Always dreamt of being an author? You don’t know where your big break will come from, as Emily Baker found out! The 16-year-old Directioner has landed herself a hot publishing deal with Penguin after her 1D fan stories were spotted online.
Penguin Senior Fiction Editor, Lindsey Heaven, was browsing the online youth writing community movellas.com when her attention was drawn to a fan fiction story written and published by Emily, a massive fan of One Direction. It was the most popular story on the whole site with over 30,000 dedicated fans asking for more.
At the same time, Penguin had been looking to commission a writer to pen a romantic young adult fiction novel that tapped into the current obsession with boy bands. Emily proved to be just the right kind of new talent to write such a novel with powerful emotion and authority and world rights were duly acquired from movellas.com.
Lindsey comments: “We at Penguin Children’s are delighted to be publishing ’Loving the Band’. Emily’s novel is fresh, romantic, current and completely taps into today’s pop culture. Her love of a certain boy band is heartfelt and her passion feeds into every bit of her writing. We were incredibly excited to discover Emily’s writing originally on the teen writers’ site movellas.com where she had amassed the most incredible fan base already. I’m sure they will be thrilled to see her published too!”
Emily comments: “I wrote my original novel on Movellas at the time that I was taking my GCSEs, so I had to balance my studies with writing. It was hard work, but it all paid off when everybody on Movellas was so supportive of what I was doing, which just urged me to continue writing chapter after chapter. That book then inspired me to write ‘Loving the Band’. I am very excited to be published by Penguin and it also helps that everyone there is so lovely!”
Emily isn’t the first writer to be discovered on the internet. E.L. James, author of the controversial 50 Shades of Grey, made her name publishing Twilight fan fiction on the web. She’s now a worldwide best-selling author.
Loving the Band, a tale of what happens when you meet the boy band of every girl’s dreams, will publish in ebook on 1 November.
