Dishing the Dirt with best-selling author, Matt Dunn.

From Simon and Schuster to indie. 

Romantic comedy novelist, Matt Dunn, has chosen the indie route with his latest book, A Day at the Office. Read his amazing interview here . . .

You’re a man in a woman’s genre, top of the pile too, how does that make you feel?

Thanks, though I’m not even sure I’d be top of the slush pile! To be honest, I don’t think about it. I just try to write entertaining stories about real people, and hope they appeal to both men and women. If there’s one thing ‘unique’ about someone like me writing in this genre, perhaps it’s simply that I can give the male point of view. Though I do write as a woman (or two) as well in A Day At The Office, so maybe that’s all changed!

At last count, you have seven published books, have you stayed with the same publisher with those seven?

No. Simon and Schuster published my first six novels, but I published A Day At The Office myself.

Out NOW!
Amazon.UK
Amazon.com

You’re an accomplished writer of many novels, but how long did it take you to get where you are today?

I'd known I wanted to write since I wrote/read out a piece at school assembly when I was fourteen – I’d put a few jokes in and they actually got a laugh, and I was hooked - but didn’t know what to do about it until I read High Fidelity in the late nineties, and realised there might be a readership for the kind of thing I wanted to write. A couple of years later I ‘decided’ to take a sabbatical (when my headhunting business collapsed thanks to 9/11) to write up the idea I'd been toying with, and actually finished the first draft pretty quickly. It took a while to get it published (see below) but to be honest, I wasn’t in any rush – rather than spend my evenings typing in a draughty garret, a friend of mine had loaned me his villa in the south of Spain, which was nice. From typing the first word to actually seeing the book on the shelves probably took around five years. Though playing a lot of tennis didn’t help speed the process up.

How did you find your agent? Was it in a long line of writing submissions and receiving the rejections before being signed, or were you one of the lucky ones and found the process easy?

I took the traditional route of sending my ms off to agents and publishers, and had the usual load of rejections (31, I think), so no, it wasn’t easy, especially when the ones who did deign to reply with anything more than a ‘no’ would often give me conflicting advice (‘loved the plot, characters need work’, followed by the next one saying ‘love the characterisation, but the plot needs developing’) but every third or fourth one would give me a little tip, or suggest how I could make the manuscript better, which I tried to take on board – the best being ‘read the bestsellers in your genre, and see how they achieve their page-turning quality’. Eventually, after a LOT of rewriting, and after being a bit smarter in the way I approached them (making personal contact by directly emailing ones I knew who represented similar writers, making my approach email more ‘salesy’), an agent took me on.