Google Jean Grainger, who has sold millions of copies of her historical fiction, and the first page of results has no newspaper book reviews, publisher profiles or radio or TV interviews.
What you see, aside from the Irish author’s own social media and website, are 300,000 reader reviews on Goodreads and 100,000 five-star reviews on Amazon for her catalogue of 50 books.
Most of the reviews are from readers in the United States, where the former history teacher, who lives in Co Cork, has built a loyal base, including among the enormous Irish diaspora.
Grainger has made some €10 million in sales since she published her first title, in 2013, equating to between three and four million reads, which is to say of physical books, downloads, borrows and listens. Such figures are remarkable in the Irish book world, and even more so for a self-published author.
Her novels have appeared on the USA Today bestseller list. They are on the shelves of Walmart and Barnes & Noble, and they’re available to borrow in libraries from Ohio to Kentucky. Yet they aren’t to be found in Irish bookshops such as Eason or Hodges Figgis.
When The Irish Times times talks to Grainger, she’s sitting in the type of place her tens of thousands of Irish-American readers might imagine: a comfy armchair in her 200-year-old stone cottage in rural Co Cork.
What does she think about her very low profile in Ireland? “A couple of years ago a publisher told me, ‘You know, if you had sold that amount of books and you were in trad publishing, you’d be on The Late Late Show every week.’”
For Grainger, a lot of this anonymity is by design. “It’s a perfect thing for me,” she says. “I love that I can sell all these books in America, Canada and Australia ... and it’s weird for me: when I go there people recognise me.”
Locals in the author’s own village don’t really know what she does, she says. She wonders if some people are “scratching their heads, thinking, ‘They seem to have plenty of money, but they don’t seem to work.’“
In many ways Grainger got to know her future readers during her 15 years as a tour guide, bringing mostly Irish-Americans around Ireland on buses. She has a sense of understanding what this audience is looking for, and it’s not shamrocks and leprechauns.
“When they come here they have a profound sense of coming home. I think it’s really important to honour that and not mock it,” she says. “They want a sense they have come home and they are welcome here. And I think my books are something to do with that.”
Most of Grainger’s books are set around historical conflict, such as the first and second World Wars and the War of Independence. “It’s just a good vehicle for that, but really it’s about the people ... on the periphery of the big stories, in the weeds.”
But the diaspora is not coming to her books for a deeper understanding of Irish history, she says. “The history is simply the framework ... They want something more meaningful.”
While tourists enjoy the Irish food, history and culture, “the things that made their holiday was some random interaction in the pub or on the street, people being kind, interested and funny. My books are about ordinary Irish people. And they seem to love that. That’s what the attraction is.”
Being a tour guide is a storytelling job, Grainger says. Visitors would tell her to write her stories down. ”One winter I was at home and I said, ‘You know, I’ll have a crack at it,’ so I did.“
Grainger admits to having “no idea, not a clue” what she was doing. “I’m a voracious reader, and I had a degree in English and history, but apart from that ...”
Her first book, The Tour, was about a group of people travelling around Ireland by bus.
Like most debut novelists, Grainger had followed the frustration-laden path of sending her book to agents and publishers. “I laugh when I hear people saying they got loads of rejection letters. I just got nothing. Crickets.”
When her husband spotted an Amazon self-publishing course in Dublin, Grainger was initially resistant, thinking she’d be “mortified” and that she would “take the word” of publishers that she wasn’t good enough. After completing the course, she came away thinking, “This isn’t vanity publishing. This is ‘the market decides’.”
That “market decides” mantra seems to have stayed with the author. Grainger got her first book edited (“not to the standard of now”) and a cover (“It wasn’t great”) and published it on Amazon. “It seemed to hit a seam of people who were looking for that kind of content, and it sold way better than I ever anticipated. And it just sort of grew from there.” (The book is one of a series of six.)
Grainger moved into popular Irish historical fiction with her second book. She was teaching history at a college and working on a PhD thesis about Irish women’s involvement in the second World War. “I was interested as to why poor Catholic girls would sign up for this given the history of Ireland.” She interviewed women around Ireland who had joined the British forces.
But Grainger didn’t want to turn “really human, interesting, romantic stories” into a “dry academic paper”. That felt like “sucking the life out of it”, she says. So Much Owed, based on her PhD work, became her second book.
“That solidified me as a historical-fiction writer,” she says. “And then I wrote another 48 books,” she adds with a laugh.
Grainger’s latest novel, The Rectors’s Daughter, is the second in the Dunmara series. At its centre is the story of an Irish big house and how it connects the stories of two people living a century apart.
The author is keen to not get tarred with the negativity often associated with self-publishing. The author likens it to the book world’s version of YouTube or TikTok for musicians and comedians.
“It’s just the conduit. It’s how I got into it ... If you were a band years ago, you had to have a record contract. Now you can sit on your bed and record yourself on your phone and become an international star. And that’s because you have talent. The market decides, and people won’t spend their money on things they don’t want.”
For Grainger it always comes back to her “incredibly loyal” readers, who are not just in the US but also in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Her books have also been translated into German. “They’re amazing. I know all about my readers.”
She gets “tons of emails”, writes a newsletter to more than 30,000 of them every month, and makes them social-media videos.
Grainger has even found a large audience in US Christian communities, which seem to like that her books have no sex or cursing. “There’s a very, ‘She blew the candle out’ energy ... I suppose I was taught by nuns.”
Her books also reflect modern Irish values, sometimes putting her at odds with readers. She gets pushback, she says, about having gay characters and storylines involving the Catholic Church, including industrial schools and Magdalene laundries. “I don’t think I’m particularly hard on the Catholic Church. I’m just honest.”
Grainger describes her approach as the “ultimate cottage industry”. She has had offers from publishers over the years, she says. “I always say no, because I get 70 per cent of the royalties ... Financially for me, it makes no sense.”
She has set up Gold Harp Media to publish her books, along with her husband – a historian and piper who is “meticulous on research” – and her two sisters in Australia, one an accountant and the other a scientist.
“It’s beautiful. We talk every day. A three-hour meeting, an hour and a half is sister chat.”
Grainger has built a list of 200 people she can consult before publication, from horticulturalists to rabbis, nuns, lawyers, farmers, mechanics and the owner of a stately home.
She has very little grá for traditional publishing. “That bigger world of publishing and reviews ... that doesn’t really enter into it.”
“People often say to me ‘how come you’re not speaking at this book fair or literary festival?’ But I don’t move in that world at all. I wish them all the best,” she says. “It just doesn’t really interest me.”
For Grainger, making a living is a “great byproduct” of her main aim, which is “to try to connect people though stories”.
“If your heart is broken, your heart is broken, whether you are 12 or 70, and live in Argentina or Dublin.” The reader will think, “I’m not the only person in the world who felt like that.”
The Rector’s Daughter, book two of Jean Grainger’s Dunmara series, is available on Amazon in print, on Kindle and as an audiobook
