – in a panic, I show it to my editors, I rewrite it and submit it to my editors again, I rewrite it and submit it to my editors again, I swear I’m not going to work like this any more, that I’m going to be responsible and professional and work at a slow but steady pace with no panic involved, and then I have an idea, I let it stew for a while, I map out… Repeat as required.

Sinéad: Your books are so neatly mapped and plotted. How do you go about the early stages of planning a piece?

Catherine: I always know the beginning and have a fairly good idea of the end, and then I try to come up with a midpoint that will halve the book in two. If you have those three plot points, that’s usually enough to start. Then, as I write, I keep an Excel spreadsheet colour-coded to within an inch of its life, on which I track chapters, scenes, acts, word counts, etc. The nicer the spreadsheet looks, the worse the writing is going.

Sinéad: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

Catherine: Don’t waste one second of your life thinking about or reading about or talking about getting an agent, the publishing industry, etc. until you have finished your book and made it the best book you possibly can without outside help. Nothing else matters until then so everything else is a waste of time before then.