Teen author Beth Reeks on her major book deal
Andy Davies
Home Affairs Correspondent
Schoolgirl Beth Reeks was fed up of trying to find a teenage novel that didn’t include vampires or werewolves, so she wrote one. One of the UK’s biggest publishers releases her first book on Monday.
In Newport’s Bassaleg Comprehensive, teacher Paula Colebrook turns to one of her pupils: “Beth, can you tell me what the quark structure of the Pi+ particle is?” Beth Reeks, 17, the only girl in her group, answers hesitantly: “Up-antidown?”. She’s spot on.
Meanwhile, 140 miles away at the London Book Fair, this modest schoolgirl’s debut novel The Kissing Booth is being paraded alongside posters of the latest titles by Frederick Forsyth, Robert Harris and Helen Fielding.
She’s just been featured on NBC in the United States, feted as ‘shaping up to be the next big thing in literature’ . The film rights have just been sold and the UK paperback launch is imminent.
It is a striking juxtaposition with A Level Particle Physics. A few days later Beth (@Reekles) posts a tweet: “My book is out tomorrow…Aaaaaaaah! Somebody pinch me”. It sums it all up rather neatly.
‘Vampires and werewolves’
At the bottom of the front cover of The Kissing Booth it reads ‘One Kiss…so much trouble’. This is a teen romance novel, set in the US, whose main protagonist is “pretty, popular, but never been kissed Elle Evans” who falls for her best friend’s brother.
It was written, says Beth, out of a frustration at a market which she considered to be saturated with the fantasy themes of “vampires and werewolves”. She decided to try to write a novel which she wanted to read. She had no idea it would end like this.
The story of Beth Reeks (who writes under her school nickname of ‘Reekles’) offers a fascinating insight into the way in which the publishing industry is changing.
She has become something of a poster girl in the increasingly influential world of self-publishing, epitomising the allure for publishing giants like Random House of an author who emerges from the online world with a huge fan base.
It’s indicative of “a sea-change in attitudes” within the industry towards self-publishing, comments the Bookseller magazine’s editor Philip Jones.
Beth began writing the story during GCSEs. Her breakthrough came when she decided to post chapters of the novel on an online writing forum called Wattpad.
She posted late at night, aware that her instalments were beginning to attract interest from readers in the United States. Before long she had more than 40,000 followers on Wattpad, picked up the website’s Most Popular Teen Fiction award, and generated 19 million ‘reads’ from her postings.
It wasn’t long before Random House spotted the teenager they now like to refer to as ‘a media sensation’. In November they offered Beth a three-book deal. She signed and The Kissing Booth was soon released as an E-book.
Rights for the paperback version, due out this week in the UK, have now been sold in the US, Greece, Spain, Turkey and Hungary. In the world of publishing, the iPad generation is deftly rewriting the script.