John Purcell - Author
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2012 - present

In 2012 I finally secured myself an agent who saw the potential in A Gentleman of Sorts. She shopped it around to a few publishers. While waiting to hear back, she asked me if I had anything else - an old manuscript lurking about in a drawer, perhaps? I did. I told her I had this great mess of an erotic novel about a woman named Emma. She took it and read it. Her conclusion, it was great, however, no one would ever publish such filthy writing. A week later a little known book called Fifty Shades of Grey was on the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald. It had been bought for a million. My agent rushed off to the publishers with my novel about Emma. A couple of weeks later I was signing a contract with Random House Australia under a woman's name, Natasha Walker. A month or so after that, The Secret Lives of Emma: Beginnings was in the shops. It rocketed into the top ten fiction charts. That was July, 2012. Random House wanted to publish a sequel in September. The Secret Lives of Emma: Distractions was in store in September, 2012. 

With the success of book one and two, Random House now approached me for book three. I didn't have a book three. Book one and two had been rewritten from the very large manuscript I had written all those years ago. I'd used it all up. This was November. They said, can we have book three delivered by January? Hmmm... I had the summer holidays... Sure thing, I answered. Trouble was, that summer my partner's parents were coming out from the UK. They were staying with us the whole summer. And her father has a habit of walking around in budgie smugglers. Not very conducive to erotic writing. Oh, and also, my partner and I decided to get married that summer, too. Why not!?

We got married, my now father-in-law got his tan and The Secret Lives of Emma: Unmasked was handed in on time and was published in April 2013. I don't know how I did it. It's a bit of a blur. And book three is by far the best of the trilogy. 

Now to publish A Gentleman of Sorts...


Read a sample of The Secret Lives of Emma: Beginnings here

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