Laurie Graham's Blog, page 9

A quick post to acknowledge a hugely appreciated mention from Libby Purves in yesterday’s London Times. You can read it here.

Thanks too for your cover design comments which boosted my own inclination to go ‘graphic’. By this time next week I hope to have a cover ready for the oven.

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Today, a little market research. As you know, I don’t believe novels can be written by committee, which is why I’ve only ever listened to my editor, my agent and my husband, and not always to them, but in the matter of marketing a book, I’m a novice, and therefore all ears.

Dr Dan’s Casebook will be the first book of a series, so I need to create a brand ‘look’ for its cover that will be adaptable for future books. I’ve identified three possible approaches and I’d appreciate any feedback from my readers, bearing in mind that Dr Dan’s covers will only be seen online and thumbnail size. So, adaptable and clear, are priorities.

First option, an image of a patient. Second option, an image of a doctor (but no white coats). Too non-fiction-y? Third option, a simple graphic, such as an ECG trace. Fourth option???

Here are some test images. Email me your thoughts. Heaven knows, I got some lousy covers when I was in the hands of experts. Let’s see if we can do better.

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Wears Many Hats would be a good name for me if I had any Cherokee blood. But I don’t. I’m just a gal who’s done a lot of different jobs and I’m about to extend my CV even further. I’m becoming a publisher.

I have good news and bad. The bad news is, (and it’s official), that no publisher will touch me with a ten foot pole. Not because I can’t write but because my sales projections are on the feeble side of pathetic. I grieves me to tell you this because the very fact that you’re reading this blog suggests that you are one of those loyal readers who buys my books. But you are too few, the competition is fierce and nowadays the accountant is king. So that’s that. Let’s move along to the good news.

During these long months of famine I’ve been at work on a project, a series of novels, gentle comedies about a young doctor, and I’ll be publishing Book 1 of my Dr Dan series, in early to mid September. Book 2 will follow early next year, and Book 3 in the autumn of 2020. As a self-publisher I will have no distribution network so you won’t find my new books in the shops, but they’ll be available from Amazon, in paperback and on Kindle.

This is both exciting and scary because it’s a huge undertaking but the alternative   –  to crawl away with my backlist and hide under a rock –  is unthinkable.  So, I can no longer be just a writer. I now have to be a project manager, editor, designer and marketer. In my spare time I plan to make jam and work for world peace.

There are a couple of things you can do if you’d like to put your shoulder to the wheel. If you are a retired copy editor or graphic designer, willing to work for a modest consideration (a bottle of champagne) please speak up.  Ditto if you’re a retired medic with an hour or two to spare to check copy for clinical howlers (remuneration as above). And if you have not yet signed up to my mailing list, please, please do so because that’s how I’ll be letting people know about release dates etc.

Thank you for your patience. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

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Well, not quite. Land of my great-great-great grandfather, to be accurate. On Monday I’m off to Wales to visit the little town where my ancestor was born and try out my Welsh, in the wild.  

We go back a long way, Welsh and I. My first boyfriend had family in the Rhondda Valley and I was so smitten by the language I bought myself a copy of Teach Yourself Welsh. That’s the nerdy kind of sixteen year old I was. I don’t know what happened to the book or the boyfriend, but the itch never quite went away. Which is why, more than 50 years later, I decided to do something about it. An Englishwoman, living in Ireland, learning Welsh. It made perfect sense, right?

Last summer I signed up for something called Say Something in Welsh. As a veteran language learner who has spent more money on textbooks and hours in airless classrooms than I care to count, I was ready for a new approach. A ‘put the books away and just speak, damn it’ method. And that’s what I’ve been doing. Three or four hours a week, at my own convenience, with occasional episodes of brain-fry, some new friends and the very exciting fact that I can actually speak a bit of Welsh and recognise about one word in ten when I listen to Radio Cymru. I mean, how thrilling is that? If you have ever thought of learning Welsh (or Spanish, or Dutch, two other languages they currently offer), Say Something is the business.  And they haven’t paid me to say that.

So this blog is going dark for a couple of weeks, though I won’t be slacking. Quite aside from achieving  my weekly word count I have a granddaughter’s ballet show to attend and my newest grandson’s first trip to the seaside to organise. Oh, and I’ll be on cat litter tray jankers too.

I leave you with a little bonus: a couple of videos of my favourite Welsh hymn, Calon Lan. There is something so distinctive about the sound of a Welsh male voice choir that I had to include this one, with Bryn enjoying himself. But my first prize goes, hands down, to this crowd, singing their little red socks off.

Hwyl am y tro!

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I’m always piggishly interested in what people are eating so I just had to have a look at the menu for the State Banquet HM Queen gave for President Trump last week. The dessert was listed as Strawberry Sable.

Now I’m not a pastry expert but I knew there was a pastry French patissiers make called sablee. Was ‘sable’ a misprint, or an attempt at making, say, strawberry shortcake, sound more sophisticated and worthy of all those candelabra? Sable is the French word for sand, and my shortcake is definitely gritty because I add rice flour or semolina to the mix, depending on what I have to hand. A little research proved that the recipes for shortcake/shortbread/pate sablee are practically identical. So now we know what The Donald had for pud. Of course, having thought about strawberry shortcake I then wanted to eat it. You can therefore guess how my Saturday afternoon was spent. Restraint, though, got the better part of greed and I made little shortcakes, the better to eke out the treat over the next few days.

So that was ‘sable’ sorted. But sometimes there are words we use day in, day out, without any idea where they came from. Here’s one for you: book. No, me either, but thanks to Dot Wordsworth of The Spectator, I know now and will share with you.

People used to write on the inner bark of beech trees. In Latin it was called liber. See where this is going? The Old English word for a beech tree was bok. I concede that acquiring this piece of information isn’t as useful as remembering where I put my stapler, but it’s still rather nice to have.

One last thing today. If you haven’t joined my mailing list please go to the sign-up page and do so. I promise you won’t get inundated with annoying emails but if, as looks increasingly likely, I self-publish a book later this year, you dear readers, will be the first to sample it.

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It’s strange how something you’ve enjoyed can disappear from your life and all too soon you forget about it, and then, if it returns, you wonder how you’ve managed without it. This week Garrison Keillor’s resurrected Writer’s Almanac popped up in my mail box. First thought: yeah! Second thought: what callow breed of fan are you that you’d forgotten how much you missed it?    

Over the years GK, a crumpled maestro of self-deprecation, has brought much joy to my life. I love his books. I love singing along to A Prairie Home Companion. And now there’s the unexpected pleasure of a revived Almanac.

The Writer’s Almanac is a daily shot of information, delight and whimsy. Subscribe to it. You won’t be sorry. Until it disappears again. You usually get a poem as well as all the other stuff and I quote today’s in full because, well, you’ll see. Now read on.

Advice from a Bat

by Michael T. Young

Hunt only at night. Fly erratically.

Defy even your own expectations.

Feed on beetles, moths, and mosquitoes,

whatever is small and annoying.

Cultivate the myths about you

until every predator fears your legend.

When hunting, be guided by a language

only you can hear. The same is true

when courting the one you love.

Clean fangs and fur nightly. Crawl

or climb to confuse the observant.

Retreat to a cave no one believes in.

Let the day and the world pass

while you sleep, and sleep upside down,

ready to wake and fall into flight.

“Advice from a Bat” by Michael T. Young from The Infinite Doctrine of Water. © Terrapin Books, 2018.

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First, dear readers, thank you for your kind words of encouragement. You may not realise quite how important they are to a writer who works in fairly isolated circumstances. There are twin occupational hazards: that you’ll become deluded about the true scale of your own talent, an embittered mutterer against the world of publishing, or that you’ll lose all self-confidence and give up. Readers who are genuinely hoping for another book are the perfect antidote to either tendency.

These are challenging (and exciting) times for me, as the prospect of self-publishing looks ever more likely, and I have never missed my husband more than I do now. He was a great sounding board, a fount of ideas and also a bit of a fan. But on, on.

People often ask me about creative writing groups and book clubs. As a writer I love book clubs, but I don’t want to belong to one.  I need personal control of my precious reading time. and I don’t necessarily want to read the police procedural your sister-in-law loved.

As for creative writing, that would truly be a busman’s holiday. I know professional writers who never switch off, who only hang out with other writers and talk shop. I can’t think of anything worse. Writers need a varied diet. They need to get out and about.

Mondays, I have a Welsh lesson, and walk down to the harbour in search of seals. Tuesdays I take my tapestry to the church craft bee. Wednesdays, I’m a hermit. Thursdays, I visit my husband, then cheer myself up by buying cake and eavesdropping on conversations during my train ride home. Fridays, I play catch-up in order to achieve my weekly target of five thousand words. Weekends, I change the sheets and learn how to self-publish. I tell ya. Life’s rich variety.

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So we have a new Poet Laureate. For my non-Brit readers, this is a position conferred by our monarch (as advised by the Prime Minister) and worth, in addition to the honour, £5750 a year plus a butt of sack.  The laurels now sit on the brow of Simon Armitage, who used to work as a probation officer, so no whiff of an ivory tower there. And as a son of God’s Own County, he’d probably be happy to swap the sack for a cask of Ossett’s Yorkshire Blonde.

Mr Armitage has been told by Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, a Government department as philistine in its opinions as in its title, that he is under no obligation to write poems alluding to Royal events.  Or indeed any poems at all. Well. What would Lord Tennyson say?

What our new Laureate says is, that he has no idea what he’ll write. I imagine two of his predecessors might be on the phone to him with words of advice any day. Andrew Motion got mocked for his poem on the occasion of Prince Charles’s marriage to Camilla. Carol Ann Duffy, the gay Laureate who wrote something for Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding, got lambasted by the sistahood for celebrating a traditional heterosexual marriage. A minefield.

From his statements since his appointment, Simon Armitage sounds pretty ‘woke’. He says he hopes he won’t be judged on his identity as a white male. What can he mean? What’s wrong with being a white male? If we’ve so far only had one female Poet Laureate it’s possibly because women are often too busy keeping the world running smoothly to be full-time poets.  Was it just a touch of self-deprecation? It was public knowledge that he hadn’t been the first choice candidate. That was Imtiaz Dharker, a female, Glaswegian Pakistani, who declined the honour because of the demands of the position. Which are what exactly? To encourage the nation, particularly children, to read and write poetry? Good, fine. But I still think we’re owed the occasional encomium.

I’m no poet but I thought I’d offer something to encourage Mr Armitage in his new role.

Hail, laureled poet, Y-chromosom’d and pale.

Theresa says no need of toadying lines.

Just trade the sherry for some Theakston’s ale.

Okay, it’s a work in progress.

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No, I haven’t been on holiday all the time since my last post. Simply that I still don’t have a publisher and it’s now getting embarrassing when people ask. Also, beyond depressing. Thirty years, never out of print, and now this. I mean….

So although I haven’t yet given the order to lower the lifeboats, I do have a plan. If no-one has snapped me up by August I’ll self-publish. To which end, I’m now scheduling one day a week to learn how self-publishing is done. There are other new skills I’d much rather be acquiring, but there it is. Needs must.

I’m currently working on Book 2 of a series no-one wants and have co-opted Sir Harry Lauder as my personal trainer. You too can get spurred on here. ‘Round the bend’ is about right!

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I’m often asked what I think of e-books. It’s difficult to give a simple answer. As a reader, I’m all in favour because I travel a lot and I don’t always know what I’m going to fancy reading while I’m on the road. This week, for instance, much as I’ve been looking forward to Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor, it will have to stay home. It’s too heavy for my luggage. Instead I’ll read Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights which I loaded onto my Kindle a while ago.

Books are a major item of expenditure for me these days. I don’t run a car. I only drink when I have either a very good reason or company. And since my hairdresser decided to go stratospheric with his prices I’m down to five cuts a year. But books…. can’t resist them. Hardback, mass market, secondhand and electronic. I buy them all.

For a writer, e-books have now become bad news. When they first appeared we still earned a decent royalty rate because publishers thought e-books probably wouldn’t catch on. Then they woke up. They screwed the royalty rate down to an iniquitous 25% and we authors rolled over and accepted our fate. Amazon piled on the agony (and yes, I too buy stuff from them, notably, recently, a catnip banana and a lefthanded pen) by demanding big discounts. So Amazon squeezes publishers and no prizes for guessing who the publishers squeeze.

The only way I can see this changing is if best-selling authors make a stand on behalf of us also-rans. They are the ones with enough clout to demand a perfectly fair 50% royalty rate on electronic books, for all of us. How can publishers possibly justify pocketing 75% of earnings on something delivered to buyers wirelessly? Anyone listening? J K Rowling? Ian Rankin? Sophie Kinsella? Failing that, full-time writing is going to disappear as a profession. We’ll be like lamplighters and milkmen. Fondly remembered ghosts from Ye Olden Days.

I’m now going to disappear but only for a few weeks. I’ll be back after Easter with, who knows, perhaps some good publishing news.  Oh, low-flying pig overhead.

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