Million selling author hopes she might inspire others to take up their pens

Part of our International Women's Day feature

Mullingar’s bestselling author, Patricia Gibney, who has hit the two million book sales mark reveals that, as her 11th book is set to come out, she is under contract to write four more. “I’ll be writing into my seventies,” she joked in an interview with the Westmeath Examiner.

The Examiner caught up with Patricia as news of that incredible milestone broke last Tuesday, in the Mullingar Parish Community Centre at an event to mark International Women’s Day. She confessed that she was stunned by the news that her books had sold two million copies.

It is five years since her first book came out and since then she has had 10 more published as the Detective Lottie Parker series continues to grow in popularity.

When asked why the series was so well received, Patricia said she felt it was because Lottie was a character a lot of people could relate to.

“It is important to have a strong, flawed, main character and I think a lot of people relate to her daily struggles,” Patricia said. She added that it is important too to write a story that keeps the reader guessing to the end.

When asked what lies ahead for Lottie Parker, Patricia said that life is getting a bit easier for her heroine, but obstacles are always being thrown in her way.

Patricia has always loved crime mysteries and now loves to find new authors, especially those doing a series of books.

Addressing the gathering organised by the Women’s Community Project in Mullingar, Patricia recalled how the Irish Times dubbed her “the bestselling author no one has heard of” when her first book was published.

That book, The Missing Ones, sold 100,000 copies in the first month and 750,000 in the following five years. It has been a bestseller in the UK, US, Canada and Australia.

Patricia told the audience how her husband, Aidan, was diagnosed with cancer in February 2009 and died three months later. They had three teenage children and the hardest thing they ever had to do was to sit them down and tell them, “daddy is going to die”.

She was working with Westmeath County Council at the time. The ban preventing women from working in the public service after marriage had just been lifted before she joined, and it was mainly men who were being promoted, but Patricia was “dogged” and she progressed up the ladder.

When Aidan died, however, she found it difficult to work and after a year she “totally fell apart” and had to resign.

She spoke of the depression that grief produced and of the black days when getting out of bed was a struggle. She worked on autopilot to get the children fed and out to school or college.

During that time Patricia rekindled her creative spirit and started to write and paint. Every morning, before getting out of bed, she would fill three pages with her feelings, and it helped. Then she would draw, paint and write. From that emerged Spring Sprong Sally, an illustrated children’s book that she self-published.

Patricia praised local author, Dolores Keaveney, who has self-published 17 books, saying that self-publishing is not easy and it was the hurdle at which Patricia fell because she could not manage the business side.

Then she decided to write a crime book and developed Lottie Parker and her family, living in Ragmullin, which Patricia said is loosely based on Mullingar. “Writing The Missing Ones gave me something to focus on and took me five years to write,” she said. She started entering short story competitions and when she won one, she began to believe that maybe she could write.

She needed a publisher, but first she had to find an agent. She lit a candle and sent off her manuscript for appraisal. When it came back with 15 pages of changes, it was like being told your child is ugly, she said – although she knows now that the changes were correct and the book needed another 12 months of work.

Ger Nichol, a literary agent, loved the book and Patricia signed with her as her agent, a partnership that still thrives.

Ger sent the book to several publishers and then the rejections started coming in.

Patricia recalled being upset at first, but less so when she discovered that JK Rowling had got 100-plus rejections before she was published.

When her first book was published, she was approached to write four more. As there were no advance payments, she had nothing to lose, if the books failed, she wouldn’t have to pay back any advances.

When Patricia was writing her first book, it was difficult and she enrolled in writing classes to hone her skills, but also to network with other like-minded people.

She now finds that the writing part is easy, it is the editing that is tough. She is editing book 11 at the moment and it is due out in June.

Life and the world in which she lives are Patricia’s inspiration for her books. “I have re-invented myself since Aidan died. I focus on my other self. I set goals and if I don’t achieve them, I set new goals,” she said.

Finishing her remarks at the International Women’s Day event, Patricia quoted Walt Disney and said: “‘If you don’t have a dream, how can you make a dream come true?’,” before reading an extract from her latest book, Buried Angels.

In conclusion, she said she hoped she might inspire some of those gathered to take up their pens or their laptops and write.