How I Scored a Book Deal With Penguin Random House

Forgetfulness can be a wonderful thing. 

I’ve written three book proposals in my lifetime. Of these, I sent two to publishers; one boomerang-ed with a ‘thanks, but no-thanks’ note; the other, swept aside by deadlines, to-do lists, and a day job, faded from my memory as years passed. 

Two years and 14 days, to be precise. 

I say that because on the fifteenth day of the third year of my forgetfulness, I received the most amazing email. It was from the desk of the managing editor of Penguin Random House SEA, and it read: ‘We love this. Has your novel, Mami Suzuki: Private Eye, been acquired?

Somewhere in the dark recesses of my memory a neuron sizzled.

‘Yes!’ I screamed. 

Retracting my fist from the Troposphere, I then got down off my desk and tapped out a reply to the effect of, ‘I’m very pleased to say it hasn’t.’

Fast forward to March 2024, and I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that my story, about a Japanese mother named Mami Suzuki who moonlights as an amateur sleuth in the port city of Kobe, now sits on bookstore shelves from Mumbai to Melbourne, is gaining traction in the US, will soon be translated into Indonesian, and has just propelled me around India on a 25-day book tour that included four literary festivals. Adding to this dizziness is the wonderful fact that I now have a literary agent to represent me. 

Looking back, my forgetfulness was exacerbated by an industry which moves at glacial speed. And yet, the story of how I scored a book deal with one of the ‘big five’ actually goes back further.

It began six years ago in the Good Hood of Himeji city, western Japan, where I have lived for 26 years, when someone ignored my ‘No Junk Mail’ sign and pushed a leaflet into my post box. 

It was an advertisement for private investigative services, specialising in ‘cheating husband’ cases. With a week before Valentine's Day, the timing wasn’t accidental. A photo showed a professional-looking middle aged woman dressed in a dark suit—the PI. She didn’t look like a perfumed steamroller; nor like anyone who might toss back gimlets at the end of a smoky bar on Friday nights with one eye on the door. She looked … incredibly normal, like the customer seated behind you in a city cafe, or an office worker dozing blissfully opposite on a commuter train.

I filed the flyer under ‘ideas’ and returned to a collection of short fiction I had been working on. Weeks later, after finishing Raymond Chandler’s Trouble is My Business, the woman’s image resurfaced in my mind. I fished out the leaflet and pondered it over coffee. I needed one final story to finish my collection. An idea began to take shape: a tale of a single mother private detective who investigates a pearl theft in the port city of Kobe (aka Pearl City) in western Japan. 

I wrote Pearl City in under a week, not out of desperation, but because the story flowed easily and was fun. With 16 stories in hand, I approached a professional copy editor who, after reading them, said; ‘Pearl City reads like a novel.’ 

Interesting, but not useful. 

I stayed focused, contracting said copyeditor, arranging a cover designer, and setting up a 1000-book print run with a company in Hong Kong. Then I launched a Kickstarter campaign to pay for it all. The short story collection, Pearl City: Stories from Japan and Elsewhere, was a moderate success, winning a 2021 Best Indie Book Award for short stories, as well as two other international book prize nominations, attracting positive reviews, and selling half the print-run in a few months. 

It wasn’t until the dust had settled that my thoughts returned to the copy editor’s comment. I was confident Pearl City ‘the novel’ could be written, but would it attract a publisher? 

I paid a visit to the manuscript submission page of Penguin Random House SEA, then I penned a synopsis, distilling the main character and her adventures into a single paragraph, providing a breakdown of the four chapters in the style of Sherlock Holmes (each stand-alone adventure linked by the changing seasons of Japan), and declaring my audience to be primarily female and/or readers with an interest in mystery stories and Japan. 

While the beef between the buns was Pearl City (this story sets up the entire novel and introduces my protagonist, Mami Suzuki), I did not mention how the novel concluded. To be frank, I didn’t even know myself. Neither did I know of any ‘similar or competing’ titles to the one I was proposing to the Penguin, except maybe The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency which I thoroughly enjoyed reading with my weekly book circle of ten elderly Japanese women.

Nevertheless, I knew that I had the perfect pitch: a divorced female private detective with an ageing mother and daughter to care for, a day job as a hotel receptionist, and a love interest who helps her with her sleuthing adventures across Japan. It would be a story of modern Japan. Yes, a story for our times!

Fast forward two years and fifteen days, and once my jubilation at receiving an email from Penguin’s managing editor had subsided, the waiting resumed.

Several weeks passed. 

During this time, I set myself the daunting task of planning my first novel. I needed fifty-five thousand words in ten months. To lessen the risk of myself drowning in a sea of angst, I looked at the project as my father might have (he’s a retired civil engineer), viewing each story as a building block, a separate mystery—a pearl theft, a runaway sushi chef, a mysterious drowning, a pregnant shrine maiden—which would contribute to the overarching narrative. Thus, I could tackle each chapter in the same way as if writing a short story. 

The writer’s agreement from the Penguin finally arrived. It was standard boilerplate stuff, requesting sweeping rights worldwide. With no agent to advise me at that time, I might have signed off on everything, except that a little voice in my head told me to step up and push out my chest. I requested to keep French, German and Spanish language rights, as well as the dramatisation rights. It was my ‘meow’ against the lion’s roar. The Penguin was amenable.

Having self-published twice, the importance of the cover design was not lost on me. The Penguin kindly allowed me full creative control, stipulating only that I pay for it myself. This I was happy to do because I did not want to be lumped with a terrible design that would not scream ‘pick me!’ off the new releases table. The cover, rendered by an award-winning Hungarian artist, screams pitch-perfect.

Ten months flashed by.

I wrote whenever I could, planning meticulously before each session to ensure minimal time wastage. I never moved on with a story until I had read, and polished, the previous day’s pages. In this way, continuity was maintained and the story flowed smoothly. 

Reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes helped me with structuring my mysteries. All four cases which Mami Suzuki undertakes use a pattern which allows me to build in the essential elements of the mystery (set-up, rising tension, climax, and denouement) and help the reader to easily follow them. Suzuki’s mysteries aren’t complicated; in fact, intuition and luck play a large part in her successes. But she triumphs because she understands the vagaries of human nature, and if she doesn’t, she learns how to deal with them. There are tough moments, but she rolls with the punches and very rarely gets ruffled or stressed.

It was a great relief to hand over the manuscript. As per the contract, 55,000 words, delivered one week ahead of deadline. It is also a strange feeling to finish such a big project. It’s an empty feeling. But time waits for no scribe and I have already begun work on the next instalment of Mami Suzuki adventures.

If I were to give advice to writers on pitching to a publisher, I would say follow the instructions carefully, keep it simple, and make it compelling. I would also encourage them to be forgetful.

Two years and fifteen days is a long time.