Jojo Moyes is a novelist, best known for her bestselling book Me Before You. Jojo has been a full time novelist since 2002, before that she was a journalist for 10 years. Her first book Sheltering Rain was published in 2002 Since then she has written a further eleven novels, all of which have been widely critically acclaimed. Jojo has won the Romantic Novelist’s Award twice, and Me Before You has been nominated for Book of the Year at the UK Galaxy Book Awards. Me Before You has since gone on to sell over 8 million copies worldwide. The film adaptation of Me Before You starring Sam Claflin (The Hunger Games) and Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones) was released in June 2016 and was a huge box-office success. The screenplay was written by Jojo. We spoke about dealing with rejected manuscripts, changing jobs, her new book Still Me, the power of listening to feedback and the excitement of being on a film set when you wrote the main characters.
Favourite quotes from this episode:
“My publishing career was in such a perilous state at that point I just wanted a book that sold enough for me to keep going as a writer.”
“You can only do so much as an author, so much of it depends on timing, it depends on retailers, it depends on whether people like the cover, it can be a million different factors that you have no control over.”
“It’s not about how you fail, it’s about how you respond to that failure.”
