Every week for about 15 years I continued to run the small ad in The Bookseller simply announcing ‘Ghostwriter for Hire’ and giving my phone number. Sometimes months would pass with no responses and then a call would come which would set me off on a new adventure.
Towards the end of the eighties I received a cryptic call from a woman in Birmingham, who told me she had a friend who’d had a book written about her by a journalist, but who now wanted to tell the story from her own perspective. She wouldn’t say any more, apart from the fact that she had been given my name by a librarian when she enquired how she should go about finding a ghost. The librarian had consulted a copy of The Bookseller that she happened to have under the counter.
Money was tight at the time and I had to decide whether such a vague lead was worth a train ticket all the way to Birmingham. Some instinct told me it would be, and anyway my curiosity had now been piqued. I wanted to find out what this story was.
In a small, crowded house I met Zana Muhsen, who told me how she and her sister, Nadia, had been sold by their father as child brides in the Yemen. It had taken their mother five years to find them and another couple of years to get Zana out. Nadia and their children were still trapped down there and Zana wanted to write a book that would draw attention to their plight and help them to escape.
It seemed like a great story, almost a classic fairy tale. Two innocent young girls imprisoned in a frightening, alien, exotic culture and then the tense story of Zana’s escape. I wrote a synopsis and sent it round to a few agents. John Pawsey, an agent then working on the South Coast, thought it looked like a ‘nice little package’, and agreed to send it out to the London publishers.
Everyone turned it down except for one, who offered us a few thousand pounds, which we accepted gratefully. Sold was duly published as a rather cheaply printed paperback and sank with barely a trace. So far, so predictable. Chalk it up to experience and be grateful for an interesting experience, a few thousand pounds and a book with my name on the cover as the co-writer.
A few months later John Pawsey rang to say that a German publisher was interested in the story and would like to meet us. This time Zana came down to London and we met in the gentlemanly environs of John’s club. The German was charming and offered us an advance five times the size of the British one. A few days later John rang again, could we come to a meeting with a French publisher, then a Dutch one, and so it rolled on. Over the next few years the book came out in about nine different languages. It went to the top of the bestseller charts in all the countries it came out in. It became France’s bestselling book of the year and Zana was feted in Paris as a cause célèbre.
John was able to go back to the British publishers and remind them that they owned this property and had possibly not exploited its full potential. Amazingly, they agreed and reissued it as a handsome hardback.
Just over 20 years since that first telephone call we have sold more than 5 million copies of the book around the world and I still get emails most days from readers telling me that they have just discovered it or that it is their favourite book ever, and asking what happened to Zana and Nadia after the end of the book. I am able to tell them that Nadia and the children are now free to travel to England.
It just goes to show, fairy tales can happen, even in the world of publishing.