First Attempts

“Yeah - we [Muna & Jon Ware] both wrote things that were always well received by our tutors and classmates but... In my case, I was edited really quite heavily to be commercial in a way that felt far away from what I wanted to write.
        And China Mieville was one of our tutors, and said to Jon - what you’ve written is fantastic, but you'll never sell it. It's not commercial. 

But then... As we got older, the internet obviously became much more prevalent. Self-publishing became a huge thing. And that's when we realised, actually, we don't need to run through these hoops. Our audience is out there, and we can find them. 
         So we decided to go for it, completely naively. 

In fact, I Am in Eskew, we did under pseudonyms - the two main characters' names. And no one knew who we were. Because we had no idea if it would work…”