Alexia Casale: Make Sure You Have a Strong Pitch

Alexia Casale is a British-American author, script consultant, and course director of the MA in Writing for Young People program at Bath Spa University. She has over a decade of experience as an editor specializing in the field of male violence against women and girls, having been an executive editor of an international human rights journal. She holds two master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from Essex. Follow her on X (Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram.

In this interview, Alexia discusses how change happens when everyone pitches in with her debut novel, The Best Way to Bury Your Husband, her advice for other writers, and more!

Name: Alexia Casale
Literary agent: Kristina Perez, Perez Literary Entertainment
Book title: The Best Way to Bury Your Husband
Publisher: Viking Penguin Random House U.K. & Pam Dorman @ Viking Penguin Random House U.S.
Release date: March 14, 2024 U.K. ; 19 March 19, 2024 U.S.
Genre/category: Crime
Previous titles: Sing If You Can’t Dance; House of Windows; The Bone Dragon
Elevator pitch: Terrified of going to prison after she kills her increasingly abusive husband during the COVID lockdown, Sally juggles the hunt for loo-roll with the challenges of disposing of a fresh corpse. But when she discovers she’s not the only woman in this predicament, she finds herself leading an extremely unusual self-help group.

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What prompted you to write this book?

During the COVID lockdown, my workload as a specialist human-rights editor exploded. In the morning I’d be working on a news story about the spike in domestic homicide and in the afternoon funding bids for charities struggling to support victims through the restrictions. However, it seemed impossible to get people from editors to funding bodies, and from the government to the public, to engage: in the middle of a worldwide plague no one wanted to hear about yet another huge, depressing problem. But that didn’t change the fact that some women were in far more danger from being locked in with violent men than from COVID.

Exhausted and out of editorial strategies to bridge the gap, I was yelling at the kettle that unless I could make people laugh (not a viable option when discussing real murders), I couldn’t see a solution. Then it hit me: What I couldn’t accomplish in my nonfiction editing I might be able to achieve with my fiction writing—suddenly I had an idea for a new book. This book.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

The idea popped into my head in March 2020, and I started writing immediately, but I couldn’t get the voice, tone, or style right. I ran a few pages by my wonderful Aunty Pat, who’s always my first reader, then a different version past the brilliant Holly Bourne, and they agreed it was great but confirmed that I hadn’t found the right version. So, I pivoted to writing the start of the story as a pilot script for a TV series. I figured looking at it from a different angle and focusing on visual storytelling might help unlock the rest. I did a bunch of drafts, working with amazing dramaturg Gavin Whenman and BAFTA-nominated Jack Jewers along the way, but I was leery of returning to the novel.

I’d pitched the idea in March 2020 to my amazing agent Kristina Perez and she thought it was awful—as in “don’t mention this one to me again” bad. I knew that was wrong—that it was a good idea—so I had to face up to something I’d been avoiding dealing with: that I was terrible at pitching and it was getting in the way of my career. So, while I worked on the script, I invested in a whole range of pitching events and courses, both free and a few paid. After a lot of failures (a lot), I did a pitching event at London Screenwriter’s Festival 2021 and won the little competition at the end. That was when I knew I was ready to take the idea back to Kristina and do it justice.

“Drop everything and write this as fast as you can. I’ll start pre-pitching it tomorrow,” said Kristina. The confidence boost and the work on the script meant I was finally ready to write the book in my head, so I did. I wrote like the wind, then we edited even faster, and it went out on submission in early 2022. For a week or so, all was quiet, then there was a pre-empt. Then an auction was arranged. Then there was a sequence of additional pre-empts. About 48 hours before the auction, Kristina called me at 9:30pm with an offer we couldn’t refuse from an editor I desperately wanted to work with, and that was that!

From there it was real dream-scenario stuff. The book sold in a bunch of territories, and we had several roughly equivalent U.S. offers, so I had the amazing experience of talking to three amazing editors. But there was no way I could turn down the chance to be edited by the awesome Pam Dorman in the U.S. alongside the fantastic Harriet Bourton in the U.K. It was a really wonderful process—challenging but in an entirely positive way—and I am so grateful to Pam and Harriet for helping me tell the very best version of my story possible.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

The big surprise was how well so many aspects of it went, from the pre-empt, to the translation rights deals, and the territory deals, especially the U.S. one. There have been some lovely things about outlets preordering the book and publicity plans and other things I can’t talk about yet.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Yes—lots! Many of the really interesting ones came out of the expert policing reads and the sensitivity reads.

On the police side, my editor and I were both surprised by how plausible some of the elements were from a policing perspective; obviously the set-up is an implausible what-if, but a lot of the things that flow from it would, apparently, pass muster in real life!

As for the sensitivity reads, there were some fascinating small things like the order you have to put on a hijab and mask, but the final sensitivity read was just brilliant and I’ll take a lot of the lessons from that into future projects. The reader put his finger on exactly what sorts of things I could add to deepen characterization, including in relation to culture and heritage, without getting bogged down in exposition. It was invaluable to have such an incisive take on where I could afford to dwell and what a reader wanted to know more about.

The sensitivity reader also took the idea of Ruth and Sally bonding over Sally’s son sending her a song a day and suggested that maybe Ruth could start sharing music she loves, too. This added so many lovely layers and really enriched the playlist. He even provided a brilliant list of bands and artists, freeing me up to focus on the exact songs that fitted Ruth and the immediate story-context in which each song is being listened to.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope it’ll make them laugh … and then think. We all feel despair at the scale of male violence against women and girls, but instead of being daunted we all need to start doing something, however small, and doing it now. If enough people start acting, a solution can and will build from there.

Whether it’s reaching out to a boy or man in your life you know behaves badly or reaching out to a girl or woman you’re worried about, or donating or volunteering, or just reading up on the problem to understand more about it, there is something you can do today. If you’re reading this, please do just one little thing. Big changes start when many people commit to making the world better, one little act at a time.

Here are three great places to start:

Like the End Violence Against Women coalition in the U.K., The National Network to End Domestic Violence is a large network of charities, NGOs and nonprofits dedicated to addressing male violence against women and girls.Like the ‘Femicide census’ in the U.K., the Remember My Name project (run by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence) is a list of women killed each year in the U.S. where a man is charged with or suspected of committing the crime.Like the Centre for Women’s Justice in the U.K., the National Defense Centre for Criminalised Survivors is a specialist organisation supporting women charged with crimes related to being victims of male violence, including killing a man in self-defence in the context of long-term abuse. They support the real Sallys, Janeys, Samiras and Ruths in the face of a criminal justice system that often ignores the context of women’s violence.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

The timeless advice is read, read, read. Write, write, write. Just to add value, I’d throw in Make sure you have a strong pitch for why you are writing this book now. And if you’re trying to pick a debut manuscript, the best advice I ever came across is, “Write the book only you can write.”

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