As of: February 8, 2024, 9:00 a.m
By: Timo Aichele
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“Incredibly liberating”: Johanna Furch during her creative stay in the USA.
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Johanna Furch is an author, editor and journalist.
A scholarship enabled her to write her new novel in the USA.
St. Wolfgang
– letters, words, sentences are the life of Johanna Furch.
She works freelance as an editor, novelist and journalist for this newspaper.
She had this passion from early childhood.
“I learned the letters with my older brother,” says the now 29-year-old.
At the request of her parents, she “first learned something clever” professionally, but Furch now relies fully on her talent – which has not gone undiscovered: She won a scholarship at the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus and spent six weeks at the “Virginia Center” at the end of 2023 as part of an artist exchange for the Creative Arts” in the USA.
Today the young author lives with her boyfriend Niklas Willnhammer in Schönbrunn near St. Wolfgang.
She grew up in Hague in Upper Bavaria.
After attending secondary school there, she went to the FOS in Wasserburg and learned the profession of industrial clerk at the Jäger dairy plant. The young woman calculated soberly, continued to work at Jäger and still set off into the fantastic world of words.
From 2016 to 2019 she studied literary writing and cultural journalism part-time at the Faber-Castell Academy in Stein near Nuremberg.
“I basically wanted to get into the book industry.” A part-time job at the Random House publishing house in Munich and journalistic work were the next stops.
Furch completed further training to become a freelance editor at the Academy of German Media - and that's when she got started in this business.
In 2020 she became self-employed.
“I didn’t know for a long time that there were jobs that had anything to do with writing,” remembers the 29-year-old.
She wrote constantly.
“I had planned to write one book a year.” But she always just put all of these works on her shelf.
Almost all of them - only the love story "Like Salted Caramel Ice Cream" was published by the author in 2020. "But I wasn't really into it enough," she says about the necessary advertising.
Like many freelancers, the 29-year-old is under pressure to juggle everything.
Not disappointing a client, advancing one's own projects, self-marketing - here the editor, author and journalist is now trying to find the right balance.
“I actually started my own business in order to write more books.” That's why Johanna Furch has a plan for this year: “I've decided to reserve a third of my work just for my literary writing.” She keeps one day a week prepare for it.
Then she just sits down in her writing corner in the apartment – or in a “writing café”.
She is still looking for the right location in the area.
For example, she wrote her master's thesis for her studies at McDonald's in Wasserburg.
“Most of my customers are self-publishers,” reports Furch – i.e. authors who publish their works without a publisher.
This works, among other things, via online platforms such as Amazon.
Thematically, they are “mainly stories that have to do with love or science fiction dystopias”.
She writes in these areas herself - her customers appreciate that the editor knows what tension is important here.
“Since there are so many authors now, it is becoming increasingly difficult to stay in the black,” says the writer.
This business “requires a lot more than just being able to write: marketing and metadata for Google, etc.”
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During her creative stay in the USA, Furch thought clearly about this path.
“Six weeks without appointments, without having to talk to anyone.
That was incredibly liberating.” In this atmosphere, the author completed the rough version of her upcoming novel.
Working title: “Livia”.
A dystopia that deals with artificial intelligence.
She also wrote songs there and as a singer she is often on stage anyway.
“I plan to self-publish 'Livia' in the first half of the year,” reveals Furch.
At the same time, she repeatedly writes “pitches” for publishers, i.e. short versions, to draw attention to herself.
And the next novel is already far away.
“It's about the love of a pet,” says the 29-year-old, who is very fond of her poodle-schnauzer mix, Bertl.
Information: https://wortwuehlmaus.de