Kathleen Jones talks to Sophie Nicholls about The Dress
A first time, young, independently published, UK novelist who makes it to the top of the Amazon best-seller lists has to be pretty special. One of the E-book phenomenons of the past 12 months has been Sophie Nicholls ’ novel The Dress, and, as I'm just about to produce my own first novel on Kindle, I was fascinated by her success and wondered what I could learn from her approach. Sophie is a poet with a collection ‘ Refugee ’ recently out from Salt publishing, and she has previously published a novella ‘Ruby Slippers’ , but The Dress is her first novel. I read and reviewed it for the IEBR site and was very impressed by the quality of the writing and the story. It seemed to me (and she has 75 reviews on Amazon to prove it) that it was equally as good as many of the big commercial names stacked up in Waterstones and WH Smith; Kate Morton, Victoria Hislop, Adele Geras, Joanne Harris - Sophie’s novel stands up well against them. Yet Sophie didn’t both...