Kath Morgan meets author Angie Sage to find out how she wrote a number-one bestseller and landed a seven book publishing deal for her Septimus Heap series.

When we met up, the third book in Angie Sage's Septimus Heap series had just hit the shelves and she was already busy typing her way to the end of book four: "My publishers have commissioned me to do seven altogether," she says with a grin. "I’m writing one a year up to book 5, then I’ll have two years each to do books 6 and 7.” Not a bad position for any author to be in.

The Septimus Heap books are novel-sized fantasies set in a land reminiscent of the Cornish landscape around the home Angie shares with husband Rhodri, also a writer. They are fast-paced, exciting tales of adventure in a fictional world which has enough similarities to our own to resonate, and enough differences to intrigue and entertain.

Magyk, Angie’s first book in the series, went to number one on the bestseller lists in London and New York. “It was such a buzz, getting that phone call from my publisher,” she says. Flyte, the follow-up book, reached number four in New York, despite selling more copies than Magyk. Her other long running series, Araminta Spook, reached the top ten of the children’s bestsellers, and she has won the Salford Book Award.

From illustrator to writer

Angie grew up in the Thames Valley. On leaving school she trained as a radiographer until, yearning to create more exciting pictures, she enrolled in an art school in Leicester. On graduating she decided she wanted to illustrate books.

“I got an agent and I did quite well,” she says. “I was a jobbing illustrator: I worked on Ladybird books and toddler books, but it was just a job of work and I have always wanted to write. So I wrote my first book and pretty well sent it in as a dummy book. After six months they said they were still looking at it. Six months later they told me, yes, it’s still here. I imagined it in a dusty corner, lonely and ignored, so with a heavy heart I phoned them up and asked them to send it back to me. The next day I got a call from the editor, who told me, ‘I was just walking down the corridor to put your book in the post when I realised that I don’t want to send it back to you.’ And that was that. They took it, and I got my breakthrough because on the strength of that I got a literary agent.”

Life-work balance

For a long time, life was a balance of raising her two daughters, illustrating, and writing the early-reader books. But Angie always felt that wasn’t quite the thing she really wanted to write, and then the illustration work began to tail off. “I was actually without work for six weeks,” she says, “and I thought, well, I can’t go on any longer than three months but I’m going to use this time to really get into the atmosphere of something. I really thought that at the end of it I would have to go back to being a radiographer. I was actually making enquiries about refresher courses,” she says with a small shudder. “I was determined though. I had this scene that was haunting me, where someone finds a baby in the snow, so that’s where it started. At the end of three months I had the first eight chapters, and on the basis of those my agent got me a publisher.”

Angie is in no doubt that the Septimus Heap series represents her best work to date and is confident about the seven book deal. “At the beginning I wasn’t sure it would support that many, but the characters just kept arriving and I just love the characters. When people ask me about them, I talk about them as though they’re real because they feel real. I think it’s the characters that sustain the series.”

She suddenly throws back her head and laughs. “I mean, yesterday, I had this character and he got fired from his job and I thought, ‘Oh my God, you can’t do that.’ I was planning just a bit of a contretemps and suddenly it escalated and I was completely shocked, as he was, and that’s when it’s great.” She grimaces. “Today, though, I’m having to pick up the pieces which is quite tough because, as you can imagine, today he’s feeling wretched.”