We’ve been celebrating Kate Macdonald’s debut novel The Shetland Witch a lot this month, with excerpts and a review from Jonathan, and now Kate herself is here to tell us about the process of writing it. We at the Hive were devastated to hear that Handheld Press were closing, so we’re thrilled to support Kate in her new writing venture.

Before we hand you over, let’s have a reminder of the blurb:

Hazel is an archaeologist, working in Unst, on the most northerly coast of the Shetland Isles.

She’s digging on Ishabel’s land. Ishabel is a retired professor of botany, and one of the remaining three Shetland witches, along with Maggie the artist who is getting too casual about shape-changing in public, and Avril the wildlife warden with too many birds to guard.

Maggie discovers that Hazel is also magical, and she becomes a Shetland witch.

Then Atropos arrives, to look for her shears that she sent into hiding to the ends of the earth thousands of years ago. She has to protect them from Zeus.

How will the witches protect the islands from a Fate and Zeus?

How will Hazel learn how to do magic again?

How will she cope with Tornost, a malignant trow with a penchant for eighteenth-century manners?

The Shetland Witch is a novel about living in the north, about sisterhood and belonging, and the power that women wield when they work together. As past and present collide, we are reminded that history, however old and mythical, is always with us.

The Shetland Witch is out now – you can order yours on Amazon

Writing and publishing The Shetland Witch

by Kate Macdonald

In July 2019 I went to Shetland for the first time. The landscape grabbed me first: the emptiness, the treeless outlines of the hills and around lochs and the coastline. The compact villages of well-built houses to keep out the storms. And the immense grandeur of the most northerly cliffs in Unst, with the puffins and the skuas. In the cafes and shops I began to be curious about what it was like to live there, how folk made a living. I began to read about the lives of 19th-century Shetland women and how they worked the crofts in a fishing economy in which most of the men seemed to die at sea.

Back home, in September I went to my first residential writing retreat, booked months before. I found myself writing the beginnings of a story about the Fates, set in Ancient Greece. I showed it to Una McCormack, the resident tutor. I talked about wanting to write something about fantasy on the doorstep, about what it would be like to encounter magic in your house, in real life. I also went on about Shetland and the lives of land-bound women on a British Isle so far north that it was closer to Norway than Scotland. Una asked me whether I thought that this might be more than a short story.

And so I began to write the story of how Atropos, eldest of the Fates, had offended Zeus by hiding her shears that cut the threads of all lives because he wanted to use them for his own desires. She is sent out of human time and space to return the shears to him, and she arrives on the cold wet grass in Unst, where she meets the shape-changing witches of Shetland who are willing to help her: Ishabel, Maggie and Avril. The novel also became the story of Hazel, an archaeologist in Shetland who first meets a trow, and then the witches, and realises that she once had magical powers which she has suppressed for fear of being different for nearly twenty years. But now she can begin to relearn them, because Atropos needs her help too against Zeus, and Trow Tornost is suspicious that somebody is hiding things of value in the land that he still considers to be his.

The novel evolved over several years. I revised it using critiques from two successive writing groups connected to the BSFA, from friends who were also authors and editors, and from a professional editorial service: this all helped me greatly. In 2021 I talked to an author friend about the novel and she asked me if she should mention it to her agent. Her agent read the current draft, loved it, and I signed a contract. The agent’s critiques helped me revise the structure, taking out most of the Ancient Greece parts to focus the novel wholly on Shetland. I turned the Fates’ Ancient Greek backstory into a novella, which was satisfying, but I didn’t know what to do with it. Then I found myself writing another large piece of backstory, in which the figure of Mrs Margaret Sinclair, witch and murderer, stepped out of 1807 and into agonised life as I explored how and why the Feather Haa, an invisible, magical house built on a cliff-edge in Yell, came to be. This turned into Mrs Sinclair and the Feather Haa, another novella I did not know what to do with. In the meantime I was busy writing the sequel to The Shetland Witch, in which Atropos encounters more terrifying people from her past who are out to get her. I was getting a bit bogged down with a new leading character who didn’t seem to be doing very much, and this second novel, though it had a solid beginning and end, was definitely flabby in the middle. In the end I eviscerated the second novel, cut some flab from the first one, and smooshed them together into a much more satisfying new version of The Shetland Witch, packed with magic and action and more twists than Klotho’s spindle.

It was now autumn 2023, and my agent had been sending The Shetland Witch out to editors for two years. But the book industry was under post-Covid stress. Every editor was fielding novels written during the lockdowns, and The Shetland Witch was lost in the backlog. My agent forwarded me emails of extravagant praise from two American editors but they also said No. That was heartening, kind of, but maddening. What could I do to get a Yes? Did I even want to do that? Why did I want a publisher’s agreement in the first place? Had any British editors seen it? (My agent is based in the US.)

After two years of getting nowhere my agent and I agreed to part company, and I was free to send The Shetland Witch out into the world under my own direction. I went to Substack, the online platform designed to publish long-form writing, and I began to serialise The Shetland Witch.

I have the good fortune to have run my own publishing house, Handheld Press, for seven years. I am quite good at marketing and my company has a very large mailing list of followers who are also interested in what I am doing (my gardening reports in our monthly newsletter have a lot of fans). In my academic career I used to research and teach publishing history, so I knew how serialisation works from a business perspective. I was interested in making some money from The Shetland Witch, but much more interested in getting it to readers. Ever since the immense success of Madeline Miller’s truly excellent The Song of Achilles the myths and history of the women of Ancient Greece are being retold. Throughout those two years of not selling The Shetland Witch (subtitled: Or, Atropos Wants Her Shears Back) I was in agony every time I saw the announcement of a new Ancient Greek mythic woman’s story in the book trade press. But nobody seemed to be tackling the Fates, not even the redoubtable Natalie Haynes (I did not read her Pandora’s Jar until a month ago, and I was greatly relieved).

So I launched The Shetland Witch on Substack. It is sent out weekly in 1000-word episodes, for free to subscribers who received it in their email inboxes. I also set up a paid tier, where subscribers could pay about £5 a month to be sent the serialised two novellas as well in as separate feed. Around a tenth of the Handheld Press mailing list were interested enough in the novel to subscribe to receive the free episodes, and then Substack networking began to work for me. I discovered that one of my oldest friends, now a big name journalist, had a Substack, and I became very attached to a Substack about spinning, cartooning and weaving from the north-west of the USA. Both these lovely people liked The Shetland Witch and recommended it to their vast online followings, and my subscribers numbers jumped up. When the number of paid subscribers was high enough to be sending me a small but regular income, I decided to go to print.

I used to have a prejudice against self-publishing, but now I see it as being another kind of artisanal craft worker. If a jeweller or a weaver can make and market and sell their own work, so can authors, as long as enough reliable external readers have critiqued the work. I invented a new identity, the Peachfield Press, to separate Kate the self-publisher from Kate the author. I spent most of my smallish budget on design and layout. I have seen too many dreadful book covers on self-published books, and know well from experience that a really stunning cover can sell pretty much anything. So I commissioned Jane Cornwell, a designer I had worked with before, to design the cover and do the inside layout. (She threw in extra artwork, including maps, as part of the deal.) I decided to publish via Amazon KDP, because they handle printing, distribution and ERM management for ebooks, which I cannot afford on my own. Amazon’s massive worldwide reach makes The Shetland Witch easily available in North America, where a lot of my Substack subscribers live. But I’m open to moving my books elsewhere if things go well with The Shetland Witch: Amazon’s practices are destructive to the book industry overall, and I don’t want to support that for long.

The Shetland Witch is available in paperback, ebook and also hardback (Jane’s idea), and so also is Stories from The Shetland Witch, a slimmer volume containing the two novellas In Achaea and Mrs Sinclair and the Feather Haa. There has been considerable interest in the books in Shetland already, with one visitor centre ordering copies from me to stock ahead of publication, so that has been very encouraging. 

In the end, why am I doing this? I’ve told a story, and I want readers to read it and enjoy it and give it to their friends. I want to talk to book groups and library reading groups about writing and publishing and Shetland and witches and inventing people we’d love to really exist. I will talk to anyone! Contact me at peachfieldpress.@gmail.com. 

The Shetland Witch is out now – you can order yours on Amazon