"If you don’t feel upbeat and confident about your writing, how can you expect anyone else to champion it?"
The "King of Modern RomCom" lets us in behind the scenes of how he crafted his own Second Chapter.
In June, I attended the First Date Romance Festival put on by Lighthouse Bookshop. Besides learning how to write erotic fiction (!), I attended a panel talk called The RomCom: On Love and Laughter that featured Justin Myers, Ada Barumé and Bethany Rutter. And did we laugh and love on that panel!
When Justin spoke about his new book, Leading Man, I was really captured by not only his witty humour, but also how he was at once humble and genuinely proud of his book. An approach he has a bit more to say below.
His interview is honest and vulnerable with a touch of humour - much like his writing. I loved reading about how he got into the industry, the preconceptions that almost held him back, and his self-belief attitude. Hope you enjoy and take something away for your own writing.
Let’s start in the past. Tell us about your pre-author career journey.
This may sound incredibly affected, but writing has always been an urge. I simply have to write. I filled thick wedges of A4 lined paper as a kid, I wrote in old telephone directories, even on the endpapers of my story books. Scripts, soap operas, fake celebrity news stories – I built an entire universe.
I wanted to be an actor or a journalist, but I came from a working-class background in the north of England, the careers’ advice at school was very poor to nonexistent, and I had no connections in the media at all. I assumed a career in the arts was out of my reach.
When I was about 24, doing a post-grad admin job, I saw an ad for an online magazine, looking for young, fresh columnists to write, unpaid, about their lives. I dashed off a couple of examples, sent them in, and got the job. Inspired by the favourable response from readers, I moved to London, with only a month’s rent and a few weeks’ work experience at a pop magazine, and things slowly started to happen. After a couple more years in admin, I got a job writing at a Digital agency, then working in TV, and finally going freelance and mixing corporate work with consumer writing.
So I kind of snuck in the back way. Story of my life, really.
Juggling anything with a day job is hard work, especially something as in-depth as writing a book. Can you set the scene for what your life looked like when you started writing?
I had a corporate client a few days a week and would supplement that with my own journalism, or editing. I don’t really know how I did it – I was very disciplined. I think as a freelancer you have to be anyway. I forced myself to sit at my desk in the evenings and get the words down, and I would work all weekend, usually in cafés or coffee shops so I’d feel more connected to the world in general. I don’t remember it being particularly arduous, although I’m sure I felt different at the time.
What inspired you to keep going?
I had a deadline and I worked steadily toward it – I find an end date hugely helpful and motivating. My worst nightmare is being told, ‘Oh just send it in whenever, no rush.’ I need the rush!
Did your first career help in your writing at all?
Writing a book is very different from writing a feature or an opinion column. It can be more freeing, certainly, but there was so much about the process that mystified me. Nobody teaches you how to do it and other writers’ advice, although well-meaning, can often be contradictory to your own instincts. If anything, my day job made it tougher. I’d do a full day of writing and editing and then have even more to do in my spare time; I don’t know where I found the energy.
A huge element of writing and the path to publishing comes from a cultivated community. What is your writing community like?
I would say, unfortunately, I don’t really belong to a specific community of writers. I wish I did; it can be hugely lonely sometimes. I suppose I found my community – as in people who enjoyed and encouraged my writing – on social media, Twitter in particular.
I was writing my blog The Guyliner and cultivating a persona – I wrote anonymously for seven years – and a following to go with it. Substack is a community in the virtual sense, of course, but real-life interactions tend to be more creatively inspiring for me. I have a few author friends who I get together with at launches and events and we are all massively supportive of one another, but nobody I see regularly to talk about writing with. Shame, really, but I suppose I’m used to it by now.
Leading Man is published by Little, Brown Book Group, as is The Last Romeo, The Magnificent Sons, and The Fake-Up. Could you tell us a bit about how you got published?
I did everything backwards and upside down, basically. I had been writing my blog, anonymously, for a few years and gained a decent following. I’d had an approach from an agent before, but it came to nothing and we parted ways. An editor from Little, Brown called Dom got in touch to say he was a fan of The Guyliner and had I ever thought about writing a novel – he was looking for the next big gay book, something commercial and fun, and he thought I could be it. I mean, what an email to receive. I was in shock.
Obviously, I had thought of writing a novel, and even started a couple and abandoned them after only a chapter or two. Why hadn’t I? I didn't know how. I didn't think it would be a career available to me. I would never in a million years have had the balls to write a manuscript, or even a synopsis, and punt it out on spec to agents and publishers. A lack of confidence and knowledge, born of a dearth of connections and a less than privileged background, holds so many people back, I think, and it infuriates me.
Anyway, after liking my very rough idea, Dom asked me to write a first chapter and a scene from later in the story, which I did – after panicking solidly for a couple of months and ignoring his gentle nudges over email – and he took those to an acquisitions meeting, landing me my first two-book deal. I know it doesn’t usually happen like that; I can still barely believe it. I signed the deal without an agent (maybe not the best idea) but was approached by my agent Becky a few months before the book came out and we hit it off straight away.
Leading Man is the last book of my second two-book deal with Little, Brown, and for 2025 I am moving to a new publisher, so I didn't actually ever experience going on submission until my fifth novel – it was as terrifying as I’d imagined.
How many revisions did you do before it was ready for publishing?
All my books tend to be more or less ready after the third round of edits, although I do around four or five revisions of my very first draft before anyone else sees it.
To be able to pivot any career, there’s usually a supporting financial element tied to it. Did you have any financial support that helped you on your journey? Could you share what that looked like?
I didn't have any. I just had to get on with it. I guess in real terms I took a pay cut, in the hope it might become more lucrative as time went on.
There’s also a blackhole when it comes to how much authors make, enabling a myth that once you’re a published author you can write full-time as the only source of income. But it's not always that simple or linear. You were a journalist, but now are writing full-time, either for yourself or contributing to other projects. Could you tell us a bit more about how this is working for you financially?
The honest answer to this is that there are good years and bad years, and the difference between them can be stark and stressful. The way I work at the moment is, if I don’t have any writing work coming in from anywhere else, I either try to get some of that work, or write a novel.
I wrote the first drafts of both Leading Man and my next one, The Glorious Dead, in 2022, a hugely quiet year. I try to build up as many reserves as I can to allow me to do that, but it’s not always easy. I don’t really go on holiday and my extravagances are few.
Book advances are never as big as people think, and they’re paid in instalments over a period of anywhere from two to four years, so they’re not a major source of my annual income. But other things help – festival appearances and event hosting, selling TV rights, foreign deals, PLR, my Substack, getting commissions from editors who like my writing. I’m not a hustler by nature; I usually wait to be approached.
I don’t earn a huge amount of money – this year has been tough so, guess what, I’m writing my sixth novel – and the ups and downs can be exhilarating and dispiriting all at once, and there are dark days where I have the conversation with myself: how long can you carry on doing this? Is it time to get a ‘real’ job? But I genuinely don’t know how to do anything else. This is it, this is me. For better or worse.
Okay, time to put on your wise Hindsight Glasses. What advice would you give to aspiring authors?
I don’t usually give writing advice. Maybe I feel unqualified, or perhaps because there are people out there offering much more useful help. Lately, however, I’ve come to learn a very important lesson. It can be tempting, especially early in your career, to be negative about your work, make a joke of it perhaps. It’s a form of self-deprecation, which has its uses, especially in comedic writing, but ultimately, it’s the wrong approach.
If you don’t feel upbeat and confident about your writing, how can you expect anyone else to champion it? As an author, you will put yourself out there a lot in the hope of gaining attention for your writing – you will write notes to established authors asking for endorsements, you will appear on panels of much more experienced people in the industry, you will attend meetings full of people whose job is finessing and promoting both your book, and you.
You can be light-hearted, modest even, but always have absolute faith in your writing, and your talent. Don’t neg yourself, not even in jest – eventually you’ll start to believe it, and so will everyone else. There is only one you, embrace that with everything.
Are there other Second Chapter authors that inspired you? If yes, who are they?
I signed my first book deal at 40; it felt like I was playing catch up. So Mary Wesley is the ultimate inspiration. First adult novel Jumping the Queue came at the age of 70, a new lease of life after losing her husband. The Camomile Lawn is one of my favourite books, so bold and witty and tragic. She’s the blueprint for ‘it’s never too late’.
I sometimes wish I had started earlier, pushed myself a bit harder and wriggled into those spaces, but you have to just accept whoever you are, and take it forward with you, rather than harking back to the forks in the road you never took.
Thanks so much, Justin, for being part of Second Chapter! If his interview didn’t give you all the feels to just be you, get on with it, and embrace where you are in your own road, I’m not sure what will.
Check out Justin’s books…
You can follow Justin on Instagram and X, and get more of his writing on Substack.
If you liked this interview, please consider sharing it with another aspiring writer. You never know what will help and keep people going. Thanks so much for your support!