ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ARE THEORETICALLY for thanking the people who helped you to write the book in which they are published. So in that case I mainly need to thank me, myself, and I! I do write without input or advice for the majority of the year, just me and my (three) typing fingers and my weird imaginary world. I get to the end and put in place the final full stop without anyone’s assistance. I don’t do research, even when I should, because it puts me off my stride (so apologies for all the bloopers), and I don’t like editorial input when I’m still working it out for myself.
But from the moment that final full stop is typed, all these magical people appear over the brow of the hill and silently walk into the imaginary world you’ve created to fix it for you and make it look pretty, to design covers for it, and to talk to people in bookshops and ask them to sell it, and to take it to foreign publishers and ask them to publish it, to make it look appealing on bookshelves so that people will notice it and buy it and read it, and to write nice things about it to encourage other people to read it. They bring you to bookshops and libraries to talk to readers about it, and they urge friends to read it, and they write to you to say nice things about how the book made them feel.
So of course it’s not all down to me. If it were all down to me this would be a rather rough-around-the-edges, vaguely nonsensical document on my laptop full of errors and typos and you would not have it in your hands right now.
So thank you to everyone, from the ground up. To Selina, my UK editor; Lindsay, my US editor; and Jonny and Deborah, my agents, for the early-doors editing notes. To Richenda Todd for skillfully copyediting it; Luke, Anna, and the film and TV team at Curtis Brown for putting it in front of people who make films and TV; and Jody and the foreign-rights team for getting it out across the globe. To the sales teams across the world for making sure it gets into the shops, to Sarah and her marketing team and Laura and her publicity team in the UK and to Ariele and Meriah in the US for making sure everyone knows about it. To booksellers, librarians, readers, and reviewers.
Thank you.
A note on the character name “Angela Currie”
A wide selection of the UK’s most well-known authors have supported the Get in Character campaign from CLIC Sargent, the UK’s leading cancer charity for children and young people, since the campaign started to run in 2014. To date more than £40,000 has been raised.
I have been very happy to support this campaign over the years, and one of this year’s winners is featured in this book as the character Angela Currie.
The campaign will launch again on eBay in March 2021. Further details will be available at www.clicsargent.org.uk in the build-up to the auction.