Life for Princess Isabella is far from a dream, trapped by tradition, protocol and the stifling burden of inheriting the crown, she longs to escape her shackles. After fleeing her abusive home, Sophia and Isabella meet at the palace gates. Realising how alike they look, they plan to switch places for one week. What could possibly go wrong? What starts out as a naïve plan to follow their dreams soon takes an unexpected turn with events quickly spiralling out of control. As the nightmare continues around them, it’s a race against time to stem the devastating consequences of their actions.

THE PRETENDER

As the popularity of ‘The Pretender’ has continued to grow, it has now achieved its highest ranking position, 30 in the Amazon YA Bestsellers List. This is an amazing feat especially when you consider this is this a debut novel and also that it has been independently published.

For authors who choose to publish their books independently from the traditional publishing route (where a book is published with the assistance of an agent and publisher) there are a lot of obstacles that make achieving high rankings difficult.

Firstly, as a debut author, no one knows about you. You can have the best book in the world but if no one knows about it then it won’t ever sell. To overcome this, many authors will launch their book with a blog tour and have in place a media plan in the first week.

If you dream of seeing your books in your local Waterstones then independent publishing is probably not the best choice as many retail outlets will not stock books that are independently published in their stores. Therefore, independent authors are not able to benefit from readers looking for inspiration on the bookshelves of their local book store.

As an independent author, the most important thing to me was to make that I created a book that people didn’t know was published independently because if people can’t tell then there is no discernible difference in quality. Since publication, the question I’ve been asked the most is whether it was hard for me to get a publisher.

So, to see ‘The Pretender’ scale the YA bestsellers chart is a very personal and exciting moment as it shows that people like the book I created and that means I did exactly what I set out to do.

TOP 30 BESTSELLERS

LIST

RED ROSES

SECOND NOVEL

BY KATIE WARD 

Red Roses is the second novel by Katie Ward, her first The Pretender was awarded a prestigious BRAG Medallion Award in April 2019.

This novel is a modern interpretation of the classic tragedy made famous by the likes of William Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte and Wilkie Collins. Katie has a love of classic fiction and aims to encapsulate these elements in work in order to allow her readers to enjoy these aspects in a modern way.