Give and Take: Finding Partners to Help Build Your Writing Career

I wanted to write a book about the Royal Navy during the Second World War. There are lots of children’s books about soldiers, plenty about airmen too, but very few about sailors. I saw a gap in the market: the book would be called Arctic Star.

This idea was inspired by my wife who used to work on board HMS Belfast, once a warship, now a museum on the Thames in London. As usual, I asked myself the what (WW2 naval warfare), who (young sailors), when (1943) and where (on a warship).

My first research was to visit the outstanding Imperial War Museum (IWM) website and trawl through their online audio and photograph files. Awesome material. But there was still so much I didn’t understand. So I contacted HMS Belfast, also part of the IWM. I told them I was planning a book about the ship’s role in the Arctic convoys – to be called Arctic Star – and could they help me, please?

Some museums and organisations don’t reply to these approaches. But if you do your research, discover the name of an individual involved and have already done some ground- work, they often do. HMS Belfast did reply. I asked them for all the help they could give me to tell the story of their ship. Then I offered to help them do the work they are funded to do. If I could help them tell their story and if I could help drive visitors to their museum, then they had a good reason to invest time and goodwill in me and Arctic Star.

They introduced me to a veteran of the Arctic convoys and I interviewed him. They gave me a private tour of the ship. They answered countless questions I had about what might happen to the characters in the book. And then – when I had written the first draft – they checked it and advised me on how to make my book more accurate.

No money changed hands. But we both benefit wonderfully from our partnership. My book is accurate. Many of its 30,000 readers have gone on to visit HMS Belfast with their families, but all of them now know the story that the Imperial War Museum and HMS Belfast are trying to tell.
 

Tom Palmer is a children’s author from Yorkshire. He writes historical and sports fiction for ages 7–13 years. Tom has been published since 2008 and in 2024 he passed 1,000,000 book sales. He has won 30 book awards, including four UK national awards. Before he was an author, he worked as a bookseller, in library reader development and at book festivals. For more information, visit Tom's website.