Thank you for taking the time to visit my website. It’s a bit of a dream to be able to call myself a writer and I sometimes think it might make me sound a bit pretentious, so I hesitate before I say it – or mention my editing and publishing work first. However, I have nine published novels, three of which have been Amazon bestsellers, so here goes:
My name is Katharine E. Smith and I’m a writer.
I was born in Leeds and have lived in quite a few different places in the UK over the years. I now live in Shropshire with my husband and two children. I hope we can add a dog to the household soon.
When I graduated from Hull University, having studied Philosophy it’s possible I had learned to think a bit too hard about things. I knew I wanted to either work in publishing or the charity sector, or with animals. But which way to go? As it happened, my first job after graduating was in Bristol, processing over-50s building society applications! I hopped from temp job to temp job, never satisfied, and went on to work in the IT sector, and the charity sector, before training as a proofreader, with half an eye on developing my career in that area. In the meantime, I made a few attempts at writing a novel but it was not until 2008 that I really put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and got stuck in. When I discovered I was pregnant, I had a ready-made deadline, and I worked steadily towards completing Writing the Town Read (click on this link for a free ebook) before my daughter was due, in July 2009. It was some time later, after some positive but ultimately going-nowhere feedback from agents, and having worked extensively with somebody else who was self-publishing, that I realised this was the route I wanted to take. I can honestly say it has been incredibly hard work but I would not want to do it any other way. It helps that I run Heddon Publishing, working with many other independent authors, but I’d recommend this route to any aspiring writer. There’s snobbery out there – “Oh, you’re just self-published” – but I think this happens less and less, as people realise the very high standards of writing and book production being achieved by independent authors and publishers.
Anyway, I’ll come back down from that high horse! I love writing; absolutely love it. I love people and places, and human interest stories. My favourite contemporary writers include Kate Atkinson, Helen Dunmore, and David Nicholls. I aspire to write as well as them. I also love hearing from readers, particularly when they have positive things to say 🙂
My nine novels are, in order Writing the Town Read, Looking Past, Amongst Friends, and the bestselling Coming Back to Cornwall series: A Second Chance Summer, After the Sun, As Boundless as the Sea, Sticks and Stones, Lighting the Sky and Something About the Stars. I am now working on a seventh book in the series, and have also started something completely new.
Writing provides me with a way to escape the world for a while and I don’t tend to plan things too much. I usually know roughly which way I want a story to go then I will sit and begin to write, and see what happens.
