I hadn’t really found the strength to push back as hard as I wanted to, and there were themes that I wanted to explore but I still had a bit of hesitation towards, and I hadn’t yet figured out to flex and be as strange and dark and magical as I wanted to be. I was beginning to chafe against my boundaries, I was beginning to feel unsettled. The Near Witch is a time capsule to who I was when I was creating it, and I see so much of 21-year-old me in that book. I look back at it, now that I’ve been on tour for it, and I see so many themes in their early stage of development that have then gone on to be massive for me and my other books. How did The Near Witch serve as a jumping-off point for your other books? I think it can exist as an example both of the pressure we put on baby authors, and of the fickleness of the industry-how much of it really is out of the writer’s control. But now that I have an expanded audience, now that I’ve found my people, now that I have my readers to know what to expect from my book-now it’s getting this huge amount of attention. It was a very quiet, strange book at a time when the more popular books were very loud. This book came out with no fanfare and disappeared very quietly. But all of the support surrounding the book-the size of my readership, the nature of the industry, the people willing to give me a chance, the publisher willing to make investments-those were in a very different space. I didn’t go back and rewrite or revise this book-it didn’t change. I think it says: you can do everything great, and it can still not work. How can talking about The Near Witch and its re-publication also serve as a lesson for young writers about the undue emphasis that’s placed on debuts, or the realities of building readership? So many aspiring writers follow and engage with me online, and so many say to me at events, ‘I love the way you talk about publishing, because it makes me feel less alone.’

So I decided I was going to be as honest as I could be, and I’ve been really, really surprised, in a good way, by the response. It feels like you’re struggling because you’re not good enough, instead of that you’re struggling because it’s hard.

Because then when you do struggle, it feels like you’re an island. And I thought to myself: it’s so nice to know you’re not alone, but for those of us who are not usually in the company of other writers, it can be so lonely when all you hear is positives. Then I went to a writer’s retreat, and all the authors could talk about were the struggles.

The near witch ve schwab