There’s something Kerry Wilkinson isn’t telling us. But I’m not sure he knows what it is.
Four months ago, the most remarkable thing about Wilkinson was that, at the age of 30, he was a part-time magistrate, handing out fines to local miscreants. A sports journalist for the BBC website,
living in Preston, he looked to be heading nowhere in particular and likely to continue in this direction for some time to come.
Today, he is the UK’s most successful self-published novelist, with sales of more than 50,000. Locked In, the first in a series of crime novels featuring feisty DS Jessica Daniel,
went up on Kindle on July 10, having previously been posted on iTunes. On August 9, Kindle Author, a literary blog distributed on Amazon, interviewed him at length. The same day, the Daily Express,
for which he once worked, dubbed him “the hottest new author in Britain”.
Twenty-four hours later, in “one of the strangest days of my life,” Wilkinson was installed by Amazon UK as its No.1 Mover and Shaker. Despite the fact that his novel had attracted only
four reviews, it had risen to number 78 in the Kindle bestseller list.
With his rankings improving by the day, the previously unknown author was then interviewed by his local newspaper, the Lancashire Evening Post. Wilkinson was jubilant. He was outselling Stephenie
Meyer and Stephen Fry on iTunes, he said. “I don’t really know how it’s happened. It must be word of mouth.”
The interview, spread across two pages, was written up as a news story by The National, an English language daily in Abu Dhabi, and syndicated “to all kinds of places,” renewing
interest in one of the odder literary tales of the year.
By September 3, Wilkinson, a self-confessed online obsessive who understands every arcane trick of the trade, had broken into Kindle’s Top 100 Crime, Thrillers and Mysteries
section. The following day, iTunes featured both Locked In and the follow-up, Vigilante, on the front page of its New and Notable review section, boosting sales still further.
Mid-September saw his debut hit Kindle’s Top 50. A week later, it had climbed to number 18, then number 7 and, finally, on October 29, number 1.
Astonishingly, the previously untested author turned out to have an almost Georges Simenon-like literary fecundity. He wrote the first draft of Locked In in three weeks. Immediately after,
he started on Vigilante, then on Woman in Black, the third in the series, with a fourth, Think of the Children, already forming in his mind. Though he works on outlines
for his novels during time off from his day-job, his drafts come and go in a blur.
Wilkinson, a media studies graduate, says he doesn’t know how things developed so fast. “I’ve just started plotting book five, actually. I don’t know about burnout. I’ll just write
until I get bored or can’t think of any further ideas. I don’t really think long-term because I have a full-time career working as a journalist, and I don’t know about mentally exhausted. I like
being busy.
“My dad built fork-lift trucks for a living. My brother gets up at 4am to work in a bakery. My sister works for the Metropolitan Police. She was on duty every day during the London riots.
These are properly exhausting jobs. Sitting on a sofa and writing isn’t really a proper job when you compare it to what some people do.”
Fresh-faced, with a haircut straight out of Brideshead Revisited, the neutrino-powered Wilkinson is married to Louise, an industrial chemist, but has no time at present for children.
Instead, alongside his work for the BBC, he will devote himself full-time to his unique literary production line.
He has yet, he says, to come to terms with being a successful author. “The best thing is that I’ve had some amazing emails. I had one this afternoon from a woman who said she had breast
cancer and isn’t doing too well. She said that, instead of dreading the evenings, she was looking forward to them because she wanted to read the next part of my book. How do you respond to that?
It’s just beyond my comprehension.”
Walter Ellis’s novel London Eye is available from the Kindle Store on Amazon or via his
website. You can follow him on Twitter: @Waltroon
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