At just 20 years old, Samantha Shannon landed a six-figure book deal. It was the sort of deal aspiring writers dream of.
The British fantasy author was quickly dubbed the next JK Rowling and the books she published — including The Bone Season series and The Priory of the Orange Tree — would go on to become international hits.
But as she told ABC RN's The Book Show: "I've always described the experience as a double-edged sword.
"There was a huge amount of media interest … it was actually an enormous source of pressure for me. And in a way, it was setting me up for a fall. And I was lucky to survive that in terms of my career."
Shannon had dreamt of a writing career since childhood, but experienced severe anxiety after she landed her deal.
"I thought, 'Well, the other shoe has to drop at some point. I can't be this lucky, something must be coming to balance the scales.'"
Now, in a highly unusual move for the publishing industry, the 32-year-old has released a new version of her first Bone Season book.
"Your first book is very rarely your best work," she explains.
"I'm glad that The Bone Season was published when it was, because timing is so important in publishing … But I do think that I was a little too young and I would have benefited from working on my craft for a few more years."
Rejection and acceptance
Shannon sent her first story to a publisher when she was just a child.
"I just wrote on an envelope, 'To Penguin, Love Samantha.' And then put it into a post box. To no-one's surprise, I never saw it again," she says with a laugh.
By 12, she had taken up writing as a "pretty serious hobby".
"I was getting home from school, rushing my homework, and then just writing the whole time … When I was doing my [high school] exams, I remember my parents had to make the decision to take my keyboard away from me every night because I was just constantly writing."
By 17, she'd written a 200,000-word novel and sent it off to publishers, only to face a wall of rejection.
Then at 19, between her first and second years at the University of Oxford, she wrote what would become The Bone Season.
The Bone Season is a supernatural dystopian novel about a clairvoyant named Paige Mahoney, who works for an underworld crime syndicate in London.
Shannon's earlier experience of rejection deterred her from trying to get the book published.
But then Scottish writer Ali Smith (How to Be Both), a visiting scholar at Oxford, read her work.
"I was expecting to be completely obliterated by this author … [instead] she said: 'I think this [first chapter of The Bone Season] is brilliant, I think you've got a really strong voice, and you should send it to a publisher.'"
Shannon sent her manuscript to an agent she had interned for, who didn't usually represent fantasy writers, hoping he'd recommend an agent for her. Instead, he signed her and the deal — with British publisher Bloomsbury — followed.
Samantha's version
After Shannon inked the deal, she had to juggle finishing her degree and writing the novel. Then she had to survive the gruelling editing process and the media storm.
"All of this meant that I feel I didn't do justice to the first instalment of a series that I absolutely love," she says.
Almost a decade later, and four books into the planned seven-book Bone Season series, Shannon decided to revisit the first instalment.
"I said [to my publisher], 'Well, how would you feel if I did some edits?' And I think they thought that I meant just some light tweaks," she says.
But then she submitted her first edited chapter to them, with many changes marked up in red.
"I think Bloomsbury were probably a bit puzzled and alarmed by this, because it's not very common for authors to edit already published books; it's not really something that's done in the industry."
To Shannon's surprise, Bloomsbury agreed to publish new versions of all of her first series. She attributes this, in part, to the renewed attention two of her other books — The Priory of the Orange Tree (2019) and its prequel A Day of Fallen Night (2023) — had generated on queer romance BookTok.
The 10th anniversary edition of The Bone Season is labelled the "Author's Preferred Text" and she's now revised and re-released the rest of the series.
"I knew that some original readers of the series might be a bit frustrated with me because obviously they loved the books as they were," she says.
"And I want to stress that if you liked The Bone Season as it was, I can't take that away from you. I can't come into your house and take the books and throw them away, even though I would occasionally like to do that. It feels like having my first draft out in the world, which I find quite unnerving now."
It's rare for a writer to admit their mistakes or critique their own work so openly.
"I thought it was best to be honest about it when I felt like I'd strayed, and it [rewriting] was about making sure I was building the rest of the series on a stronger foundation," she says.
'Women writing about women'
But don't mix and match the old and new: In her new versions, Shannon has changed parts of the plot and fleshed out underwritten characters.
Looking at the books through fresh eyes also showed Shannon she had "absorbed some toxic masculinity issues", she says.
She describes Paige's love interest Warden as a "gentle, considerate person", yet when she looked back on the first book, she was unsettled by what she'd written of their courtship.
"[He had] this weird habit of grabbing Paige by the back of her head without her consent. And at the time, I clearly thought that was incredibly sexy," says Shannon.
"Now I'm thinking: 'What are you doing? That's extremely awful. Stop it!' And it actually felt like it was dishonouring his character."
She also changed her plans for the series as a whole — having plotted it out at just 19 years old.
"So the fifth book was originally going to have this very Twilight-esque pregnancy plot line in it … I was following what I thought was going to be expected, which was that the character gets together with their love interest, and they get married, and they have babies — which is fine, but not what I wanted to do with the series."
The changes show that Shannon's thinking about women's representation, romance and fantasy have evolved over the last decade, shaping not only her revisions of the Bone Season series, but her newer books too.
In A Day of Fallen Night, which came out in 2023, Shannon imagined a "queendom" where women ruled for over 1,000 years.
"I did want to unapologetically centre women … and it's very centred on issues that touch women closely, like the decision on whether or not to be a mother," she says.
Both Fallen Night and The Priory (2019) also feature Sapphic romances.
Shannon's late grandmother, a huge supporter of her work, was worried about how Priory would be received.
She asked: "Is anyone really going to want to read an 800-page novel about dragons and lesbians?"
Despite her grandmother's misgivings, the novel was an instant bestseller and garnered a following on BookTok.
"Fantasy has a reputation for being a traditionally masculine genre. But I think that's massively changing. Now, I'm far from the only author doing it. I feel like we're in such a golden age of fantasy at the moment where there are so many women writing about women."
