Revived and renamed ... Debut novels are anything but these days

The publishing world loves a debut author. But is too much emphasis put on the ‘next big thing’ at the expense of building careers? And are Bame writers missing out? David Barnett reports

Publishers are always looking for the hot new thing (iStock)

In 2018, Rebecca Fleet published her first novel, a gothically tinged psychological thriller called The House Swap. It received rave reviews and was the subject of a healthy marketing push by her publishers, Transworld, an imprint of Penguin. On its website, Penguin says that Fleet lives and works in London and that The House Swap is her debut thriller, with another, The Second Wife, to follow in August this year.

When news of Fleet’s two-book deal was announced in The Bookseller in 2017, Frankie Gray, Transworld’s commercial fiction publishing director, talked of the publishing house’s excitement to “launch a standout new voice with all the focus and dedication she deserves”. In an interview Fleet did with crime fiction website Dead Good Books, The House Swap was hailed as “an exciting new thriller by [a] debut author”. American trade magazine Publishers Weekly noted that “British author Fleet makes her US debut with a consummately plotted” first book.

The key word here, of course, is “debut”, flagged up in most of the marketing and reviews. Except, it wasn’t the author’s first book at all. Her debut novel was The Art of Losing, published in 2009 under her real name Rebecca Connell. She tells me “it got pretty much no attention”, which might have been true from a sales point of view. However, it was widely and warmly reviewed, with the Guardian calling it “a heartfelt examination of betrayal and guilt”, the Financial Times saying it was a “confident debut”.

A second novel, Told In Silence, followed in 2010 (“which got even less attention”) before Rebecca —now married with the surname Cormack — decided to switch genres to the hugely popular domestic noir market of female-led thrillers. She says: “My agent was very firm that we sent my last book out under a new name and pitched it as a :debut psychological thriller”. Editors knew I had been published before but no more detail than that.”