Tag: london book fair

APRIL: FOOL

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FOOL to think the winter was over! Sitting here today, I’ve seen sunshine, rain, hail, thunder and lightening while I work – talk about four seasons in a day, I think it was four seasons in an hour! There’s not been much going on this month. I’m waiting for final edits from my agent to come back and I’ve been on a much-needed holiday in the meantime. My son is away for a week – a whole week! SOB! – which you would have thought would be the perfect time to crack on with writing but has ended up consisting mainly of meeting with friends. School starts again next week though, and I’ll be back to the desk then with the goal of finishing up my third manuscript by summer! Fingers crossed for more rain, I suppose, or I’ll never get it done!

APRIL BOOK CHOICE

I took the opportunity while I was away to catch up on some of the CWIP Prize short listers, in preparation for meeting them at the awards party this coming Monday! Of course I’d already read a few of them, but ‘Impossible’ by Sarah Lotz was one I hadn’t heard of before and thought it looked like a good book to get lost in while I was laying on a sun bed. I was right! I enjoyed the book a lot although I’m not entirely sure I agree with Amazon’s headline of ‘a twist you won’t see coming’ … I saw it coming from a country mile away. However, it was well written with strong characters and the author clearly had fun with the world-building, which, I assume, is how it got selected for CWIP. There aren’t a whole load of LOLs in this one, but it is touching and funny and I enjoyed it very much. Hopefully see you at the party, Sarah!

APRIL TV CHOICE

GUILTY PLEASURE WARNING: The return of Grey’s for the second half of the season would usually fill me with joy but I have to say, it is SO. DULL. It’s like they took all the utterly mind numbingly boring character traits of Dr. Meredith and then made all the other actors on the show say her lines because she’s left. The scripts for Grey’s have always been formulaic… even Shonda will tell you there’s a generic way to write the script for each episode – but in the past few decades they’ve had their moments of producing some really, really great medical drama which, very simply, is why they’ve made it this far. Season 19 would not be one of these moments. I DO NOT CARE about the new interns. Giving them all the screen time with their fragility and hormones will not make me care more about them either. Worse, I don’t care about any of the old characters either. They have turned into cardboard cutouts, as dull and boring and grey as Meredith herself. So, dear reader, I have defected. I’ve been watching Old Amsterdam, which is basically another show based around a talented but flawed set of doctors, set in a busy public hospital in NYC. But it’s fresher and faster and a bit down and dirtier than Grey’s and I’m still in the first flush of getting to know the characters, which is kind of like starting a whole new relationship, and I’m enjoying it. It won’t set the world on fire, but it’s a nice way to spend the evening after a full day procrastinating about writing books.

APRIL RECIPE

I’ve reached a new low in writing/editing/eating crap this winter. Every day I pull out the same food: a cheese sandwich with marmite/cucumber/pickle – delete as appropriate –  crips, biscuits with a cuppa afterwards… and then sit eating while I work, effectively leaving my desk for as long as it takes to boil the kettle and slice the cheese. (What kind of useless writer procrastination is that?)

As a result I’ve developed what I like to term ‘Writer’s Arse’, and with the prospect of it maybe stopping raining at some point in the next six months, along with the sheer boredom of eating a cheese sandwich every day for weeks on end, I’ve decided to take a proper break and make myself something healthy and attractive, in the hope that it will make me go the same way if I do it often enough.

Today was day 1 and I made a roasted grape, pecan and goat cheese salad. You can find the recipe here (thanks Waitrose) https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/recipe/roasted-grape-goats-cheese-salad. It was bloody lovely! It took 10 minutes to make plus the time the oven took to heat up and was pretty filling too.

I halved the ingredients and used croutons I had in the cupboard rather than making my own, popping them in along with the cheese. Okay, it’s not exactly the lowest fat salad in the world but certainly better than what I was eating! And as a had to use a knife and fork, I couldn’t type while I ate either. Procrastination WIN.

MY MONTH AHEAD

Well, Monday is a VERY important night as it’s the Comedy Women in Print Prize! The wonderful Helen Lederer has pulled it off again, managing to put together authors, slebs, publishers, and a slew of witty women to celebrate all the amazing literature that’s been published in the past year – plus change the life of the lucky winner of the unpublished prize! I’m really looking forward to reconnecting with everyone and can’t wait to find out who’s won!

The rest of the month is dedicated to writing. Not much on the horizon in terms of promotional stuff at the moment… so if you are reading this and fancy having me come along to talk at an event or appear on the radio, run a quiz night, do a virtual book club… do get in touch!

Happy Springtime,

Fx

What I learned about self publishing at the London Book Fair

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I decided to brave the London Book Fair for the first time this year.

The LBF isn’t really for authors, but they do have a special little corner for us where talks are given and, if you were quick off the mark when the tickets went on sale, where you can get a 10-minute agent one-to-one to pitch your work. I’ve decided to use the fair to make some informed decisions regarding whether I should keep pursuing the traditional publishing route or self publish, so today I devoted my day to finding out about self publishing and sourcing people to help me do that.

EAC-The-Editors-Weekly-blog-Editors-and-Self-Publishing-Authors-Shipton

Self publishing feels like quite a daunting prospect, I don’t know why. It all seems like a lot of hard work. No, let’s put that another way:  it is a lot of hard work. And investment – of time and money – the returns on which are very unclear. I’ve toyed with the idea for sometime now but I’ve been unconvinced I’ll be very successful for a myriad of reasons: I don’t understand the tech, I’m scared of doing it wrong, I worry about wasting a lot of money on stuff I don’t need, I don’t know how to market my book to make people buy it, I won’t have the security blanket of an agent/publisher to help me make decisions, I will be the one to make all the decisions and they might be bad ones because I don’t know what I’m doing … I could go on. Basically, there’s a lot I don’t know.

Then of course there’s my ego. ‘Getting published’ sends a very clear message to your friends, family, adoring fans, unknown critics, etc etc., that you have been approved and endorsed by at least one other person who isn’t your mum.  Self publishing feels like you might have made it all up, that you are good at writing in any real way, like you paid your way into a world you don’t deserve to live in and it’s just going to be you and your mum buying 300 copies of a book for £2.27 plus postage and packing.

But today I listened to lots of people talking about the self-publishing experience and concluded that there are some very compelling reasons why I should get over myself and seriously think about doing it. In terms of control over your work and your career, it seems like self publishing beats trad hands down. You work at your own speed, have complete control of your end product (no editors changing your book title, ending, etc), retain the ability to flit between genres without upsetting a publisher who wants you to only write a certain kind of book, and stay directly in contact with your readers.

Of course, the little devil on my shoulder still says that self publishing means your book wasn’t ‘good enough’ to get picked up by an agent or publisher. And there is no doubt that for many people, the holy grail of getting one is the most important thing. But a number of authors who spoke today had deliberately chosen self publishing, even though they had been traditionally published before. Yes, there is a lack of reach, due to money and time and the ability to distribute across all the same channels as trad publishers enjoy. But something that really struck a chord for me was the entrepreneurial spirit of these authors: their joy in acquiring knowledge about the industry, the tech, the marketing and distribution; the buzz they clearly had, of being successful and respected, not only as authors but as business people too. It looked like a lot of fun.

The confidence in their product and the way they had got their stories out there was really interesting to observe. All of them had strengths and weaknesses; all of them identified their weaknesses, hired someone to do that bit of the process, and moved on. I thought about the crushing feeling of getting rejection after rejection, of the endless waiting to hear from an agent, of the vague notion that your book (as you wrote it) might never see the light of day. Your self confidence as a fledgling author is being permanently bashed up and it’s hard to stay positive when you’re staring into the abyss of having to do yet another submission to keep the dream alive. I’m finding it hard to be patient and stay positive through that. But then I thought about the motivation and satisfaction I get, from learning what good looks like. Of getting a job done well – and of having something to aim for – of having deadlines and being organised and in charge. I came to the conclusion that self publishing might just be a way to remove all the anxieties about being ‘good enough’ and just get on with achieving something.

One of the authors speaking made the point, that you will only ever be successful if you make your book indistinguishable from published authors of the same genre, which means you have to write a very good book. So either way, you have to write a very good book. How you get it out there and convince people to read it is purely down to luck, personal preference, or because your cousin’s husband works for a literary agent. So, lots to think about. Tomorrow I’m back to the LBF to pitch to an agent and consider the trad route. It will be interesting to compare how I’m feeling about things after that. If my ego is still speaking to me by then, of course.