Story of ‘bloodthirsty unicorns’ brings debut author record publishing deal
A 28-year-old first-time author from Canterbury has landed what is believed to be the world’s largest ever book advance for a debut children’s writer, with a fantasy series about “bloodthirsty unicorns”.
Annabel Steadman, writing as AF Steadman, was paid a “major” seven-figure sum by Simon & Schuster this week, following a hotly contested multi-publisher auction for three books in her fantasy adventure series for children, Skandar and the Unicorn Thief. Set in a world where unicorns are deadly, and can only be tamed by the rider who hatches them, the series follows Skandar Smith, who is preparing to become a unicorn rider. When the most powerful unicorn in the world is stolen by a mysterious figure, becoming a rider becomes a lot more complicated than Skandar ancitipated.
“Unicorns don’t belong in fairytales; they belong in nightmares,” writes Steadman as the series opens. The unicorns in her books are “not at all like the unicorns we know in shops, these fluffy unicorns with rainbows, they’re different and exciting and magical but also dangerous,” she says.
Simon & Schuster, which will publish the first book in the series in spring 2022, said the deal was believed to be record-breaking for a debut children’s author. Sony Pictures has also signed an “aggressive” seven-figure deal for the feature film rights in the series, which is aimed at readers of nine and over.
Steadman said she collapsed on her bed on hearing about her deal. “It kind of completely went mad after that. I was like, this isn’t real, this can’t be real,” said the author, who wrote down the original idea for Skandar in 2013, but set it aside to focus on her job as a lawyer.
“I just wrote some names of unicorns, and then I left it alone,” she said. “I was training to be a lawyer at the time, living in Oxford and commuting to London, so I had an hour every day to think about things.
Steadman, who attended King’s School, Canterbury, on musical and academic scholarships before going on to study at Selwyn College, Cambridge, left law in 2017. She then took a master’s in creating writing at Cambridge and returned to the story she’d thought of years earlier.
Steadman said she had wanted to be an author “for as long as I can remember”, but was “just so overworked”. “There was no room in my brain for anything other than cases coming up. I thought I didn’t want to do this forever, so I stopped,” she said.
She wrote her story “in about three months in 2018, and then I left it alone”, working on it again with her literary agent, Sam Copeland at Rogers, Coleridge & White.
“I knew the moment I first started reading this, I had found someone extraordinary in Annabel. This has been matched by the excitement from publishers and the world record-breaking offers for a children’s debut – with a number of publishers offering well into seven figures,” said Copeland. “This has been the most exciting auction of my career and to top it off with wildly exciting film news as well has left everybody breathless.”
Ali Dougal at Simon & Schuster said that Steadman had created “the most jaw-dropping new world we’ve seen in years”, and that “the instant, seething excitement about this series across S&S is unlike anything I’ve experienced before”.
“At the moment I’m not even sure I’ve really processed [the size of the book deal] at all. It’s so nice to be able to think I can just concentrate on this and make the books as good as I can. It’s a dream come true,” said Steadman. “[I] scribbled my first book aged 12 in two notebooks I was given for Christmas. As well as ambition, 12-year-old me had a lot of worries, so I wish I could go back in time to tell her that she’d be published one day. This has been a truly life-changing week.”
