It is a pleasure to welcome Natalie Ramm to provide an insight into her picture book, Man in the Mountain, and the way her career and life have fed into the creation of this.

Six years ago, I took a three month sabbatical from my job in publishing to set off on a road trip across Europe with my husband. The plan was to check out of work entirely – but no sooner had we hit the end of week one, than I felt a sudden urge to write.

Perhaps it was the peacefulness of the surrounding landscape, or just the sheer desire to still be working, but each day I would sit down excitedly to write for a few hours. When our trip came to an end, I filed the stories away and thought little of them for years. This is largely because I work in publishing.

After spending seven years at Penguin Press, I now work freelance – as a copywriter and marketing consultant – for some of the best publishers in town. I love my day job, but there is nothing like it for reminding you of all the reasons never to get your hopes up of being published: there are just too many books – excellent books – being published already, most of which barely anyone has heard of.

Each year, the market seems more crowded, and the space for capturing readers’ attention increasingly small, and contested by all kinds of media. At the same time, in the children’s world at least, big brand authors continue to dominate much of the landscape.

And yet, last year, I started to think about my stories again. And in a fleetingly hopeful moment, I sent a few of them to some smaller publishers who accept submissions directly from authors. I was pretty sure it would come to nothing, so when Ragged Bears said they were interested in publishing Man in the Mountain, I knew not to get my hopes up. I didn’t think about whether the book might be a success or not, because I’d worked in publishing long enough to know that it couldn’t be. 

When you work with books (and especially in marketing), you can get fixated on sales figures, and other standard measures of success. But what if ‘success’ just meant you’d written something that people (who aren’t just your mum) actually want to read? What if success was a finished book you were proud of, kind words from respected colleagues, a spring in your step?

Over the past year, as I’ve worked alongside the amazing illustrator Gaia D’Alconzo, my friends and family have often asked ‘aren’t you excited to be having a book published?’. My response was almost always ‘well, it’ll probably sell about three copies’. They would look perplexed, and rightly so – because this is not the attitude to have if you’re writing a book, or creating anything for that matter. Feeling excited and hopeful is an important part of the creative process.

So now, upon publication, I’m allowing back those feelings of hope and excitement I felt when I first sat down to write.

And it’s a thrill.