We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Susan Furlong a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Susan , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you have an agent or someone (or a team) that helps you secure opportunities and compensation for your creative work? How did you meet you, why did you decide to work with them, why do you think they decided to work with you?
I’ve been fortunate to work with a couple excellent literary agents over the course of my career. When planning to pitch my latest work, I researched agents through Publishers Marketplace, and online resource for authors, agents, and publishers. I found an agent with a strong sales record in the mystery/thriller genre, and reached out with a query. She called a few days later with an offer of representation, and after a long talk, I decided to sign with her. I’m glad I did. She’s fearless in pitching to editors, has a strong sales record, is assessable, and most importantly, she likes my work. I think that’s the key component. If my agent is passionate about my work, she’ll get it sold.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I spent my childhood listening to stories told around the dinner table. If I wasn’t listening to stories, I was reading or scribbling my own stories in a school notebook. I also loved puzzles and mysteries and spent a lot of time observing people. When I grew up, I either wanted to be a police officer or a teacher. I chose teaching. After college, I got married and spent a couple years teaching high school language arts. But then our first child came along, and I realized that what I really wanted was to be a full-time mother. I quit teaching to stay home, but still needed to supplement my income. I tried tutoring, and translating, and finally ended up content writing. For the next fifteen years, and three more kids, I worked from home writing content for businesses, online academic resources, and even travel websites, although I rarely got out of the house, let alone traveled anywhere exotic. As the kids grew older, I decided to try my hand at what I loved to write—mysteries. I started with short stories and worked my way into writing novels. My first break came in 2013 when a small press published my first two novels. In 2014, I pitched another novel to an agent. She liked my story enough to sign me, and although that manuscript never sold, she secured a work-for-hire contract for me with Penguin Random House. I wrote two books for them under a penname. That turned out to be the break I needed to get a foot in the door with publishers. Now I only write fiction and I’m grateful for the opportunity to do what I love.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
The biggest lesson I’ve had to learn as an author is how to read reviews of my work. The first negative review I received, stung. Big time. Even worse, it got into my head and interfered with my writing. Reviews are important because they give me an idea of what my readers like and expect, but over the years I’ve learned not to allow a couple of negative opinions affect me. Instead, I look for overall patterns. If several people critique the same aspect of my story, then there is probably merit in their opinion.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
As a crime fiction writer, my goal is always to give my reader a realistic, sometimes visceral, glance at the darker side of life. I create normal characters and place them at the apex of good and evil, pushing them to their limits, and watching the moral consequences of their choices play out over the arc of the story. I want my reader to relate to my protagonist, feel themselves in the story, and question how they would respond to the conflict. If I accomplish all that, then I’ve achieved my mission for the book.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.susanfurlong.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susanfurlong/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SusanFurlongAuthor/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Furlong_Sue