Andrew Crofts

Writing Books is Tennis for the Brain

2012-01-31T07:18:00.000-08:00

So, Jonathan Franzen fears printed books are going to disappear and Ewan Morrison predicts an e-publishing bubble that’s going to end somewhere between sub-prime mortgages and tulip fever, ruining lives and crashing banks – I exaggerate, but then so do they.

Let’s think of writing books as being more like tennis for the brain, or maybe even golf for the brain. Millions of people join golf clubs and take tennis lessons in order to enjoy the sport, get fit, amuse themselves or socialise. Some of these enthusiasts are able to hire personal coaches, others join expensive clubs, maybe even build their own private tennis courts. Many fantasise about winning Wimbledon or the British Open, others are lucky enough to become coaches themselves or work in sports shops.But just because these enthusiasts sometimes dream of becoming Rafa or Tiger doesn't mean they actually expect it to happen. They know in their hearts that these champions are born with something special and then dedicate their lives to improving themselves in ways that most people cannot possibly hope to achieve, and would not wish to do.

Where once the manuscripts that people wrote for a variety of personal reasons ended up languishing in their bottom drawers, they are now able to languish as e-books, a little bit further along the publishing food chain, a little bit more visible, a tiny bit more likely to be spotted by someone who might be able to lift them to another level. One or two of them might even make it all the way to championship level, up there with the works of Franzen and Morrison. The fact that most of them will get no further at all hardly turns e-publishing into a confidence trick, a bubble or a pyramid selling scam. Some people who fail to reach the giddy heights of a Franzen or Morrison will still be able to take pleasure from the act of writing, from seeing their words coming into existence on a page or a screen. They might even continue to hold onto dreams of one day “breaking through” into the big time. Or they might decide to teach writing instead, or dabble in journalism or blogging or just get on with something else, (tennis or golf perhaps, painting or child rearing).

Very few of the crowds who start out with hopes of becoming successfully published writers get as far as they first dreamed they might, but isn’t that the same in any walk of life? And is it a reason to make doom-laden predictions about bursting bubbles and the death of the book? As long as there are people wanting to buy printed books there will be publishers and authors wanting to supply them and the cyberstore of e-books can grow as wide as the blogosphere without causing anyone any terrible financial pain. I think Messrs Franzen and Morrison can relax a little

An Amazon Superstore in Every High Street

2012-01-30T09:03:00.001-08:00

Despite the fact that millions of us love to avail ourselves of its services, Amazon has taken over from the supermarkets as the “number one hate figure” of the publishing and bookselling worlds, apparently responsible for the genteel but inevitable decline of the traditional book shop that we all profess to love but not enough of us support.

Maybe Amazon should make themselves more cuddly by expanding into bricks and mortar themselves. (I know there has been talk of them creating “Argos-style” pick up points for their products, but I am suggesting something with a little more vision).
If they want to become more loved by the public – and if they are sitting on piles of cash which I assume they are or so many people wouldn’t hate them as much as they do - why not open Amazon stores that are as cool and beautiful as the Apple Stores?

As well as being able to see and handle, sample and sniff the books before ordering them, customers could be immersed in the whole publishing experience. There could be authors talking from big screens or available via headphones like in the record shops some of us remember so fondly. There could be live talks going on by anyone from Jonathan Franzen to Dan Brown if the “footfall” was large enough to attract them. There could be coffee houses that Samuel Johnson would have been happy to hang out in, and reading areas where new models of Kindles can be tried out and newspapers read like in the public libraries we all want to save, (and in the more up-market coffee shops where book group denizens already meet and chat). There could be editors, designers and printers available to turn self-published e-books into beautifully printed and bound limited editions for customers to carry proudly away with them - imagine the christmas gift potential of elegantly published family histories!

The underlying elephant in the room of publishing and traditional bookselling is that there simply isn’t enough money in the business to make it viable and buzzy enough to attract the crowds, but is that true now that people buy kindles and iPads and download at the press of a button?

We need to re-invigorate the nation’s town centres and high streets and if Amazon are the people with the money should we not be looking to them to fill the empty spaces with imagination and flair? If they are moving into traditional publishing, why shouldn’t they move into traditional bookselling as well – only with some 21st century style?

Many will hate the idea of course because it is potentially brash and vulgar and might prove popular with the sort of people who do not usually grace the older style of bookshops – but aren’t they exactly the people most authors want to reach? If the concept is fantastically successful then of course that will lead to Amazon becoming even more all-powerful and rich – but who else in the words business is currently rich enough to take the chance of the whole thing being an absolute disaster?

Most Glamorous Ghostwriter

2012-01-20T10:11:00.000-08:00

As if Ewan McGregor, (in Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost”), wasn’t enough, we now have a new contestant for “most glamorous ghostwriter” in Charlize Theron, (huge movie star and also the golden lady who strides out and sheds her golden clothes and golden jewels on television every Christmas in order to sell us J’adore perfume). In “Young Adult”, a new film just out in America, she plays the anonymous writer of “Young Adult” fantasies who is also, co-incidentally, devoid of any “moral compass”. Oh well, at least she looks good. Any other nominations for "Most Glamorous Ghostwriter"?

Ghostwriters and Biographers as Gift Items

2011-12-30T10:01:00.000-08:00

Following a recent trip to Bangkok, (see previous blog entry), I have been thinking about this concept of ghostwriters and biographers as gift items. I have recently been commissioned for a number of such projects. One client, for instance, wished to write his autobiography in order to present it to his grandson. He had no expectation that the grandson would actually read it for many years to come, he just wanted it to be there, ready for the day when it might seem a tempting proposition. A couple of other clients have presented me to recipients who they knew wanted to write books but who they also knew would never get round to tackling such a daunting task without help.

Millions of people are now hooked on the idea of tracing their family histories. I have met enough of them personally to know they would be thrilled to discover that their great grandmother or great uncle had written a book chronicling family relationships, homes, businesses and – with any luck – scandals. It wouldn’t matter if the books had been read by no one since the day they were written, to that particular researcher they would be absolute gold dust.

It might once have been called vanity publishing – and if the author is persuaded to part with money on the promise of becoming a bestseller, then it still should be – but if all you are doing is leaving a record for future generations is it any more “vain” than commissioning a portrait painter or an architect to create a great family home?

Printing books to a high standard is no longer hard. It can be done on line at sites like Lulu.com or by the many specialist self-publishing companies, but writing the books in a readable style can be more challenging and that is where the specialist skills of the ghostwriter or biographer come in.

Given Away in Bangkok

2011-12-30T08:47:00.000-08:00

(This blog was previously published on the excellent "Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?" site: http://authorselectric.blogspot.com/ )

I was sent to Bangkok as a gift this month. I was to be presented at a party to the host, who had long said he wanted to write a book and whose family thought he would welcome the help of a ghost. The family did not ask me to go to the Orient gift-wrapped, but they did ask me to take with me a mock-up of a possible cover of the book, so that there would be something tangible to be handed over, something that would show instantly what the gift was.

That got me thinking about the place for printed books now that we are all concentrating so hard on understanding the dynamic of the electronic versions. This imaginative idea of the book as a prestigious gift would not have worked so well if presented in e-book form. It would have lacked the cultural resonance of the print version. The recipient of the gift would not have been able to pick it up, turn it over in his hands and pass it round the guests who had assembled for the presentation beneath the hotel’s palm trees.

E-books are undoubtedly the way forward when it comes to getting writers’ work out there, showcasing it, distributing it more economically and ecologically, but when it comes to creating a product with special meaning, and for limited editions that are to be displayed as well as read, print will no doubt live on for a long time. Books that might be read by millions on screens, can still be produced in special editions for hundreds or thousands of collectors and enthusiasts.

The hotel in Bangkok where the four day party was being thrown, was next to a mighty new shopping mall, which had a whole floor dedicated to information and communication. Wandering past the bustling, beautiful stores belonging to brands like Apple, Blackberry and Nokia, I found in the middle of the concourse the most beautifully presented book shop. Half of it was dedicated to English language books and there were hundreds of well displayed, well designed, tempting books. The aisles were full of browsers and there was steady business at the tills. I know very little about the Thai book market. It may well be that retail rents are much lower than in Europe, but whatever the reason it was a wonderful experience to find books so integrated into this very modern shopping experience, seeing them finding their place amongst the Smart phones and tablets. It seemed like a glimpse into a harmonious future, bringing the works of writers to readers in an attractive way that we are still only stumbling towards in Britain.

BBC's "Imagine" Explains the Current State of Publishing Perfectly

2011-12-15T04:18:00.000-08:00

With so much confusion and hype all around the publishing and reading world - are printed books dead in the water? Is Amazon going to take over the world? etc - it was good to have the whole business put into a very positive perspective by the BBC on Imagine - (Episode 6. "The Last Chapter").

The way I came to the programme seems to illustrate the subject rather effectively.
1. At a Society of Authors gathering another writer says "did you see Alan Yentob on Imagine last night?"
2. I went straight to Iplayer and found it.
3. I played it on my Ipad while answering emails on my computer.

Anyway, my point is - if you are looking for some erudite illumination on the state of publishing, this is the programme for you. http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01871m9/

Mariella Frostrup Plays the Mischievous Minx

2011-11-18T07:28:00.000-08:00

It all started with the Book Show from Sky Arts turning up at the house to film me waffling about ghostwriting. Pleasant sunny day, guard down, camera running, my questioner enquired if I wouldn't prefer to write "in my own voice", or something similar.
What I wanted to convey was the idea that I wasn't particularly interested in hearing anything I had to say, but I was interested in hearing from other people with more interesting backgrounds. What actually happened was I proferred the opinion that the world had heard enough over the last five hundred years of people like me, ("middleclass, middleaged, middlebrow, male and english speaking"), pontificating and that it was time to give the rest of the world a bit of hearing.
The filmed interviews ended, (Hunter Davies and Kirsty Crawford had also appeared and been very charming), and the viewers were returned to the studio where, to my horror, distinguished novelists Robert Harris and Peter James sat listening to me pontificating, as if deliberately illustrating my own point, (if only I could lay claim to such subtle powers of irony). Mariella Frostrup, armed with her most disarming of smiles, then suggested to them that they were the under attack as "middleaged, middleclass, male and english speaking pontificators", (mercifully she let them off the "middlebrow" accusation).
Eek. These two were most defintely not who I had in mind. Most of Peter James's books of crime and policework are very much not set in the world of the middleclass etc etc, and Robert Harris tells tales on the very rich and very powerful, who are just as colourful and interesting as the underdogs of society. To make it worse, I know them both. Peter is a chum of long standing and Robert very sweetly quoted my "Ghostwriting" book at the start of every chapter of his novel, "The Ghost".
Both of them, mercifully, did not rise to the bait that the Mischievous One was dangling and doled out only the mildest of reprimands before saying very forgiving things. I felt a little like I had been hauled into the common room and told off by two much admired teachers for some piece of smart-alecry which I had meant for other staff members. Yet another illustration of why it is infinitely preferable to stay behind the scenes as a ghost and let other people do the media pontificating.

Posh-Publishing Embraces Self-Publishing

2011-11-11T08:13:00.000-08:00

Faber and Faber, poshest of the posh old guard publishers, (T.S. Eliot, Peter Carey, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath - you get the picture), run a thing called The Faber Academy - http://www.faberacademy.co.uk/ - and are launching a three-day course on self-publishing in February 2012 entitled "Bring Your Book to Market". The tutors are Ben Johncock http://www.benjohncock.com/ and Catherine Ryan Howard http://www.catherineryanhoward.com/ .

I met Mr Johncock, who runs a thing called The Twitter Consultancy, in a BBC radio studio in Oxford a year or two ago. I was still somewhat in a funk about social media at the time, but already uneasily aware that the things this extraordinarily bouncy young man was talking about were probably the future and sooner or later I was going to have to get my head round them. (The programme was being mediated by the fabulous Sue Cook - http://www.suecook.com/ - who was also proselytising on the joys of social media, making me even more aware that I might be cowering a little further from the cutting edge than was wise).

Catherine Ryan Howard I have not met, but she is a successful self published author and comes across on her website/blog etc as being very jolly, truthful, self-aware and endearing.

Not only are Faber and Faber an extremely bright bunch of people, (their editors re-wrote "Lord of the Flies" for William Golding for heaven's sake), they are also not afraid of things cutting edge - a point proven by their recent adoption of Jarvis Cocker as Editor-at-Large, which followed a similar appointment for Peter Townshend some time ago, when the old boy was still pretty cutting edge himself. If they are embracing the idea of self-publishing and the need for us to learn how to use social media properly, then I think we can safely assume that there is now no going back.

I find this is all enormously encouraging having just launched an ebook of my own, "The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer", (http://www.maggiedebeer.com/) and opened a Twitter account.

A Triumph for Fine Ghostwriting

2011-11-10T04:05:00.000-08:00

The announcement from New York that Keith Richards has won the Mailer Prize for Distinguished Biography is a wonderful endorsement for the writing skills of Mr Richards' ghost/collaborator/whatever-you-like-to-call-him, James Fox.
The whole project illustrates perfectly the joys, (and doubtless frustrations), that the process of ghostwriting for an interesting subject can provide. Mr Richards has led the most interesting and entertaining of lives. Spending time with him and then speaking in his voice must have been fun. To then be awarded a "distinguished" prize would be a very jolly cherry on top of the cake.
Mr Fox is, of course, a highly established writer, (and author of the very famous "White Mischief"), so I am sure he has no problem with Mr Richards picking up the prize and the attendant publicity which will help to keep the royalties flowing.

Are Blogs the Perfect Writers' Medium?

2011-11-08T13:23:00.000-08:00

Amidst the razzle dazzle of Twitter, Facebook and the rest, it is easy to overlook the wonders of the humble blog. For writers they must be the greatest form of communication that the producers of the electronic media have yet presented to us. Now we can be editors and star contributors of our own magazines, writing and publishing the articles that we would normally be trying to persuade others to publish, able to pursue our hobby horses at full gallop and shamelessly plug the work of those we admire.
I have been particularly converted by Morgen Bailey's Writing Blog, (and here it would only be seemly to admit that I have been both interviewed by Morgen http://wp.me/p18Ztn-1e5 and have also written a guest piece http://wp.me/p18Ztn-1fa ).
Regardless of the obvious vested interests at work here, I would still like to sing the praises of blogs such as these. There are companies now who offer to organise "virtual book tours" which, if I have undestood correctly, largely involve people being interviewed or writing about their latest book on other people's blogs in much the same way they would in old fashioned media like television "sofa shows" and the features pages of the old "grey-prints".
Each blog may have no more than a few hundred or a few thousand followers, but then many of the best literary magazines had similarly modest but extremely devoted readerships.

Self-Publishing Moves into the Mainstream

2011-10-31T02:09:00.000-07:00

The idea that The Bookseller magazine, that venerable trade organ for the traditional publishing process, would dedicate four pages of editorial for a "Flagship Feature" on self-publishing would have been unthinkable even a short time ago, but that is what happened at the end of last week Bookseller. The very suggestion of people publishing their own books has in the past brought forth patronising smirks at best, and howls of derision at worst, from those who believed such things should be left to the professionals.
All that has now changed and leading the charge is Alison Baverstock, (the author of the Bookseller feature), with the publication of her guide to self-publishing The Naked Author.
It would be hard to overstate what a seismic change in attitude this represents. Self-publishing does not in any way threaten the livelihoods of the existing publishing businesses that are able to add value for their customers in matters of packaging, distribution and marketing, but it does mean that a whole new cottage industry has been allowed to spring up and is now thriving thanks to a variety of factors coming together at the same time.
The Naked Author is an absolute milestone in this exciting journey.

Ghostwriter and Assassin Entwined

2011-10-24T04:40:00.000-07:00

A ghostwriter is once more in the spotlight in Haruki Murakami’s much publicised new novel, 1Q84.

Tengo is commissioned by a maverick publisher to “re-write” a compelling piece of prose written by an equally compelling teenage girl, leading him into the sort of adventure that tempted me to become a ghostwriter in the first place. (I haven’t finished reading it yet so it’s quite possible a fate will befall him which will make me reconsider my position there).

The chapters following Tengo’s adventure alternate with those following Aomame, an icy, glamorous, professional assassin. The stories of these two protagonists become increasingly entwined and there are, as you would expect from Mr Murakami, enough subtexts to feed the minds of several million ravenous readers.

I know I’m biased to an unreasonable degree, but I just love the idea of a ghostwriter being used alongside an assassin as a device to unravel plots and characters and trains of thought – just as Robert Harris did with his very different ghostwriter in The Ghost, (his protagonist ghosted non-fiction rather than fiction). Unravelling plots, characters and trains of thought is, after all, exactly what we are hired to do in the real world.

Books and Authors on Television

2011-10-19T01:12:00.000-07:00

Despite the phenomenal success of Richard and Judy’s Book Club, the myth persists that books and authors don’t play well on television. Never mind that virtually all the major drama series are adapted from books, (“The Slap” by Christos Tsiolkas being the latest one to be heavily trailered), and that virtually every major television personality writes books more often than cheques, (Jamie Oliver and Jeremy Clarkson must virtually support Penguin these days). In the last couple of days however I’ve seen two cheering little programmes.

First there was Diana Athill on Imagine. Ms Athill breaks virtually every rule of television; she is old, (women aren’t supposed to appear on the screen after their fortieth birthdays unless they are willing to don sequins and be mocked on the dance floor), she is unashamedly posh, (although she has a sexual history which would make an Essex reality girl blush), and she is mightily and unapologetically intelligent and literate. The reason she makes good television is because she is genuine and because she thinks and talks with an honesty and clarity which fairly takes your breath away.

The second programme was produced by The Culture Show and involved carting the Booker shortlist up to the village of Comrie and getting a variety of locals to read, comment and meet some of the authors. The result was a gentle half hour of interesting characters telling interesting stories. (The book which came off the worst was later announced to be the winner of the prize, which I guess goes to show just how far the literary world’s tastes sit from those of the majority of the reading public).

Surely there must be a wealth of this sort of unexploited television fodder gathering cobwebs in our remaining bookshops.

Chocolate Addiction and the Pursuit of Literary Excellence

2011-10-13T02:27:00.000-07:00

In the course of learning about Twitter, I have been stalking, (sorry – “following”), a number of authors and I have noticed an inordinate number of us flag up chocolate addiction in our personal profiles, (i.e. our identities as we see them). Where once authors were expected to be booze-soaked, chain smoking, serially promiscuous, unwashed and generally antisocial types, we are now more likely to list chocolate, caffeine and “the occasional glass of wine”, as our credentials for being considered bona fide garret-dwelling Bohemians. Speaking as someone who can never be too far from an espresso pot and a bumper bar of the dark and bitter stuff, I find this trend interesting. Have Messrs Starbucks and Costa done this to us, or is it the combined seductive powers of Joanne Harris and Juliette Binoche? I think some serious research is required. Good subject for a media studies dissertation or two, I say.

Rare Interview with Maggie de Beer

2011-10-12T03:02:00.001-07:00

Maggie de Beer has been famously reluctant to give interviews, reputedly on the advice of her management, who worry that some of her views might not chime well with modern sensibilities. The following extract from a Q & A with a literary journalist is therefore a rare, and shocking, glimpse behind the very controlled image that she normally allows the world to see.

Q. Many readers have been shocked by the apparent ease with which you put your career before your personal life. Some have suggested that it is a very male approach to ambition.

A. Well I can assure you I am all female, but I think people forget how different things are now to when I started in the seventies. The idea then of trailing a child along behind you to auditions – I assume that is what you are talking about – was just unthinkable. If you felt you had a destiny which you had to follow then you had to be single minded about it. It wasn’t just me. It happened to Shirley Bassey and many others. We had to make choices.

Q. Giving up your child for your career is certainly one thing that people have pointed to. But not many women would be able to walk away from their families when they are fifteen and never even look back. That is a very ruthless sort of ambition.

A. Ruthless is a horribly negative word, don’t you think? I prefer “focused”. I was totally focused on what I had to achieve. I couldn’t afford to have any excess emotional baggage. Women are now coming to realise that they really can’t “have it all” – they have to make choices.

Q. Do you feel you made all the right choices?

A. Yes, of course. I’m not saying they weren’t painful. They were, but there is no point in going on about it. All this weeping and wailing that goes on now, with everyone traumatised by the terrible things that have happened to them. Bad things happen to everyone. It is just boring. You have to focus on the positive, on the beautiful, on the exciting, the glamorous if you want to be a star in the true sense of the word.

Q. Sex has played a big part in your career.

A. I don’t know about that. Sex appeal certainly has, that is all part of the glamour, don’t you think?

Q. But you don’t talk about sex in your book (The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer). Is that deliberate?

A. I don’t choose to talk about sex much anyway. It’s not that interesting is it? Everyone does it – well most people, just like they go to the bathroom each day. I don’t want to read about it all the time.

Q. But for many years you were a stripper …

A. That’s a stupid, ugly word.

Q. What word would you prefer?

A. Exotic dancer, perhaps. Erotic actress. Real sex appeal is about what is hidden. It is a tease, a flirtation. Once everything is out in the open it is just farmyard rutting, don’t you think? Just anatomical descriptions. Whatever happened to romance and glamour? Can you imagine Audrey Hepburn describing what she did in bed in anatomical detail? Or Princess Grace? Of course you can’t.

http://www.maggiedebeer.com/

Video Trailers for Books

2011-10-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

Marketing books must be the hardest task in the media world – even harder than writing the damn things. No one has ever found a reliable method of raising a book above the bubble of competitive noise apart from the unpopular, (to other writers), move of linking up with celebrity names. Beyond that it is all a lottery – always has been and perhaps always will be. But new media give birth to new possibilities, and one way of bringing an unknown book alive for potential readers, (or potential publishers), is to make a book trailer, because with the internet we now have somewhere to showcase the resulting films. I had a go at it myself with an actress performing a monologue from the opening pages of “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride” (to see the result go to the home page of www.steffimcbride.com, below “The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer”). But others have taken the idea further, producing what look pretty much like full blown movie trailers. Terrence (Terry) King has produced a trailer, (go to http://terrenceking.wordpress.com ), to showcase his unpublished novel –“The Silent Partner” – which I think is a pretty compelling and digestible taster for the book.

Tweet Right Masterclass and Twittering Pirates.

2011-10-10T07:22:00.000-07:00

Determined to get on top of this Tweeting lark I purchased Tweet Right, by Nicola Morgan (www.helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com/ ) who is the world expert on assisting numbskulls to navigate these choppy seas – and at the same time experienced a baptism of fire when boarded by Twittering pirates last night. The pirates sent out mischievous and self-serving tweets in my name, (one had me telling my followers I had seen a really “bad blog” about them – which is dispiriting at any number of levels – the other merely had me recommending a weight loss article, which at least shows that the Twitter Pirates have some of the sharp entrepreneurial instincts of their seafaring ancestors). Nicola is wonderfully calming in her advice, and the Twitter police seem to have been quickly on the pirates’ trail, so hurrah and onward we sail on our voyage of discovery.

The Naked Celebrity

2011-10-07T03:47:00.001-07:00

Reflecting upon the simple brilliance of Alison Baverstock’s newly released title “The Naked Author” – I’m beginning to wish that instead of “The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer” I had suggested “The Naked Celebrity” as a title for Maggie’s frank revelations. It has that lovely film noir ring to it – the sort of thing you might see scrawled on a newspaper vendor’s board. Celebrities like Maggie are so very brave and selfless in baring their souls to their public, but the phrase also conjures up dark images of bodies in the woods and sinister subplots – Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson, Hendrix and Hutchence, Morrison and Mansfield, Polanski and Presley – so many vivid images have seeped into our brains from the fabulous, tragic, celebrity circus. http://www.maggiedebeer.com/

If You Don’t Appear in the Media, Do You Really Exist?

2011-10-05T03:10:00.000-07:00

Liz Hurley famously talked about people in the non-celebrity world as “civilians” and working with Maggie de Beer on her memoirs - "The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer" - has led me to think a little more deeply about why people like Liz and Maggie yearn so painfully to be famous and why they work so long and so hard to acquire and hold onto fame.

Maggie never really believed she existed until she read about herself in the papers or saw a picture of herself outside a theatre or flickering across a television screen. The moment she left home her family became invisible to her and only the faces she saw in the media remained real. The majority, those of us who are never photographed or filmed or talked about in the media, are a sort of grey wallpaper around the colourful contents of her celebrity room.

The media of course is a bigger playground now than it was when she first ran away from home in 1970. Now you can be famous simply for being on-line, for blogging, for having a YouTube video that goes viral. To Maggie that is not real fame, not the sort of iconic status that she dreamed of from the first moment she learned the legend of Marilyn Monroe, first saw the headlines that lifted Jackie O and Christine Keeler from the crowd, first felt the eyes of a crowd upon her.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/86679

www.MaggieDeBeer.com

Authors Stripped Naked

2011-10-03T02:24:00.000-07:00

Intrepid authors are now heading into the future alone, stripped of our protective layers of literary agents, editorial and publicity departments, (deprived also of the joys of rejection letters and remainders piles and saved from the jaws of the pulping machines).

Self publishing and electronic publishing are the future and Alison Baverstock – possibly our nation’s greatest living authority on the worlds of writing and publishing - has created a survival guide for us all in her new book The Naked Author, (published this week, ironically, by A&C Black, a particularly distinguished member of the old style of publishing houses).

I have seen the great Baverstock in action in both the lecture halls of Academe and amongst the denizens of the Society of Authors and the idea of her marching, naked and brave, into the future is a fine one indeed. She is our Lady Godiva. Where Jamie Oliver led, Baverstock will follow, where he opened up the secrets of cooking to everyman, she promises to do the same for publishing.

Amazon author profile

The Naked Author: a guide to self-publishing

Should Everyone Write a Book?

2011-09-30T04:36:00.000-07:00

“Everyone who wants to write a book should do it.” - The very idea brings knee-jerk reactions of horror from many. But if you suggested “everyone who wants to paint a picture should do it”, you would receive a much more forgiving response.

Is that because a painter is asking for only a few seconds of their audience’s time to appreciate their work – a few seconds that could also be combined with being in company or simply day dreaming - whereas a book might expect them to spend several hours of mental effort in its exclusive company?

But just because a book has been written doesn’t mean you have to read it unless you truly want to.

“But now every book can be self-published, so there is just too much stuff out there.”

Well yes, there is too much for anyone to ever hope to read more than a tiny percentage of the books that they might potentially enjoy. But returning to the artist/writer analogy; self publishing a book is really just like putting a frame around a painting, merely a practical way of making it easier for your audience to access your work should they wish to.

If only one person ever read your book and enjoyed it – or maybe if you simply enjoyed writing it – wouldn’t that be justification enough for doing it? Even if you fear that your writings seem mundane now, that doesn’t mean they will seem that way to anyone who might come across them in fifty or a hundred years time. Then your book may be providing a fascinating glimpse into the past, just as a painting produced today might make the perfect decoration for a house in the twenty second century.

What Would You Sacrifice to be Famous?

2011-09-29T00:31:00.000-07:00

A philosophy current prevailing in the popular media is that if you want to succeed, want to excel, want to be a winner, want to attain your dreams, you have to be entirely ruthless and single minded. The message is constantly being banged home in singing, dancing and other talent competitions. Chefs, business apprentices – they all have to give “110 per cent” of themselves to the job. But if you are giving everything, (plus a mythical extra ten percent), you are doubtless going to have to make some sacrifices in other areas. The hard working parent who later laments the time they didn’t spend “watching their children’s school plays” is a cliché, as is the child who grows up to resent his or her parents’ absence from their early years. Some people forgo relationships or let marriages and friendships slip in the rush to be “successful” or “rich” or “famous”.

Amongst other sacrifices, Maggie de Beer even gave up her own child in order to stay on her chosen career path, and that child eventually became the key to Maggie achieving everything she had ever dreamed of. That would suggest it was a sacrifice worth making – Maggie certainly believes so. But how many would be able to do such a thing to win their moment in the celebrity spotlight?

http://www.maggiedebeer.com/

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/86679

Autobiographies: the ultimate headstone inscriptions

2011-09-28T00:23:00.000-07:00

What would you like to see written on your gravestone? Usually when people ask that question they expect you to come up with a pithy one-liner, summing up the whole sorry business of life and death in a few choice words. But actually, if you have a bit of an ego, you’d probably prefer to see the crowds pouring into the graveyard to read the whole story. Why else do so many people want to write autobiographies if it isn’t to benefit from a little wipe with the brush of immortality?

Whether its a self-published tome for your grandchildren and great-grandchildren to pore over or a mighty scholarly work for the general public, being remembered by future generations, (and validated by the current ones), is what you hire the ghostwriters for.

For Maggie de Beer it was the ultimate prize in her quest to become an icon, to have written and printed evidence that she was a glamorous, interesting person, someone of note, even if it meant having her many shortcomings exposed to anyone with the price of a paperback or a download.

“What’s the point in being coy about it?” she would say, “Steffi’s told the whole world what a terrible person I am already anyway.”

http://www.andrewcrofts.com/ http://www.maggiedebeer.com/ https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/86679

Authors' Electric Dreams Blogspot

2011-09-26T23:41:00.000-07:00

Today I have written a short introduction to my electronic activities with "The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer" on a website called "Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?" - http://authorselectric.blogspot.com/ .
Because publishing books electronically is not hard - and because it is fun to do - millions of writers are now plunging like lemmings into the icy waters. The big question remains, just as in traditional publishing - how do we make our voices heard above such a mighty competitive roar?
Just as high streets shops, newspaper review sections and Richard and Judy helped to focus people's attention onto traditional books, sites like this one are starting to give some structure to the babble of this gigantic, sprawling, exciting new marketplace.

Were "Page Three Girls" the Founders of Modern Celebrity Culture?

2011-09-24T03:44:00.001-07:00

Spending time with Maggie de Beer, helping promote her autobiography – “The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer” - has led me to pondering. Would it be fair to say that she and her fellow “Page Three Girls” became the founders of the modern celebrity circus in 1970 when they were persuaded for the first time by The Sun to take off their tops in a national newspaper?

Was that the moment when the concept of “being famous for being famous” first took root, when someone merely had to look sexy in front of a camera to start being treated as a VIP?

Of course the Sixties witnessed many meteoric and fleeting success stories, but those celebrities had usually sung a hit song, taken a photograph for the cover of Vogue or invented a new hairstyle. When glamour modelling went legit and the media started to write about the girls as well as showing their pictures it discovered the public’s surprising willingness to be intrigued, a fascination which survives forty years later with the likes of Katie Price and reality show contestants. I doubt if Maggie and the other girls had any idea they were changing society forever when first persuaded to whip their tops off for the boys.

Famous Mother and Daughter Reunited on Website

2011-09-23T05:57:00.000-07:00

To be separated from your child at birth must be one of the most painful experiences any mother can endure. Worse of course to have them die before you, but there is a very special agony in knowing that they are alive, growing up somewhere else, in someone else’s care, loving someone else, and that you have no part in their lives.

The reunion of such mothers with their lost children is bound to be fraught with dangers. What if they hate you? Blame you? Want nothing to do with you? What if they have been told nothing of your existence and would prefer not to be disillusioned about those they believe to be their true parents? What if it looks like you are back only to cash in on their good fortune and new found fame?

Despite all of the above we have a happy ending for Maggie de Beer and Steffi McBride – mother and daughter are now reunited on a new website, with both of them telling their sides of the dramatic story of both their rises to fame and the secret that kept them apart for so many years.

http://www.maggiedebeer.com/

Maggie and Me in Seventies London

2011-09-22T00:45:00.000-07:00

Maggie de Beer and I arrived in London in the same year – 1970, although she was only 15 and I was by then a sophisticated 17. We both had our fabulous dreams. She was going to be a star and I had my lightweight portable typewriter, which I trusted was going to make my fortune.

Of course she ended up as a national treasure through the wonders of reality television and the celebrity media circus and I am no more than a Boswell to her soaring Johnson, but I feel we understand one another. We share a timeline, arriving in Earls Court, sandwiched between the much trendier areas of Chelsea and Kensington, on the tail end of the much trendier Swinging Sixties. Then it felt like we had come in at the end of the party, but everything was about to change. Credit cards and parking meters were still a rarity and we had Hughie Green rather than Simon Cowell, Petula Clark rather than Lady Gaga.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/86679

Learning to Love Maggie de Beer

2011-09-19T02:58:00.000-07:00

Maggie de Beer first came to my attention half way through the writing of a memoir for her daughter – Steffi McBride. In fact that was when Steffi first learned of her existence too, (it’s all explained in her book “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”).

Initially, of course, Maggie’s behaviour seemed pretty indefensible – I mean giving up your child for the sake of your career, particularly a career like hers, is hardly the work of heroines – but as I got to know her better I became intrigued. It must have taken some guts to leave a safe and secure home at fifteen and never look back, and the woman had to be admired for her single minded perseverance in her pursuit of fame and glamour. She endured over thirty years of endless disappointment but she managed to keep on believing in herself and refused to give up hope.

Of course she only got her big break because of Steffi, but my God she was ready for it when it came, knowing exactly how to exploit this window of opportunity for all it was worth.

I found myself becoming increasingly fascinated by her single minded personal ambition to be famous and adored, and so I wrote her side of the story, starting with her leaving home in 1970 and then following her through to the eventual rise to fame she had worked so long and hard for. Her story pretty much mirrors the rise of today’s celebrity culture itself, from the arrival of “Page Three” girls through to the explosion of reality television nearly forty years later.

One of the attractive things about Maggie is her refusal to complain about the terrible price she had to pay for having her fabulous dreams come true.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/86679

From "Blockbusters" to "Systemcrashers"

2011-09-07T01:19:00.000-07:00

So, the button has been pressed and The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer are available for the whole world to read at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/86679 . Simple. People don't even have to worry about queueing round the block to get their copy. Instead of "blockbusters" authors should now aim to produce "systemcrashers".

Maggie de Beer Cover Image

2011-09-06T02:13:00.000-07:00

We have an excellent new cover. Using the same model, (see picture in previous post), designer Elliot Thomson has created a look which is eerily reminiscent of the sort of poster I would have had on the walls of my Earls Court bedsit in the very early Seventies.

My publisher, Paul Hurst, is now preparing for the technical launch into the cyber marketplace.

Fifteen year-old Maggie arrives in London on the run from her humdrum suburban life, determined to make it big in show business.

For more than thirty years she is exploited by both men and the media. She struggles against endless set-backs and disappointments, always remaining optimistic, always believing that this time her big break has come. Then, when most of us would have given up all hope, the celebrity circus rockets her to bizarre and unexpected pinnacles of fame.

Starting in 1970 Maggie de Beer’s journey mirrors the rise of celebrity culture and the growth of the media which ruthlessly created it, exploiting and destroying the lives of girls like Maggie who willingly offered themselves up, happy to make any amount of personal sacrifices in exchange for a chance to live the dream. She is determined to make herself “interesting” and only when she finally achieves her goal, at enormous personal cost, does she discover, under the full glare of the media spotlight, that the family she was running away from was never as humdrum as she had believed.

“This, I thought as the chauffeured car slid me back from Park Lane to Earls Court behind darkened windows, is what life must have been like for party girls like Christine Keeler in the sixties. I had found my Xanadu, the place where I was meant to be …”

This is the story of a woman who just wanted to be recognised and loved by the whole world.

Self-Publishing an E-book

2011-08-24T07:58:00.000-07:00

Last week I led a debate at a Southeast Authors meeting entitled "Should authors be publishers?"

The more I delved into the history of publishing, back to the days when authors, booksellers and printers did the whole thing themselves, the more convinced I became that maybe this is a good time to get back to basics.

For about a quarter of a millenium we have all been focusing on pleasing publishers, (and for the last quarter of a century we have done the same with literary agents), and have rather forgotten that it is ultimately only the readers who matter. The problem is finding ways to reach them efficiently, which is where traditional publishing houses have been helping out.

But now we have the electronic media, which allows us to take at least the initial steps to market by ourselves, (with the help of a few experts), and so I am setting out on the e-book publication trail.

I have enlisted the help of Paul Hurst, a self-confessed geek, (http://www.publish-ebooks.com/), and Elliot Thomson, a designer who has done a brilliant cover design for one of my ghosted books in the past (http://www.preamptive.com/), and I will keep the blog appraised of progress as we stumble forward together.

The book is called "The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer" and the blurb currently runs something like this:

Fifteen year-old Maggie arrives in London on the run from her humdrum suburban life, determined to make it big in show business.

This is the story of a woman who just wanted to be recognised and loved by the public.

Professor Sutherland Among the Ghosts

2011-06-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

Coming across a witty article in The Spectator by Professor John Sutherland entitled "Among the Ghosts", reminded me of the last time I heard him speak on the subject on Radio Four's Today programme, when John Humphreys and his production team were obviously hoping the Professor and I would fall out on the subject of whether ghost-writing is a "capital crime" - even the Professor had to admit that it was not that, although I think he said he found it a bit "iffy".

He seems to have been giving the subject a bit more of a ponder since then. He's obviously still not our greatest fan, but he now seems to be giving us little more than an old fashioned and kindly meant professorial cuff around the ear. He seems more saddened by the low motives of those who hire us than he is with us the ghosts.

When we were set to spar with one another by Mr. Humphreys, a reluctant pair of pit-bulls, the Professor did say in a rather despairing tone that in ghosting the motive was "always commercial".

I can't argue that that is not true, I'm just wondering if it is such a terrible thing. Most writers earn virtually no money at all from their books and have to rely on other ways to pay their mortgages, feed their children and put something aside for their old age. So they turn to journalism or they teach or they have some other expertise which they write about, (John Mortimer and the law, for instance, or the many "gurus" and "experts" on everything from medicine to gardening who fill our media).

If you want to be a professional writer of books, but do not want to rely on a university, the BBC or Rupert Murdoch for a pension, then you have to look for ways to be paid for your daily labours. We are scribes in the marketplace, selling our wares to anyone who cares to hire us in just the same way as artists might sell their skills for painting portraits. Undoubtedly the motive we have in selling our skills is commercial. The alternative, I think, would have been to have seen my children starve.

Writing Workshop in Zurich

2011-06-27T03:59:00.000-07:00

I have been invited by an interesting organisation called nuancewords.com to do a workshop on writing non-fiction. The event is being held in Zurich on the weekend of October 1 -2 and there will be a fiction workshop going on simultaneously with Amanda Hodgkinson, author of "22 Britannia Road".

I know from my in-box just how many people there are out there who have a strong idea for a book and just need a bit of guidance on how to turn it into a reality. So, if you fancy a weekend in Switzerland why not bring your idea along and we'll see what we can do to help?

To find out more go to www.nuancewords.com/workshop/speakers

Unwarranted attack on the Society of Authors

2011-06-16T13:29:00.000-07:00

I have been startled to see an unwarranted attack on the Society of Authors on the Bookseller website by Gregor Dallas, an historian who is standing for election to the Society's Management Committee.

I have also had my name put forward for the Committee, but I would have felt defensive of the Society even if that were not the case, since I have always found them to be unwaveringly supportive of their members.

Mr. Dallas's complaint is that the Society does not stand up to the big publishers and try to influence the books that they choose to publish. The thought of an organisation with such a vested interest actually having the power to influence the books that people get to read is positively Orwellian.

Authors as a breed do tend to live a little outside the bustle of mainstream life and we are not always the best judges of what sort of stories the vast majority of people want to read, hear or watch. It is always good to listen to the paying customers. When Shakespeare sensed that the groundlings were growing restless he was always very quick to adapt whatever work he was presenting to them. The big publishers spend their lives trying to divine the tastes of today's groundlings.

There are an infinite number of ways of bringing books before interested and relevant readers that do not involve the "Big Six" publishers or supermarkets or even W.H. Smith.

Long may the Society of Authors continue its good work in helping its members to survive in the jungle of modern publishing.

Words With Jam

2011-03-09T10:33:00.000-08:00

I have been asked to judge a competition for an excellent e-magazine for writers called Words with Jam (as in "words that stick" - get it?)

Readers are being asked to send in the first pages of novels - always the most crucial words in any book since they have to tempt potential readers to keep turning the pages. Details can be found at www.wordswithjam.co.uk/competition. Even if you don't plan to enter the competition the magazine is well worth a look.

Can't wait to see what comes in.

The Next Generation of Freelance Writers

2011-02-23T03:15:00.000-08:00

I was invited in to Kingston University the other day by Todd Swift - the Canadian poet - to talk to fifty or so students on the creative writing course. Kingston has a good buzz about it, (I had been there just a few weeks before talking to Alison Baverstock's Publishing MA students).

Todd very kindly cajoles all his students to buy my "Freelance Writer's Handbook" and also encouraged them to line up to have their books signed at the end of the session. Talking to some of them individually got me thinking.

It's been forty years since I was setting out like them, arriving in London straight from school, hoping for pavements of gold and all the rest. Then the freelance writer's world was one of manual typewriters and self-addressed envelopes where now it is all emails and attachments, but in essence it is still a gigantic leap of faith into a life where every morning you wake up not knowing if this is going to be the day your big break finally arrives. No doubt they were hoping that I was going to give them some clue as to what the next forty years of their lives are going to be like, but how different will it be by the time these guys are the ones blathering on to another generation of hopefuls?

The only thing I can promise to those who stick it out is that they are in for some grand adventures.

In Bed with my iPad

2011-02-05T08:44:00.000-08:00

Like several million others I received an iPad for Christmas. Although I firmly believe that such appliances are a signpost to the route we will all eventually be travelling, I was very unsure of exactly how this newcomer would fit into my life. I have to tell you, dear reader, it is a relationship of unmitigated bliss.

In our first few weeks together I have dowloaded five books and four of them have brought great joy, (the fifth was a substitute purchase for another on the same subject - Montaigne - which proved to be unavailable for download). With each of the books I have made a spontaneous decision to buy based on a recommendation, a review or simply a whim, and I have been reading the desired texts within minutes of experiencing the initial whims - without any expenditure on petrol, postage or parking fines and with minimal damage to the forests of the world.

The screen literally brings light into my life, making it unnecessary for me to hunt out suitably illuminated corners of the house, (of which there seem to be fewer and fewer as both light bulbs and my eyes seem to grow dimmer), and allow for the turning of pages with the most satisfyingly sensual of caresses. Once we are in bed together we need no other light at all.

The books whose glow I have so far basked in, since you ask, are:

"Room" by Emma Donoghue, which is simply delightful in similar ways to "Stuart a Life Backwards" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time".

"One Day" by David Nicholls, purchased in order to try to understand why so many people keep telling me its wonderful.

"Life" by Keith Richards - just because - which yielded the unexpected surprise of finding him (or perhaps his co-writer), quoting from a book which I once wrote with someone who was involved with the Stones during their Riviera exile.

"Just Kids" by Patti Smith, telling of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, which is both fascinating and beautifully written.

I understand that these are all commercially successful projects from authors who currently do not need to worry overly about methods of distribution but I am only a few weeks into this relationship and suspect my purchasing decisions will broaden and deepen in time. I am not entirely sure that I would have got round to actually buying any of these books in paper form, certainly not all of them - and that fact makes me feel extremely optimistic about the future for authors of all sorts.

Losing my Skyping Virginity

2011-02-02T05:01:00.000-08:00

Having been persuaded to grasp the skyping nettle by Nikola Danaylov, the awesome brain behind the Singularity Weblog, (http://www.singularityweblog.com/), I have now done my first intercontinental video interview with him, talking at enormous length, (45 minutes - but don't let that put you off), about my biography of James Martin - "The Change Agent - How to Create a Wonderful World".

The results will not only be on Nikola's website but also on YouTube and iTunes.

So, how brilliant is that? A full scale filmed interview in the form of a conversation between me in England and Nikola in Canada, all completed in time to go through to the kitchen for supper. A perfect, early example of "The Singularity" in action.

The Independent receives an invitation to "the private realm of James Martin"

2011-01-15T04:52:00.000-08:00

"He is a computer genius, futurologist, inspirational speaker and multimillionaire. But why is James Martin giving his fortune away to Oxford University? Steve Connor meets the mysterious philanthopist on his private island off Bermuda."

That is the introduction to an excellent feature article in the Independent's Saturday Magazine this morning. Steve, the paper's Science Editor, read my biography of James Martin, (The Change Agent - How to Create a Wonderful World), and contacted me to see if Jim would agree to an interview next time he was passing through the UK. Jim said he would rather Steve went out to visit him on his island in Bermuda - "the private realm of the mysterious philanthropist". The result seems to have been an interesting meeting of minds.

Understanding The Singularity

2010-12-29T22:35:00.000-08:00

One of the greatest benefits of earning a living from writing is that you are constantly stumbling across new things and people from worlds you had no idea existed.

In the course of writing "The Change Agent - How to Create a Wonderful World", the story of futurologist James Martin, I was introduced to the concept of "The Singularity" - the name given to the fast-approaching moment when the powers of technology and artificial intelligence will come together to overtake the powers of the human brain.

All who work in publishing should be deeply interested in The Singularity and its inevitable ramifications on everything to do with knowledge, learning, writing and reading because soon the shiny IPads and Kindles we were all given for Christmas will seem as primitive as words engraved on stone.

A guy who goes by the name of Socrates is providing a website which does a good job of explaining at least some of what is going on - http://www.singularityweblog.com/ - have a look around it and see what you think. The revolution is upon us.

Ghostwriter - Film Star

2010-12-09T08:36:00.000-08:00

The first cut of a short film made about me by a particularly charming and professional group of students from Farnham University of the Creative Arts is now on view at www.vimeo.com/17529822

Cover Designers the Unsung Heroes of Publishing

2010-10-26T03:44:00.000-07:00

I'm wondering if it is cover designers who are the greatest unsung heroes of the publishing world.

I have two new books out this month from the fabulous young publishing house, Tonto Books, (see illustrations above), and both have had their covers designed by Elliot Thomson from www.preamptive.com in Newcastle.

Obviously I'm biased, but is seems to me that work of this calibre should make Elliot extremely famous.

My Brave Losing Face

2010-08-13T09:56:00.000-07:00

Hang on a minute - a little while ago I was blogging kindly about a certain Dr. Andrew Sharp and his wonderful book "The Ghosts of Eden". I was cheerily passing on the news that the book had won the Waverton Good Read Award (www.wavertongoodread.org.uk).

Blow me down if I haven't now discovered that my own recent novel "The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride" (www.steffimcbride.com) was also nominated for the same award!

I feel that should make me like Dr. Sharp and his book a great deal less, but annoyingly it doesn't. Still would have liked to have beaten the b***** though.

Must remember all those brave losers at the Oscars and similar ceremonies, applauding wildly as their opponents walk off with plaudits and statuettes which they all know should rightfully be theirs.

clap ... clap ... clap ... crap.

I am now a Merchant of Culture

2010-07-13T22:14:00.000-07:00

Just completed a first class degree course in trade publishing and the “making of a bestseller” – at least I feel like I have after reading an advance copy of “Merchants of Culture”, by John B. Thompson, which is due out next month from Polity Press.

Don’t be fooled by the everyman sound of his name, this is an author with some seriously heavyweight credentials – a sociology professor at Cambridge, a fellow of Jesus College … a quick glance at his Wikipedia entry is enough to assure you that this is a man who does his research very thoroughly indeed and knows a thing or two about communicating the complicated stuff that’s in his head to the rest of us.

Brilliant title apart from anything else; I really like the idea of being a “merchant of culture”. I don’t know if the Prof came up with it himself or whether it was the result of a brainstorming session at Polity Press, but I bet it was one of those joyous “eureka” moments either way.

From now on whenever anyone asks me how they can get published or get a job in publishing I’m going to tell them to buy this book because it is simply perfect at summing up how the whole messy business works and explaining why it very frequently doesn’t work. I guess it is going to have to be updated fairly regularly, (the edition I received must have been sent to the printers too early to be able to mention the arrival of the iPad for instance), but even once it is a year or two out of date it will still teach a careful reader as much as any three year degree course on the subject.

Green Shoots in Publishing Landscape

2010-07-05T03:55:00.000-07:00

Due to visit Uganda for the first time, I wanted to do some background reading. On Amazon I typed in the word “Uganda” and the great machine suggested a number of titles that I had not heard of. I did a little more googling on each title that looked possible and made a selection. I did not have particularly high hopes, which is why it was all the more wonderful to find I had accidentally ordered a masterpiece.

“The Ghosts of Eden” is a novel by Andrew J.H. Sharp. A doctor who obviously knows the country and its people extraordinarily well. It is a beautifully written, life-affirming, thought provoking story and if only it had fallen on Richard and Judy’s doorstep instead of mine Dr. Sharp would by now have a best-seller on his hands.

A little further googling found his website (www.theghostsofeden.com ) and I emailed him a fan letter while still only half way through the book.

His path to publication, it seems, is a classic one. Unable to get any agents interested he read an article about a new young publisher, Picnic Publishing. He sent the book directly to them and they accepted it.

This is the second time I have heard someone speaking highly of Picnic. They recently published “Empires Apart” by Brian Landers, an intriguing study of the historic parallels between the American and Russian empires, which has now been picked up in the US by Penguin. Brian had also been unable to get an agent to take him on and so went directly to Picnic.

I relay this story because it seems encouraging in a number of ways. Firstly it shows that it is possible to stumble upon something new and brilliant on Amazon in much the same way as one might once have hoped to in an old fashioned book shop. Secondly it shows that an enthusiastic reader can make contact with an author almost instantaneously and thirdly it demonstrates that there are young publishing companies out there that are actually reading the manuscripts sent to them and then publishing them for no other reason than they like them and want to share them with the world.

During the course of our emailing, Dr. Sharp heard that he had won the Waverton Good Read Award (http://www.wavertongoodread.org.uk) for best British debut novel of the previous twelve months. Probably not in Richard and Judy’s class when it comes to generating sales, I grant you, but another sign that there are always green shoots to be found if you hunt for long enough in the rubble.

Gatsbys Arriving like Buses

2010-06-28T02:44:00.000-07:00

Damn! Having used my Gatsby analogy for Peter James’s Brighton Pier party I now can’t think of another one for the party John Blake threw on Saturday to celebrate twenty years in the publishing business. Is it really only twenty years? What a torrent of water has been under the bridge in those two short decades.

So, how to describe a champagne party held on the riverside lawns of the Blake Mansion which included a Rolling Stones tribute band, a barbecue for hundreds and fireworks at midnight. The crowd was a glorious mix of the villainous, the glamorous and the downright mysterious with the great circus master himself at the centre.

You see what I mean about the ‘Gatsby thing’- Mr. Fitzgerald knew a thing or two when he created that character.

Brighton's Own Gatsby

2010-06-04T06:52:00.001-07:00

Peter James is a phenomenon.

He threw a launch party for his latest detective novel, “Dead Like You”, at the end of Brighton Pier the other night and during the speeches his publisher announced that the book had gone straight into the hardback charts at number one.

Record numbers of translations and foreign sales and other mind-boggling statistics were also being bandied about. In an age when everyone is bemoaning the state of publishing and the decline of the book Peter is glowing evidence that people still want to read well told stories if they are marketed to them with enough energy and enthusiasm.

The most extraordinary aspect of that warm summer’s evening was that despite Peter’s enviable success, not one of the several hundred guests could be heard breathing the slightest criticism of the man himself. No one, it seems, ever has a bad word to say of this extraordinarily kind, amiable, generous and talented man. He simply defies cynicism. Anyone who has ever helped him on his way, right back to the English master who inspired him at school and up to the man who is going on Mastermind with Peter’s detective, Roy Grace, as his specialist subject, had been included in the celebration.

Twenty years ago Peter was one of the few people actively prophesying the inevitable approach of electronic readers. He was the first serious author I know of who actually produced a book on disc and became involved in the launch of an internet server. Since then he has produced films, raced cars, become a virtual member of the Brighton police force as well as visiting others all round the world. He is the Jay Gatsby of our time.

The Holy Grail of Word-of-Mouth

2010-05-24T12:37:00.000-07:00

The British publishers of “Sold”, which I wrote for Zana Muhsen some twenty years ago and which has sold around four million copies worldwide, have just re-designed the book's cover. The image of the sad, beautiful and frightened girl’s eyes peering out of the burka remains but there is more black in the surround which, coupled with the new red lettering, brings to mind the vampire books which have come to dominate the shelves of book shops in recent years.

I have an enormous affection for “Sold”, partly because it was one of the first books I ghosted and partly because hardly a day goes by that I don’t receive at least one email from a reader. Sometimes they start by saying it is their favourite book of all time, (always an endearing thing for any writer to read), and that it has left them unbearably moved. They all then go on to say that they feel an overwhelming need to know what happened to Zana and her sister, Nadia, after the close of this book, and its sequel “A Promise to Nadia”, which we wrote about ten years later.
As far as I know the book has never been advertised or reviewed in any media, apart from readers’ comments on sites like Amazon. So its steady sales of around 200,000 copies a year must be solely down to word- of-mouth. People simply like Zana’s story and tell their friends about it.

Zana and Nadia were two Birmingham sisters who thought they were going on holiday to Yemen when they were fourteen and fifteen but found once they got there that their father had sold them into virtual slavery as child brides. “Sold” is the tale of how Zana managed to escape after eight years and then started a campaign to free her sister and their children. The main platform of her campaign was the writing of the book.

It is wonderful to see a refreshed cover coming out in the country where the whole thing started twenty years ago.

Putting a Story on Facebook

2010-05-21T08:18:00.001-07:00

Having been inspired by a talk from the internet marketing guru, Miles Galliford, at a recent meeting of United Authors, I decided to take the bull by the horns and try using Facebook to disseminate a story to the world.

It looked like being a bit of a long plod up yet another steep learning curve, but I got the hang of websites and blogging so surely this can’t be too hard. Miles certainly made it all sound very simple indeed.

The hook is the announcement of the autumn publication of my book “The Change Agent – How to Create a Wonderful World” by Tonto Books.

The story behind the book is that I received an urgent invitation to a mysterious private island in Bermuda from a man who has just donated £100-million to Oxford University.

The island gradually revealed its labyrinthine secrets as the host, futurist James Martin, explained the choice that faces us all: to create the greatest Utopia ever, or plunge ourselves back into the Dark Ages, maybe even destroying Homo sapiens completely.

At the same time he explained how a shy boy from a poor family in Ashby-de-la-Zouche had come to be Oxford University’s biggest ever donor and the founder of the extraordinary James Martin 21st Century School.

Given the nature of the story, it seems appropriate that we use all the most futuristic methods of marketing available, especially as Tonto have created a cracking cover, complete with a quote from Bill Gates.

The scary thing about the whole Facebook thing is that once you have pressed the button things happen very fast indeed and within a few seconds the bull’s deceptively greasy horns had slipped from my grip. So, can I take this opportunity to apologise to anyone who might have emailed me many years ago and is now wondering why they are suddenly being greeted as my very best friend in the world and encouraged to “look at my photos”.

I will, I promise, get this demented bull sedated as quickly as possible before it flattens the whole china shop, and then I can return to being as cool about the whole “future” business as Miles Galliford – and indeed James Martin himself - seem to be.

Books Written for Strictly Private Consumption

2010-05-12T12:24:00.000-07:00

Just back from a week-long editorial meeting in the mountains of Tuscany with a distinguished international investment banker, who is now a resident of Monte Carlo.

The banker is writing his memoirs but, unlike most memoirists, he has no desire whatsoever to see his book on the bestseller lists. This is a strictly private affair, just a few copies to be produced for his grandson and other descendants to stumble across and pore over in the future. It is the literary equivalent of having a portrait painted for posterity.

With so many of us currently obsessed with tracing our family histories I’m guessing this is a trend which will grow. I have an Ancestry Addict in the family and I can imagine just how excited she would be to stumble across a privately published book of this nature commissioned by one of her ancestors a century or two ago. A full length book can go into a far greater level of detail than virtually any other accessible medium, while providing a thing of beauty to look at and hold in the future.

The grandson in question was also in the mountains with us and, unsurprisingly at eighteen months of age, showed no interest whatsoever in tales of his illustrious ancestors. In forty or fifty years time, however, the book will still be in his library and available to enlighten him on his colourful family past.

Billionaires Put Their Money into Searching for Answers

2010-04-30T04:43:00.000-07:00

Last year, as I started work on my book about the futurologist James Martin, he had just pledged to give another $50-million of his own money to the school he had founded at Oxford University, The James Martin 21st Century School, if other benefactors would be willing to match the money. He had already given the school $100-million to get them started.

There were many who were sceptical that he would be able to find enough people willing to take up the challenge and match his offer during a time of apparent economic meltdown.

A couple of nights ago I went to hear him give The Commonwealth Lecture in the Faraday Theatre at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street and found him bubbling with even more enthusiasm than usual. The pledges were all in and other donors, including such mighty names as George Soros and Bill Gates, had come up with an astonishing $90-million to add to Jim’s promise of $50-million.

The aim of the school is to “foster innovative thinking, deep scholarship and collaborative activity to address the pressing risks and create new opportunities for the 21st Century”.

It’s grand to know that so many people are willing to put their cheque books where their mouths are when it comes to sorting out the problems of the future – if only we could find some political leaders cut from the same cloth.

My book about Jim – currently entitled “The Change Agent – How to Create a Wonderful World” is scheduled for publication by Tonto Books in October.

Dinner With Zippy

2010-04-21T03:22:00.000-07:00

People complain about the corporatisation of modern publishing and at the London Book Fair smooth be-suited purveyors of digital wonders did seem to outnumber the traditional tweeds, bow ties and boxes of remaindered titles.

Stuart Wheatman of Tonto Books, however, shines like a beacon of hope for those who like their publishers to be mischievous and eccentric, happier following their own hunches and enthusiasms than attending sales and marketing meetings.

The estimable Wheatman has bought a couple of titles off me and so we arranged to meet for supper in the Earls Court Road after the show had closed its doors, along with his editor in chief, Jill Morris.

Flushed and panting, Wheatman exploded through the crowd of new arrivals waiting around the door a couple of minutes late, lugging what looked like a school trunk, which he dropped beside the table as he sank gratefully into his chair, struggling for breath.

‘It’s Zippy,’ he said, gesturing to the trunk. ‘From Rainbow. I’ve got to guard him for the night and get him back to Soho in the morning.’

Zippy’s alter-ego, puppeteer Ronnie le Drew, is doing a book with Stuart and he and Zippy had been making a personal appearance at the Fair.

This seems a good start towards Stuart’s professed ambition to build a list of ‘quirky left-field lives’ in the style of John Blake. The wisdom of this ambition was born out by the news from the Book Fair that John Blake himself would not be able to attend this year as he was ‘trapped on his yacht in Turkey’ by the volcanic dust crisis.

The following evening I was back in a crowded Earls Court pub with Stuart, who was sandwiched between one of my clients, the colourful rock and country impresario, Mervyn Conn, and one of the pub’s regulars, a mighty seven foot transvestite of African descent.

What a wonderful and varied world book publishing still is.

A Despised and Secretive Breed

2010-04-16T04:44:00.000-07:00

Feeling crushed today upon reading in the Daily Mail that Chris Tookey, the esteemed newspaper’s film and theatre critic, believes ghostwriters are “a despised and secretive breed”.

It must be wonderful to belong to two breeds as adored as theatre critics and Daily Mail journalists. Note to self, must try harder to break into a more revered circle of folk.

How the Fabulous Dreams of Melissa Bell Came True

2010-03-31T09:01:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow sees the publication of Heart and Soul, a book I have helped Melissa Bell to write.

Melissa is a singer, a kidney dialysis patient and campaigner, and the mother of X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke.

The story takes flight when, as a shy, plump ten year-old, Melissa sees Lena Zavaroni winning Opportunity Knocks and dreams of one day doing the same herself.

Many years later she gets to see her daughter become an overnight star and fulfil all the dreams she herself was chasing so passionately, but by that time she is confined to a kidney dialysis machine for a large part of her life.

It is a story that anyone who has dreamed of being a star, or who has harboured wild ambitions for their children, will understand.

Heart and Soul is being published by John Blake.

Ghostwriter as Scurfy Recluse

2010-03-30T05:55:00.000-07:00

Oh, the hubris of it all. In the very same week that the great Horace Bent celebrates the sex appeal of the ghostwriting fraternity in the equally great trade organ, The Bookseller, Terence Blacker writes in The Author that in publishing now scurfy recluses "put the words on paper", while well-scrubbed celebrities "appear on the cover and do the chat show circuit". From “sexy” to “scurfy”, how mortifying.

The eminent Blacker, however, goes on to provide a chink of light by predicting that within a year ghostwriters will be forming their own trade association, Ghostwriters of Britain (GOB), and will be powerful enough to “cripple the book trade for several months” by withdrawing their labour. The revenge of the scurfy recluses; it seems our day of power is nigh.

“Ain’t Ghostwriters Sexy?”

2010-03-27T11:08:00.000-07:00

Not my words, obviously, heaven forfend, but those of Horace Bent, éminence grise of the Bookseller magazine, and himself a strangely attractive man. I feel I must thank him, not only on behalf of myself but on behalf of all my fellow literary wall flowers as we shuffle awkwardly in the shadows of the great literary prom dance, too shy and unsure of ourselves to step out into the spotlight. Mr Bent, you see, has also been to a preview of “The Ghost” and has had his heartbeat quickened by the performance of "dapper" Ewan McGregor, our representative in the limelight.

A Viewing Room in Soho

2010-03-10T03:16:00.000-08:00

An email out of the blue invites me to a preview of Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost”, in a viewing room behind a discreet Soho door and up dark, creaking wooden stairs.

No sign of the email sender when I arrive, just a tiny cinema sparsely populated with professionals. There can be no sign of Polanski during this launch either, or course, because he is under house arrest in Switzerland for crimes too old and too famous to be regurgitated here, except that his fate strangely mirrors that of Pierce Brosnan’s character in the film, an ex British Prime Minister holed up in a rich man’s heavily guarded beach house. Once swept to power on a wave of adoration he is now wanted for war crimes and the publishers who have paid out millions for his memoirs are demanding speedy delivery of a manuscript that will recoup their outlay.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the promotional machine for Tony Blair’s forthcoming memoir is kicking into life with suggestions of publication in the autumn. No one has bothered to make any secret of the fact that Pierce Brosnan’s character was modelled by its creator, novelist Robert Harris, on Blair himself. Blair and Harris used to be friends but, one imagines, not any more.

When Harris’s book, “The Ghost”, was published, bearing quotes from my own book, “Ghostwriting” at the opening of every chapter, I was just starting work on a book for the mysterious futurologist and educationalist, Jim Martin. As I travelled out to his private island in Bermuda the parallels seemed uncanny. But whereas the secret tunnels, fantastical buildings and gardens that riddle Jim Martin’s island are drenched in sunshine, Polanski’s wind and rain-swept landscapes are altogether bleaker and darker, the violent sea grey and menacing rather than brilliant blue and sparkling. In Polanski and Harris’s world there is a body on the beach rather than the sails of millionaires’ yachts bobbing cheerfully off shore.

The ghost of the title is played by Ewan McGregor, a Chandleresque protagonist suddenly transported into a closed, dangerous, mysterious world. Initially, as with many ghostwriting projects in the real world, virtually nothing going on around him makes sense. But then slowly, as he grows familiar with his story and the characters, he sees the terrible truth materialise out of the lies and secrets.

As the film ended and the lights came back on there was still no sign of the e-mail sender who had assured me he was so looking forward to meeting me, and in the bright sunlight of Old Compton Street the darkness and menace of the film begins to fade. But actually Polanski and Harris’s world is all around us. Polanski himself is still under house arrest, Blair’s publishers still have a memoir they have to sell, there is still talk of possible war crimes accusations hanging in the air and still no one can really explain what madness drove us to go to war in Iraq with the Americans. There are conspiracy theories circulating on the internet as to why the authorities should have chosen the moment when Blair was running for European President to resurrect the case against Polanski after so many decades of indifference.

Nothing, as always, is quite as safe as it seems as I head with my wife to Little Italy in Frith Street for a late lunch.

Slumdog Star to Play The Little Hero

2010-02-12T01:27:00.000-08:00

I was excited to read in yesterday’s Hindustan Times that the hero of my book “The Little Hero”, Iqbal Masih, a bonded child labourer in Lahore, is to be played by Ayush Khedeker, who shot to global fame by playing the youngest Jamal Malik in Slumdog Millionaire so vibrantly.

Reading "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" by Mohsin Hamid the other day vividly reminded me of my research trip to Lahore with Riff Khan-Hinton, the producer of the film, (we were even staying in the same hotel as one of the book's two protagonists). Mohsin Hamid completely captures the atmosphere of this dangerous city, seething with so many varied experiences, stories and emotions and I’m sure the team Riff has put together will do the same with Iqbal's moving tale – little Ayush is perfect casting for the part.

Fantastic Ghost Writer Film Trailer

2010-02-11T10:50:00.000-08:00

As the launch or Roman Polanski's filmed version of Robert Harris' "The Ghost" starring Ewan Mcgregor, Pierce Brosnan and Kim Cattrall, draws closer some fantastic trailers are starting to appear on the Internet. The US trailer is up on FirstShowing.net and it looks stunning. The film seems now to be called "The Ghost Writer" - let's hope the cinema-loving public can overlook Polanski's current personal difficulties and just sit back to enjoy the ride - this is just what ghostwriters' lives are like, honest!
http://www.firstshowing.net/2010/01/28/official-us-trailer-for-roman-polanskis-the-ghost-writer/

“You Have Written a Masterpiece – But You Are Not a Name”.

2010-02-10T02:20:00.000-08:00

Interesting piece in the Telegraph today about Alexandre Dumas, author of 'The Three Musketeers' and 'The Count of Monte Cristo', and his ghost writer, or ‘nègre’ as folks like me are sweetly referred to over there, Auguste Jules Maquet.

“In the 1830s,” the piece claims, “Maquet, a novelist and playwright, had tried to have his works published but was told: ‘You have written a masterpiece, but you’re not a name and we only want names’.”

Plus ça change is all I can say.

The Dark Glamour of Haiti

2010-01-27T08:36:00.000-08:00

I was drawn to Haiti as a naïve young travel writer 30 years ago because in The Comedians Graham Greene had made it seem a darkly glamorous and dangerous place. Greene was there during Papa Doc’s reign of terror and by the time I arrived it was his son, Baby Doc, who was ensconced in the white folly of a palace which now lies in ruins, as uninhabitable as the rest of city around it.

The fabulous, exotic Grand Hotel Oloffson, where Greene had set his story, still stood on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince and one of Greene’s original characters, (the gossip columnist, Petit Pierre, in the book), Aubelin Jolicoeur still propped up the bar.

‘He has made himself one of the country’s leading characters,’ I wrote at the time, ‘affecting cane, monocle, cravat and a theatrically camp manner which makes many unaware of just how much influence he has at the presidential palace and in ministerial offices.’

In one of those ministerial offices I met the island’s then director of tourism, ‘a Gucci-clad minister by the name of Theo Duval’.

‘Why do we travel?’ he mused. ‘To feel in a pleasant way, to make a loop in the straight line of our existence, escaping into timelessness, a dreamlike state in which we are not reminded of our servitude.’

It was the first truly poor place I had ever visited and I was shocked to see how close to the brink of chaos people can survive, and frightened to see how fragile a veneer civilisation actually is.

If I remember rightly The Comedians ends with one of the departing characters throwing a handful of coins from a car window, causing a dangerous riot amongst the scrabbling horde of street children – an image which we are now seeing magnified and repeated nightly on the news.

‘When people come to Haiti,’ Aubelin Jolicoeur told me, ‘they always try to make the story funny. They never take it seriously. All through the centuries we have been ostracised by the world because we were the first black republic. Always we are misunderstood and misinterpreted. There is a bad spell on Haiti.’

Well, I guess no one is laughing now.

As One Little Goldmine Closes

2009-12-19T06:27:00.000-08:00

Just over twenty years ago I decided to take a modest advertisement in The Bookseller magazine – “Ghostwriter for Hire”. At the end of this year I am told the magazine will be closing the Directory page which has carried that ad almost every week since.

I owe The Bookseller a huge debt of thanks for all the fascinating people that little ad has steered in my direction over the last couple of decades.

When Zana Muhsen went into her local library to enquire how she could make contact with a ghostwriter, it was a copy of The Bookseller that the librarian pulled out to consult. Four million or so copies of the resulting book, “Sold”, have since been sold and many other authors, publishers and agents have been led to my door along the same route.

There were many months when the ad produced no results at all and other writers, following my lead and buying space themselves, would come and go, often disappointed not to be able to see instant results for their outlay. But every few months another opportunity would find its way through to me from that calling card, which I left permanently in the publishing world’s equivalent of their Post Office window.

I have no idea how the economics of the magazine’s advertising pages pan out these days, but I’m guessing they have done their sums before deciding to close this particular window.

Is it one more small brick in the bridge leading us all away from printed media, across choppy and uncharted seas to a totally digital world? Probably.

Whatever it is, taking that ad twenty years ago was quite possibly the best business decision I ever made – closely followed by the decision five years ago to ask the wonderful folk at Wordpool Design to build me a website.

A Golden Age for Writers

2009-12-16T07:43:00.000-08:00

Stephen Covey has shown us what the future might hold for writers.

If there is one thing that everyone in the publishing world can agree on amidst the current chaos, it is that everything is about to change. Insecurity is all around us as the big players all try to work out how the business is going to develop; are e-books finally going to take over the world? Will Kindles and the rest soon be as ubiquitous as mobile phones and laptops? And, if so, who the hell owns the rights to what?

As all the big corporations rush to their lawyers, it may be that this is about to become a golden age for those of us who have remained hungry and nimble and are used to living by our wits.

It is beginning to look as if in the long run none of these changes should trouble writers too much. We are used to insecurity. We are used to never knowing if we are going to be able to sell our work. We are used to not knowing how much we will be paid for it or when that money will ever actually arrive. We have never had regular salaries or pensions or subsidised canteens to lull us into a false sense of security. We have always known just how much of a jungle it is out there.

We have always been forced to accept that we have little or no control over our careers or our work, that we have to write as much and as well as we can and then basically hope for the best. We are used to being promised the Earth and then somehow not quite getting it.

We are also familiar with the exhilaration of a sudden triumph; a book that tops the charts, sells all over the world, creates a buzz and brings unexpected amounts of money pouring in. We know that those moments, and the dreams we have of those moments, make all the struggles and uncertainties worthwhile.

In this new age of e-books, self-publishing and print-on-demand, it is beginning to look as if we won’t necessarily have to rely on the patronage of publishers to help us reach our readers.

The writing life will still be a struggle, as it has always been, but it may just be that we are going to have more control over our destinies in the coming years than we have ever had in the past. It is possible that we will soon be actively choosing who we want to hire to edit us, design our covers and help us to market our wares.

Is it possible that we are about to enter a Golden Age for writers?

Cactus TV to the Rescue of Book Publishing

2009-12-01T05:27:00.001-08:00

Cactus, the television company that brought us Richard and Judy, have devised a new book programme in which celebrities will talk about books - Thank God for that!

If there is one thing the publishing world needs it is spokespeople who will help the general public to discover what a joy books can be and to give them some guidance through the maze.

We have seen how effective this can be with Oprah and Richard and Judy, both of whom are apparently retiring from their roles as ambassadors to the publishing world- we desperately need a renewed sprinkling of stardust. Let's all pray that Cactus continue to choose their celebrities and anointed books as wisely as they have in the past.

Celebrities are possibly the most powerful marketing tools ever invented - let's recruit as many of them as possible to the great cause!

Virtually all Top Twenty Bestsellers are celebrity titles

2009-11-30T23:40:00.000-08:00

Articles keep appearing in the press claiming that the fashion for celebrity books is now over, just as the fashion for “misery memoirs” was reported to be over a year or two ago. In fact, celebrity books make up virtually the whole of the Top Twenty Non-Fiction Bestsellers.

While I can see that the current crop of titles are not achieving the same enormous sales figures as some of their predecessors, (perhaps because they are not such interesting or commercial stories), it seems from looking at the bestseller charts in The Bookseller this week that the celebrities are still totally dominating the non-fiction hardback charts and the “miseries” are still showing strongly amongst the paperbacks.

In the top ten non-fiction hardbacks we find Ant and Dec, Peter Kay, Jeremy Clarkson, Frankie Boyle and Patrick Swayze, plus another Top Gear book and titles from Andrew Marr and Delia Smith, both of whom can link their success partially to their television presences. That leaves only two other books, one of which is the Guinness Book of Records, the other is Ripley’s “Believe it or Not” book of amazing facts.

Amongst the next ten top bestsellers we find JLS, Chris Evans, Jo Brand, Katie Price, Jamie Oliver, Ozzy Osbourne, Jack Dee, another Top Gear book and a Football Annual. That leaves one more place for “Simon’s Cat” a cartoon book which started life on the Internet.

On what planet can this be described as “the end of the celebrity book genre”?

I could make a similar case for misery memoirs amongst the paperbacks, (some of which double up as celebrity books by the likes of Jade Goody and Coleen Nolan).

Good Samaritan Wins Publishing Deal

2009-11-19T22:45:00.000-08:00

Here’s a story to bring hope to the hearts of everyone struggling to win a publishing deal.

Ex-soldier and international banker, Mark Powell, had written an action thriller, “Quantum Breach”, and was suffering the long agony that we are all familiar with, having racked up over a 100 rejections.

One evening he was driving home from work in Singapore when he spotted a damsel in distress attempting to heave a spare wheel out of the boot of her car. He stopped to help and once the wheel had been changed they got talking. She asked what he did. He told her he was an author and she told him she was a managing partner in a law firm that acted for the publisher Marshall Cavendish.

A few days later the Good Samaritan found he had a publishing deal for “Quantum Breach” and his second book, “Deep Six” is now close to completion.

The moral of this story? Never give up trying and never pass up a chance to do a stranger a favour.

Heart-warming tale, no?

Should Books Be Shorter?

2009-11-09T09:23:00.000-08:00

Why are books so hard to market? Is it possible that the main stumbling block to purchase, (and to consumption), is the sheer amount of time required to read them?

For the sake of argument, let’s say that the average book is 80,000 to 100,000 words long and requires six hours of fairly sustained attention from the customer.

In some situations that will be precisely why the purchase is made, because the customer has ‘time to kill’ on a beach holiday or a long journey, in a sickbed – whatever. Sometimes the pure beauty of the author’s prose and the languor of the storytelling is the reason why that title or that author has been selected. But what if the motive to purchase is that the reader merely wants the information contained in the book and wants it as quickly and painlessly as possible?

Am I the only person who has seen a book that they really want to read in the shops, or read a review, and then simply failed to find the time to read it – or at least failed to get beyond half way? Most people have a colossal number of calls upon their time once they have put in the hours required to earn a living, bring up their family or clip their toe-nails. Given a choice between a quick flick through a newspaper with a cup of tea, an hour in front of the television with their supper, or consuming one sixth of a difficult book, how often does the poor consumer give in to one of the easier options?

So many books could do with severe editing to remove extraneous material, repetitions and all the rest – “kill your darlings” as any creative writing tutor will tell you - but if the final manuscript then comes in at 30,000 words, or less than a hundred pages, it will not look like good value for money, and the publishers will have another marketing hurdle to overcome.

It seems likely that the printed book will never escape from this trap, any more than the average sit-com will escape the traditional half-hour format or many feature films will be allowed to come in at less than ninety minutes. The audiences have historical expectations of the formats which cannot be lightly dismissed.

But if electronic books take off, might we see something altogether different evolving? If people can’t see how ‘thick’ the book is when they buy it, might they be less daunted by the long ones and less likely to dismiss the short ones? Might publishers then be able to stop buying writing by the pound?

Publishing Industry exactly like The X-Factor

2009-11-05T03:37:00.000-08:00

The publishing industry is exactly like the X-Factor. You start with tens of thousands of hopefuls, all certain that they are talented and deserve to be made into stars/published. Their friends and family are equally convinced, or at least have to say they are out of loyalty or blind love.

These thousands of people turn up to auditions/send in their manuscripts, and the gatekeepers of television/publishing have a limited amount of time to try to spot the ones that the public will like and want to get to know better. Sometimes it will be obvious that someone has enormous talent, or is exceptionally attractive, usually it is not that obvious.

The majority,through sheer weight of numbers, will then be sent home/have their manuscripts ignored or rejected. Even those who get through to the show/publication, will still be ignored by the public/voted out and will end up disappointed not to have had their dreams come true and angry with those who have succeeded where they have failed.

Someone, of course, has to win - just as with every lottery. On the X-Factor it will be Alexandra Burke and in publishing it will be J.K. Rowling, and then there will be the people who simply gain public attention because they are different and make people smile - John and Edward in the X-Factor, Katie Price in publishing.

It is all quite fair because everyone has the same chance to lay their goods out on display and there are only a limited number of hours that we can all watch television or read books, so most of us will inevitably be knocked back.

There has been a spate of complaints in the media recently from published authors about the state of the publishing industry and how hard it is for new writers to break in and how unfair it is that the bad stuff gets published and the good stuff gets over-looked. But wasn't it always so? Is it possible that millions are transfixed by the X-Factor because it is a giant metaphor for life? Publishing is also exactly like life - everyone who goes into it has ambitions, most will be disappointed.

What to do about it? How do you beat the odds?

Well maybe, like Alexandra Burke, the secret lies in (a) having enough talent to start with (b) working ceaselessly at your craft and (c) coming back for another go every time you are knocked back, (she only won on her second time of appearing on the X-Factor).

Young talent is often knocked back and discouraged, but in the long-run persistence will always pay off - in publishing as in life.

The Puzzle of Creating Best Sellers

2009-05-19T08:54:00.000-07:00

Trying to judge which books will catch the public imagination doesn't get any easier, however long you struggle on in the publishing world.
I was pretty certain as I wrote "Cry Myself to Sleep" with Joe Peters that it was a story that people would really want to read, but follow-up books are always hard to pull off. We had had a number one success with "Cry Silent Tears" and it seemed almost too much to hope we could do it again, however much Joe might deserve it.
The second book picks up his story from when he ran away to London at sixteen to live on the streets. It is all about what happens to damaged kids once they grow up and go looking for a place in the world. Joe is an incredibly inspiring character.
Thankfully, my gut feeling has been proved right and the book is already at number three in the charts, battling it out with Jade and Barak and the rest. But then I was equally sure that "For the Love of Julie" which I wrote for Ann Ming, would soar straight to the top of the charts. Everyone who reads this story of a mother fighting for justice for her murdered daughter, (whose body she herself found,months after the killing), tells me that they sobbed almost all the way through it. Ann is another inspiring person who has achieved the most incredible things in getting the 800 year old law of double jeopardy changed, but the book has not soared as fast as Joe's.
I'm confident that word of mouth will result in big sales for Ann eventually, albeit at a slower and steadier rate, but it is a puzzle why the one title has taken off so much faster than the other.
In between these two lies "Disgraced", which I wrote for Saira Ahmed, telling of how she ended up on the game after escaping from her arranged marriage. The book went into the charts, and is selling well around the world, but did not go straight into the top three like Joe.
I guess if we could predict accurately who the big winners were going to be, some of the excitement would have gone.

Blake Publishing Buys Autobiography of Steffi McBride’s Mother.

2009-02-27T05:38:00.000-08:00

Blake Publishing has bought the rights to the autobiography of notorious but fictional ex-vice-girl Maggie de Beer.
Maggie, who ran away from home at the age of fifteen in search of fame and fortune, was one of the original ‘Page Three Girls’. The actress and singer became well known for her hard partying, rock and roll lifestyle, and for the many insights into the jet set lifestyle that she provided for the public as the all-time ‘Queen of Kiss-and-Tell’.
More recently she became a household name as the estranged mother of soap star Steffi McBride. The moving tale of their reunion was told last year by Steffi herself in her book, ‘The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride’, (also published by Blake).
Fifteen year-old Maggie became an infamous fixture on the glamorous London social scene soon after she arrived in 1970, emerging as a regular pin-up girl on ‘The Benny Hill Show’ and in the many West End farces and sex shows staged by Soho show business king, Paul Raymond.
In ‘The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer’ Maggie will be talking for the first time about what really went on in the steamy world of international nightclubs and hotels and revealing the secrets within her family that shocked even her.
‘Every teenager dreams of running away from home at some time,’ says ghostwriter, Andrew Crofts, ‘but not many of us have the nerve to actually do it. There are so many traps waiting out there for the innocent and the reckless. Maggie is one of life’s great survivors. She made a pact with the Devil for the chance to follow her dreams and paid the ultimate price. Her extraordinary adventures make for compelling reading; a parable for our media and showbiz-obsessed times.’

A Glimpse of the Future

2009-02-26T08:35:00.000-08:00

I spent an interesting day in Oxford this week visiting the James Martin 21st Century School as I set out on the job of researching and writing a biography of James Martin, a man who became the biggest ever single donor to Oxford University a few years ago when he pledged $100m of his own money for the founding of the School. What an incredible achievement the place is.

Born into a poor family in Ashby-de-la-Zouche, James rose to prominence with his writings and teachings about technology and the future of the planet. By founding such a distinguished school he has put his money where his mouth is and is actually doing something about the many problems that face us and the planet we inhabit.

He is basically investing in ideas, something which he has been immensely successful at for many years. The School’s fifteen interdisciplinary institutes and more than a hundred fellows across the collegiate university are studying potential global catastrophes like climate change, bio-engineering, pandemics, mass migration and the possibility of human extinction before the end of the 21st Century. At the same time they are trying to harvest the incredible opportunities arising from new technologies and innovations, as well as social change and improvements in understanding how to deal with systemic risk.

We expend so much of our academic energy studying what has gone before, it is cheering to see such a concerted and intelligent effort being made to understand the future so that we can prepare for it better.

James Martin must be one of the most interesting men currently at work on our planet and this School may well provide some of the answers that will save us from destroying ourselves and maybe even help move us closer to creating a real Utopia.

Winner of Steffi McBride Competition

2009-02-02T03:05:00.000-08:00

The winner of the Steffi McBride short story competition is fourteen year-old Nicole Hendry with her piece, “Do You Think It’s Fair?”. It was just as hard a choice as I had thought it would be but there were a number of reasons why I eventually plumped for this one over the very strong competition.
To start with, of course, there is the standard of the writing. Phrases like “the ache was unbearable, like someone tightening the gears in her face with a spanner” and “she heard her mother’s irritated footsteps ascend the stairs” seemed to sing off the page.
The rules of the competition were that it should be about ‘modern celebrity’ and the subjects of anorexia and of fame being forced on people too young to handle it both seem particularly relevant. The fact that they are being written about by someone who is still the same age as the protagonist also strikes me as important, providing a contrast to us older authors who would naturally see things from a different and perhaps more objective perspective.
I must also confess that Nicole’s story rings some personal bells for me as well. Soon after I left school, many years ago, I worked in a modelling agency and school in Bond Street. I may even have worn a ‘pin-striped suit’, certainly many of my older colleagues did. Even then, when I was still young and hungry, and the instant celebrity business was also still in its infancy, I wondered what was going on in the heads of the girls, many of whom were as young as fourteen, who flocked through the doors in search of fame and adoration in much the same way as X-Factor contestants do today.
I can’t wait to see what Nicole comes up with next.

The Paris Hilton Paparazzi Circus

2009-01-29T03:13:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed a delicious collision of cultures over lunch on Tuesday. Joining the other distinguished judges from last year’s Biographer’s Club Competition for a reunion at Mon Plaisir brasserie in Monmouth Street, I was startled on arrival to find an absolute scrum of paparazzi on the pavement outside, like a real life scene from The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride.
Opposite the restaurant was the Covent Garden Hotel, a hostelry I know quite well having spent several days locked in a suite there with the colourful Pete Bennett and his mum and entourage, when he was writing his autobiography after winning Big Brother.
Mon Plaisir is a delightfully traditional French restaurant and seemed to be crammed with other publishing dignitaries that day, (you know who you are). Distinguished biographer, Richard Davenport-Hines, had managed to get us a table in the window. So, as the four of us, (Nicola Beauman, mastermind behind Persephone Books, and Anna Swan of the Biographer’s Club making up the party), gossiped and gawped Paris Hilton emerged from the hotel and the street erupted, just as I’m sure her entourage hoped it would, with the paparazzi surging forward, fighting one another for prime position, climbing onto the roofs of their cars.
The elegant Persephone Books is well worth looking into, specialising as they do in the re-publishing of good books that have slipped out of print. Their great success at the moment is Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day and I can’t help thinking that Paris Hilton could very easily be a modern equivalent of Delysia, the dizzy, glamorous night club singer and socialite who provides Miss Pettigrew with her chance to ‘live for a day’.
What a glorious and varied world it can be some days.

Celebrity Short Story Finalists

2009-01-25T04:28:00.000-08:00

The three finalists in the Steffi McBride Celebrity short story competition range in age from fourteen to sixty, which I guess just goes to show how all-pervasive celebrity culture is now, and also that the urge to write arrives early and does not dim with the years.
At fourteen, Nicole Hendry is probably a more typical Steffi McBride reader and the one who you would most expect to be wrapped up in the spell of celebrity culture, so much of which is marketed directly towards girls of her generation. Yet both the other finalists are linked in other ways; Veronica Ryder is a keen amateur actress and so understands the lure of the spotlight and Sue Clark is currently working as a writer for a consultancy which specialises in creating a marketing buzz through the use of new media – another link to the world of Steffi McBride.
In her story, “Do you Think It’s Fair? Nicole creates a real air of danger and potential evil with her sharp descriptions of how the forces of celebrity drive her heroine into the arms of anorexia. The incredibly sharp writing makes you long to find out more about the characters sketched in the background.
In “The Purple Peignoir” Sue Clark creates two very interesting characters, neither of which are obvious candidates for modern celebrity but one of whom, Eloise, may well turn out to be one of the founding mothers of the movement. If we knew more we would not only be able to enter the now relatively distant world of the Swinging Sixties, but we would also be able to see what happens to someone when their grip on the spotlight begins to weaken.
In ‘Losing Abby’ Veronica Ryder managed to surprise me several times with unexpected twists to the plot and being the father of an ingénue actress/singer myself I recognise all too clearly the mother’s description of how she feels she is losing Abby to the lure of spotlight.
Having to put aside the seven others from the short list was just as horrible as I expected. I feel sure that many of them could still be worked up into successful novels and I hope all the authors will feel sufficiently encouraged by their success to want to give it a go.
Interviews with the three finalists will be going up on the Steffi McBride website this week and now all I have to do is decide which of them should be the overall winner.

Battling with Barak

2009-01-05T06:10:00.000-08:00

I know I’ve written before about my unhealthy obsession with getting to number one in the bestseller charts, and I think I have vented my spleen against such serial titans as Clarkson, Hammond, Bryson and Brand, who spend months crouched at the top of the mountain, swatting aside anyone who tries to dislodge them. Now we have to cope with books by the most powerful man on the globe – how annoying is that?

You’d think that being probably the most popular person in the world – ever, would be enough to satisfy the man. Whoever heard of a politician who could write books that people genuinely wanted to read anyway?

Not just one, but two of Barak Obama’s tomes are still sitting up there stopping “No One Listened”, which I wrote for Alex and Isobel Kerr, from reaching prime position. (Plus Andrew Franklin’s latest “fantastic facts” book, a whole genre which is another contender for raising my competitive stress levels!).

The Kerr siblings more than deserve a number one for their stoic tale of surviving on their own in the world after their father murdered their mother with a gruesomeness that would have left most children in therapy for life. The way in which they have supported each other and gone on to lead selfless and worthwhile lives helping others less fortunate than themselves is an inspiration to anyone who meets them or reads about them.

In all seriousness, it rather raises one’s hopes for the future to see that people like the Kerrs and Barak Obama are actually getting heard and read in large numbers. They are good people with good intentions doing good things. Long may it last – but I would still like to see the Kerr siblings get past him to the summit for one week at least.

Feeling Sorry for Cheryl Cole

2009-01-04T09:34:00.000-08:00

I have spent most of today feeling sorry for Cheryl Cole, Dannii Minogue and all the other emotionally drained judges who have to weep their way through reality tv contests. I have been sifting through a huge pile of entries for the short story competition which I ran in conjunction with publication of my novel, “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”. The stories had to be less than 1000 words long and the subject had to be “modern celebrity”.

I have been trying to work out how those who work regularly as judges manage to maintain their sanity while dismissing and disrespecting the work and talent of others, deciding who will be encouraged and who will be disappointed. How come Simon Cowell looks so confident and carefree when he is breaking hearts with his highly subjective judgements?

Having read an avalanche of entries, the vast majority of which are extremely good, I am now a complete dithering wreck. The thought of discouraging any budding talent by excluding them from the shortlist simply on the grounds that there were other stories that struck me differently is horrendous, but I know it has to be done. I have received enough rejection letters during forty years of writing, (and listened to enough deafening silences), to know that it is the way of the world, and that the initial anger I felt at those low moments stoked the flames required to forge the steel that every freelance writer needs in their soul in order to survive and go on to enjoy the highs when they come.

The other blow of reading these entries is the realisation of just how ferocious the competition is out there. There are so many people with good ideas, so many people who write well, how can we all possibly survive? Where are we all going to find enough people to buy and read what we want to write? I suppose it’s the same feeling that would-be superstars experience when they turn up to the giant X-Factor auditions and realise that the talent they had until that moment believed to be unique, encouraged by doting friends and family, is actually not unique at all. We are all struggling together to make our voices heard and have our words read.

At least when I was a judge for the Biographers’ Club prize a few months ago I had two others to help with the ruthless task, one of whom was the chairman and therefore carried the ultimate burden. Now there is no one else to share the responsibility with.

I know I have to be strong and make the choices but every decision to put a well written story into the “no” pile is an agony. God knows how the Booker and Costa judges come out with their sanity in tact, or maybe they don’t.

I have bought myself some precious time by whittling the entries down to a short list of ten, (all of which I hope to be able to display on the website www.steffimcbride.com in the next few days), but maybe all I have done is prolong the agony for all of the entrants as well as myself. I hope not.

The Stamp of Glamour for Ghostwriting

2008-12-22T02:32:00.000-08:00

At last we ghostwriters are to receive the official stamp of glamour that we have always deserved; the media is reporting that Ewan McGregor is going to be playing the ghostwriter protagonist in the forthcoming Roman Polanski movie of Robert Harris's novel "The Ghost".
With any luck McGregor will do for the image of ghosting what Bogart did for private detectives, Alan Alda for army doctors, Harrison Ford for archaeologists and Gregory Peck for lawyers.
Robert Harris very generously quoted my Ghostwriting handbook at the start of every chapter of the book and went on to paint a brutally accurate portrait of what life is like hacking away at this particular section of the publishing coalface.
As I am just starting work on a biography of an enigmatic multi-millionaire and futurologist who lives on his own private island off Bermuda and has recently become the largest single donor to Oxford University ever, I shall now be able to imagine myself as Ewan setting out into the plot of a new Robert Harris thriller. I will be able to enjoy a whole new level of self-delusion thanks to the age-old wonders of the Hollywood dream machine.

“Sold” at Auction.

2008-10-29T13:47:00.000-07:00

A signed copy of “Sold”, which I wrote for Zana Muhsen nearly twenty years ago has come up for auction at Celeb2nds.com, the charity auction site that raises funds for children's charities by auctioning celebrity items and experiences.
“Sold” is something of an on-going publishing phenomenon. Despite the fact that I am only the ghost on the project, and despite the fact that the story happened in the late eighties, I still receive several emails a day from readers in different countries asking what has happened to Zana’s sister, Nadia, and their children since the ending of the book. Worldwide we must have sold close to five million copies now and it is still going strong in about twenty different markets, including the UK, and a dozen different languages.
There is something about this real life fairy tale, in which two young sisters from Birmingham think they are going on holiday to the Yemen, only to find when they get there that their father has sold them as child brides, that seems to catch readers’ imaginations and touch them deeply. It took their mother six years to find them in the bandit-ridden mountains and another two years to get Zana out. Nadia did not escape till many years later, when all their children were grown up.
So, I hope thousands of Zana and Nadia’s followers will be flocking to the brilliant www.celeb2nds.com site and bidding their hearts out for this signed copy of a book that many have told me is their favourite read of all time.

The Fabulous Trashionista

2008-10-27T06:16:00.000-07:00

Why are there not more websites like Trashionista.com? It is such a simple and obvious idea; identify a sector of the book trade – women’s fiction in this case, or ‘chick-lit” if we are going to be patronising – and then create a really first rate website specifically aimed at that sector of the market.
Everyone is agreed that marketing books is a nightmare because of the amount of competitive noise in the marketplace and because of all the barriers to both purchase and consumption, (so much choice, so much time needed to read a book, so little money for the marketing budget, so many rival claims on customers’ attention etc etc), but here is an idea that is simple, obvious and enjoyable.
When ideas like this come along they seem so blindingly obvious you can’t imagine why no one thought of them before, (just like Amazon and the Richard and Judy Bookclub). Full credit to whoever thought up the concept and to all those involved in executing it so sharply. Let’s hope we will soon see similar sites springing up to serve all the other genres – Inspirational-lit.com anyone?

Don't Diss my Icon, Miss Jones

2008-10-22T04:31:00.000-07:00

In today's Guardian Books Blog, (www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog ) Linda Jones suggests that Steffi McBride is a 'd-lister' celebrity - although she does admit Steffi is 'more interesting than your average airhead celebrity', which goes part of the way to ameliorate the dreadful slur.

Ms McBride is without question an icon and a national treasure, as anyone who has seen her YouTube performance on the www.steffimcbride.com website has been able to see with their own eyes. D-lister-indeed!

The level of entries pouring in for the 'celebrity short story' competition on Steffi’s website is further proof, if proof were needed, that the woman is a phenomenon of the celebrity world, an inspiration to talented young people the whole world over.

Don’t diss the girl, Miss Jones, she’s a true star, a soap-goddess and a heroine to boot.

To purchase a copy of The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride for a discounted price of £6.00 (inc p&p) please call John Blake Publishing on 0207 381 0666.

Why OJ should be very afraid of this author.

2008-09-25T04:23:00.000-07:00

In the Daily Telegraph today an article by Cassandra Jardine is headlined “Why OJ should fear Ann Ming”.
Ann is the extraordinary woman who fought for 17 years to get the law of double jeopardy changed so that the man who was openly boasting in the pub about killing her daughter could be retried. Her courage, firstly in coping with being the one who found her own daughter’s body three months after her death and after a team of 29 police had failed, secondly in relentlessly pursuing a man who was known to be highly dangerous and thirdly in taking on the legal and political establishment, is the stuff of legend.
The book recounting this legend, which I was honoured to be able to help her write, called “For the Love of Julie”, is now out, and is a great testament to a great woman. OJ should indeed be looking over his shoulder at this redoubtable avenging angel.

Paranoia on the Amazon Roller coaster

2008-09-24T05:14:00.000-07:00

I have discovered a wonderful new game that feeds both my paranoia and my ego as a writer in a dizzying succession of highs and lows – it is called “The Amazon Roller coaster”. My addiction to chart-watching no longer satisfied with the weekly fixes provided by publications like The Bookseller and The Sunday Times, (more or less identical charts with a few minor adjustments by the ST to try to level the playing fields when television heavyweights and the Highway Code come on to play), I can now get fresh highs and lows every few hours by logging on to Amazon and looking up “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride” or any number of other titles.

Like all drugs you take your first hit out of curiosity, thinking that you can handle it. You see that your ‘sales rank’ is pleasantly high – let’s say you are at number 1,000. Thinking this is a good omen you go back the next day to see if you have climbed any higher – you have, you are now down to three figures. Now they’ve got you.

The next time you tune in you have plummeted, maybe in the space of just a few hours, to number 150,000. How can this be? You are filled with angst. Has your publisher failed to send them a new order? Has a bad review appeared somewhere and halted sales in their tracks? Or are you simply doomed to a future of abject failure?

You tentatively go back in a few hours later and, miracle of miracles, you are back in three figures. You are high again, thrilled with yourself and the world. Now you are Amazon’s slave. It will now only be a matter of time before you are unable to stop yourself from checking in almost every hour. It will become a new distraction from the job of writing as irresistible as making another cup of coffee (each cup a little stronger than the last, but that’s another story).

To purchase a copy of The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride for a discounted price of £6.00 (inc p&p) please call John Blake Publishing on 0207 381 0666.

Keira Knightly as a Packaging Concept.

2008-09-16T09:44:00.000-07:00

The Bookseller charts are out again “Cry Silent Tears” by Joe Peters has slipped to number two in paperback non-fiction, despite selling virtually the same number of copies as during the four weeks of its reign at number one. It has been overtaken by “The Duchess”, the Amanda Foreman biography which has just been released as a film starring the divine Keira. Although it is always annoying to be knocked off the number one perch, there are some silver linings to be found here.

Firstly it is great to know that a book of the quality of “The Duchess” can be taken to the top of the charts with the right packaging and promotional push. It proves yet again that there are lots of people out there who want to read good stuff if they can just be shown where it is and why they will enjoy it.
My second hope is that if Keira’s porcelain features on the cover can work such wonders for Amanda, fellow actress Olivia Grodd’s porcelain features might work a similar miracle in the cover picture of “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”.

All we need now is major feature film of Steffi and Bob’s your uncle.

Latest Fix for Chart Addict

2008-09-09T08:10:00.001-07:00

Just had another jolly email from a pleased publisher to say that “Cry Silent Tears” by Joe Peters will be number one in the next Bookseller and Sunday Times paperback bestseller charts for the fourth week running.
If anyone deserves a run of success like this it is Joe, a boy who was struck mute at the age of four by the sight of his beloved father burning to death in front of him and then fell into the merciless hands of a mother who eventually sold him to a paedophile ring. It is a story of someone who spent his childhood in the very depths of hell but somehow managed to grow up to be a kind, forgiving and charming man, husband and father.

Quote - unquote

2008-09-09T07:57:00.000-07:00

‘I look pretty crap without make-up - and that isn’t me being modest, it’s a fact. I’m about the only person on our estate from a mixed family who has come out looking like a f***ing albino.’

– Steffi McBride, from “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”.

Steffi McBride is in the Shops

2008-09-08T02:28:00.000-07:00

“The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride” is published today, and so far everyone who has read advance copies has been incredibly kind. Below is a lovely review by a young writer called Eliza.

Writers’ Forum magazine has also published an article I wrote about the whole experience of making a promotional film for the book with the actress, Olivia Grodd, playing Steffi, and putting it up on YouTube and on the website www.steffimcbride.com. So far we have had over three thousand viewings of the film, which seems more than healthy considering the book is only out today.

In the same issue of Writers’ Forum there is an article by the great writing guru Alison Baverstock on how all authors have to expect to do their own marketing as publishers just don’t have the time, (I paraphrase but that is the gist and of course she is absolutely right).

Eliza’s Review:

This is a read-it-in-one-sitting modern-day fairytale - princes, villains and ogres included. Bridget Jones put those pants on and move aside! There is no swanky media job here; Steffi is, for most of us, the modern day young woman.

A pot washer from the wrong estate with a junky boyfriend and family who would rather you snort a line than read a book, Steffi has a dream and no one, not even her dad, can stop her.

When talent scouts spot Steffi the ultimate young girl’s dream starts to become a reality. Steffi, a lifelong fan of The Towers, is overjoyed at the chance to work on the infamous soap.

Nothing can prepare her for the tidal wave of fame that hits, but has Steffi too many stars in her eyes to see that the wave is in fact shark-infested?

A truly gripping read, Crofts encapsulates the rocky road of today’s vulnerable celebrity status. A tale we have witnessed so often in the media, told fascinatingly from the other side.

Narrated by Steffi, this story should be a textbook for all budding wannabees. Crofts’ style ensures Steffi is a lovable character, making you love and despair alongside her. You find yourself willing her dreams to come true. Now that I have finished reading the book I feel bereft and cheated that she is not real.

The princes, fairy godmothers and villains are all there just as in every good fairytale. There’s boy band has-been, Luke, a pin up for Steffi since her early teens. And Gerry, every mother’s dream son-in-law, you love him but is he Steffi’s prince or just another knight destined not to get his princess? And we mustn’t forget fairy godmother Dora, the chain-smoking agent - but does Steffi really need another mother?

Enjoy the emotions as Steffi grows from a girl with a boyfriend living in a squat, to the nation’s sweetheart. Live the dream alongside Steffi and experience the highs and lows. Have the tissues to hand, sit back and indulge yourself in a truly beautiful read.

Many thanks Eliza

To purchase a copy of The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride for a discounted price of £6.00 (inc p&p) please call John Blake Publishing on 0207 381 0666.

Addicted to the Bestseller Charts

2008-09-07T01:16:00.000-07:00

It’s time to confess; I have become as addicted to the bestseller book charts as I am to wine, caffeine and emails; desperate all the time for a new fix, even though I know it will inevitably lead to another painful come-down.

I can completely understand why ego-crazed pop stars are driven tantrum mad when some giant selling track from a rival act squats at the top of the charts for months on end, forever depriving them of the ultimate glory they believe to be their right. To be number two or three is great, of course, but to be able to label your book merely “a Sunday Times bestseller” is never going to be the same as being “a number one bestseller”.

So many times I have ghosted a potential chart topper, only to be held off the top spot by the mega-selling likes of Jeremy Clarkson, Bill Bryson, Richard Hammond or Russell Brand, (the literary equivalents of the Beatles, Whitney Houston, Bryan Adams and Ken Dodd).

I know my addiction is illogical, that a book which sells a thousand copies a week for twenty years is an infinitely better earner than one that surges out of the starting gate with a ten thousand sale in the first week and has completely petered out by the end of the year. I know it because I have had those too, but I am still addicted to the adrenalin rush of the quick number one surge. The pleasures and rewards of sensible moderation are subtler and require a degree of patience that I am having increasing difficulty in mastering as the addiction takes hold.

Time to seek help, I think.

The Future of Books as Big Events

2008-09-06T06:30:00.000-07:00

The big fear in the publishing world seems to be that books will go the same way as CD’s, rendered redundant by the wonders of the Internet. But maybe books will survive and prosper in the same way as blockbuster movies and pop concerts have.

Movies that you have to travel to and then pay to see should have been put out of business by television, by the DVD and by downloading, but still people flock to the multiplexes for the big screens and the social experience. Live pop concerts should have been destroyed by CD's and Ipods, but actually they have been fed by them instead. CD’s were just a way to listen to music, whereas books, like movies, live theatre and music, are much loved and user-friendly products in themselves.

That’s not to say that technology shouldn’t be changing the whole way we think of books, many of which do not need to be published in the traditional way. Business books, for instance, and topical academic works are often served much better by the convenience and speed of the computer download, (and the Kindle and the Sony Reader et al will take the concept to the next stage).

Peter James, now one of the world’s most successful thriller writers, has been predicting such things for at least twenty years and is finally being proved to have been both right and ahead of his time. His own enormous successes in the traditional publishing formats however, demonstrate that the book is still a long way from being dead.

What I believe the developments show us is that we have actually been publishing books the wrong way round, starting with the hardback format and then, if that is successful, republishing in ever-cheaper paperback versions. What if we turned the whole process on its head?

Imagine a writer has created a 70,000-word piece of work. We start by circulating it on the Internet, maybe doing some print-on-demand to test the market and build word of mouth. Maybe it will get no further, in which case it probably wouldn’t have worked as a book either, but at least trees will have been spared in the new process. If it does well, however, and shows that it has a potential market, it could then be published in paperback for a wider market.

If the paperback proves successful then beautifully designed, hardback souvenir editions could be produced as gift items and to be treasured on bookshelves for future generations. Hardback books would then be the equivalent of the great pop concerts that cater to demands that have initially been fed with downloaded tracks, videos on MTV, CD’s and all the rest.

There would still be exceptions like sure-fire hits, (a new Harry Potter for instance or a lushly illustrated companion to a popular television cookery programme), but I believe the vast majority of books would suit this route to market. It is as ridiculous to put a first time, unknown novelist straight into a glossy hardback, as it would be to book an unknown band into the O2 Centre.

Arts Council Website Backs Celebrity Short Story Competition

2008-09-05T01:12:00.000-07:00

Youwriteon.com, the Arts Council sponsored website that helps new writers get published, is backing a competition for short stories around the theme of modern celebrity. It is linked to the publication of my novel, “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”.

The site is backed by some of the biggest names in the world of publishing, editing and literary agenting and has already produced a couple of best sellers.

The Steffi McBride competition is linked to the website www.steffimcbride.com and I have agreed to judge the entries and help the winner to develop their 1,000 word or less story into a full-length book. The entries are already coming in and I’m hopeful that we will be able to find a future best seller amongst them. Nothing, of course, is ever certain in the publishing world, as we all know only too well, but it seems to me that youwriteon.com is providing pretty much the best opportunity around for new talent in search of free mentoring.

Steffi McBride herself is due to be published on Monday, so this is going to be a nerve-wracking weekend.

To purchase a copy of The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride for a discounted price of £6.00 (inc p&p) please call John Blake Publishing on 0207 381 0666.

My Editor Gently Weeps

2008-09-04T06:32:00.000-07:00

I find myself in the interesting position this week of having two hardback books I have ghosted coming out from two different publishers on virtually the same day, and competing pretty much for the same shelf space.

Both are strong contenders for chart success, (although I know enough never to bank on anything). “For the Love of Julie” by Ann Ming is such a powerful and moving story that our editor informed me she wept all the way through the editing process, while the publication of “Disgraced” by Saira Ahmed is potentially so life-threatening to the author that she has had to be shrouded in layer upon layer of disguise.

Ann Ming is the redoubtable Yorkshire mother who set about changing the law of double jeopardy in order to see her daughter’s murderer brought to justice. The manner in which her daughter died and the way in which Ann herself found the body would have been enough to defeat most of us, rendering us unable to function like normal, thinking human beings, but Ann is made of some of the sternest stuff I have ever come across. It is an absolutely stunning story and it’s making me water up just to think about it.

Born and brought up in Britain, Saira Ahmed escaped from an arranged marriage back in Pakistan and then went secretly on the game in Britain in order to make enough money to settle debts run up by her parents and dissolute brothers. Any young Muslim girl from a strict family will understand just what risks Saira has taken and how extraordinary her courage is.

Ann’s story is published by Harpers Element and Saira’s by Headline Review, both highly experienced and skilful publishers of these sorts of human interest tales. So, now the race is on.

Talking to the X-Factor Generation

2008-09-03T12:30:00.000-07:00

Any young hopeful scouring the website of The Stage for auditions and lucky breaks over the next few weeks is likely to be exposed to a startling pink banner ad proclaiming the message “plucked from obscurity to become the nation’s hottest soap star” and going on to promote my forthcoming novel, “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”.

This is a story aimed squarely at anyone who has ever dreamed for a moment of winning The X-Factor or a lead in EastEnders or Hollyoaks, the tens of thousands who turn up to the talent show auditions in search of an escape from the mundane into a world of stardom, however fleeting.

These people are not habitual book-buyers – they prefer to spend their entertainment dollars on music, films and magazines – but I am convinced that can change. If publishers and writers can just create stories that are irresistible we can get the fame-seekers as hooked on books as they are on I-pods and Apple Macs, Skyplus and Heat.

The job search pages of The Stage have long been the first port of call for anyone with big, bold dreams.

To purchase a copy of "The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride" for a discounted price of £6.00 (inc p&p) please call John Blake Publishing on 0207 381 0666.

Andrew Lownie and the Biographers' Club

2008-09-03T01:52:00.000-07:00

Anyone coming accidentally into the Biographers' Club Prize dinner in the spectacular Louis XVI-style ballroom of the Savile Club last night could have been forgiven for thinking they had stumbled upon one of the oldest and most venerable literary clubs of London. The fact that it was founded by one man a mere ten years ago is astounding.
Andrew Lownie, who was already one of the most industrious and successful independent literary agents in London, somehow found the time to create a club whose meetings are invariably packed with the great and the good. His creation, however, has finally grown too large for him to control alone and last night he officially handed over power to a distinguished committee. I suspect in a hundred years time members will still be talking with reverence of the energy and imagination of their founder ,(maybe even discussing biographies of him).
Anyway, I was there because I was one of the judges, (the others were Nicola Bowman who runs the extraordinary Persephone Books which is enjoying a huge success with a certain Miss Pettigrew, and Richard Davenport-Hines, who is also currently enjoying a triumph with his new biography, "Ettie - the Intimate life and dauntless spirit of Lady Desborough").
We had been presented with proposals and sample chapters for twenty books by first time writers, at least half of which I believe, with the help of a good agent, could find publishers, and asked to reduce them to a shortlist of five, with one winner. It was not an easy choice but we eventually decided on Michael Bundock's biography of Francis Barber, the slave who was also Samuel Johnson's friend. I think it will be a fantastic book, but I quite expect to see the rest of the shortlist published and in the shops within a couple of years as well - I hope so.
The prize is sponsored by The Daily Mail and is undoubtedly money very well spent if it kick starts careers for some of these excellent writers.
It was a beautifully organised and glittering evening - Simon Callow spoke and everyone gossiped and the splendid Andrew Lownie was roundly toasted. Personally, I can't wait to see what he does next with all the free time he must now have on his hands!

Why Katie Price deserves to earn more than most other writers

2008-09-02T04:31:00.000-07:00

Every so often there is a burst of indignation in the media about how little serious authors earn. Figures are bandied about and ludicrous comparisons are made, such as complaining that Katie Price, (aka Jordan), makes considerably more money from the books that come out in her name than the whole Man Booker shortlist put together.
Of course she does. The owner of IKEA turns over more than the local craftsman who makes individual items from expensive raw materials, Ronald MacDonald turns over more money than Raymond Le Blanc.
The average earnings of members of the Society of Authors are often brought up to illustrate how poorly writers are rewarded, but we are all able to exercise at least some control over our earning potential eventually, simply by working harder. No one can predict a runaway success story like J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown, but it is a dead cert that someone who can write to a publishable level and who puts in a steady eight hours work a day, is not going to starve. If you just write one novel a year, having no idea until it is published whether anyone else is going to want to read it, then you are quite likely to be disappointed by your earnings for the year. If, however, you spend a couple of days a week on that novel, and put the rest of your time into writing articles, non-fiction books, press releases, speeches or any other work you can get your hands on, then I’m willing to bet you will be making a reasonable living within a few years of setting out.
It’s the same for artists. An artist could spend a week on a painting and then be able to sell it for no more than a hundred pounds, but if he or she also does some illustrating work, arranges to have prints made and sold of their most successful works, and accepts commissions to do portraits of children and pets, then they are more likely to be able to support themselves through the slow times. The great “masters” of history nearly always had busy studios filled with apprentices turning out the sort of pictures that clients wanted to pay for. An artist who spends his or her life painting pictures and then hoping to sell them individually will always have a hard time.
Great playwrights must create works that will sell tickets, journalists must cover subjects that editors believe their customers want to read about, but if any writer labours long and hard enough they will eventually create enough of a reputation to be able to influence a little the nature of the work that they are asked to produce.
The secret to getting launched as a successful freelance writer is always to have a mixed portfolio of work; some speculative, some satisfyingly creative and some purely to generate bread and butter.
There is also a considerable benefit to being forced out into the world to write about things that we might otherwise not be interested in. It gets us away from our desks, broadens our minds and gives us a greater understanding of the world, which we can then draw on for our other writings. If we were fortunate enough to be able to support ourselves just on the workings of our imaginations from the start, many of us would take the opportunity to shut out the rest of the world and would soon be reduced to writing books about writers shutting themselves away. We all need to be given a push every now and then to remind us that we have to join in with the rest of the world at least part of the time if we want to learn and understand how everything works.
The day we hand over our manuscripts to our publishers, many of us breathe sighs of relief and begin to think about the next book, assuming, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the publishers and the general public will take over from that point on. That is never going to happen. With very few exceptions, the most successful writers are the ones who are continually promoting themselves and their products. From Lord Byron to Jacqueline Susann, Jeffrey Archer to Will Self and, of course, the ubiquitous Katie Price, the evidence is all around.
It’s easy to deride the more blatantly marketed brand names like Katie Price, but in fact her ascent to the top of the bestseller lists is a lesson to us all in being true to ourselves, refusing to take “no” for an answer and effectively marketing whatever assets we have. She had to overcome a shameful amount of snobbery and lethargy to get where she is today. Five years ago she was just a glamour model with a tabloid reputation. When she approached publishers with the idea of writing a book about her experiences of “being Jordan” she was met with sneering distaste. Only John Blake, a man famed for his open mind on such subjects, was willing to give her a chance and bought the book for about two per cent of the price Katie and her people had initially been hoping for.
The publishers who had turned her down had misjudged their customers just as surely as the people who rejected J.K. Rowling or the Beatles. By teaming up with Blake, Katie was able to appeal to the general public over the heads of the publishing elite who have traditionally set themselves up as the gatekeepers of what the public should or shouldn’t get to read about. Having got to know her on television the public responded with a resounding cheer and immediately wanted to find out more, and more and more. The success of the book meant that one of the publishers who had previously turned her away came back with a mighty enough offer to lure her away from Blake, and the next stage of her publishing career has been nothing short of a phenomenon. As well as the fiction which appears in her name and goes straight to the top of the charts in hardback as well as paperback, and the endless stream of memoirs and diaries, she also puts her name to a series of books for children about horses and riding.
Katie’s rise contains several lessons for writers. Firstly she was not put off by the fact that every publisher in London bar one refused to have anything to do with her and secondly she settled for an advance that would not make her a profit, just to get the show on the road. She did not then sit around waiting for the publisher to make her rich, she made herself an object of interest to the general public so that they would want to read more about her. The woman’s work ethic is beyond reproach and if we all put as much imagination and as many hours into our projects as she does we too would be reaping our just rewards.
Most of us, of course, would no more want to swap lives with Katie Price than we would like to trade places with Gordon Brown or Prince William, but that doesn’t mean we can’t watch and learn from their triumphs and their mistakes.
So before any of us complain about how neglected we are by the market, and how impecunious we are left as a result, we should all think very carefully about whether we have brought it on ourselves. The rewards of a writing life are out there for the taking, but it may require a little more sweat than you first imagined before you will be able to bring in the harvest.

When is a "misery memoir" just a "powerful story"?

2008-09-01T03:23:00.000-07:00

There was yet more coverage in the publishing trade media this week of "mis-mem sales dipping" - but how is anyone measuring what is or isn't mis-mem?

Misery memoirs are just powerful stories starring great heroes and the world will never grow tired of reading them, however the trade chooses to label them.

Over the last few months I have been involved with four books that might be included in the genre; "Cry Silent Tears" by Joe Peters, (currently number one in the Sunday Times paperback non-fiction chart), "Daddy's Little Earner" by Maria Landon, (which went to number two in the same chart a few weeks ago), "Disgraced" by Saira Ahmed, which is the newly published story of a girl who escaped an arranged marriage in Pakistan and went on the game to support her family and "For the Love of Julie" by Ann Ming, a woman who spent 17 years battling to get the law of double jeopardy changed in order to bring her daughter's murderer to justice.

They could all be labelled as "misery", or perhaps "women in peril", or "crime", or "culture gap stories" - or perhaps they are just powerful tales about heroes and heroines who battle against adversity and have extraordinary and extreme experiences that the rest of us are fortunate enough to avoid. If it is the latter, doesn't that cover virtually every great story ever told?

Or are we saying that "mis-mems" are only the stories told by abused children? If that is the case how can they be said to be in decline when Joe Peters, Maria Landon and Judy Westwater were all in the paperback top ten together a couple of weeks ago?

Powerful tales, with strong and likeable heroes battling against adversity are always going to appeal to readers, whether you pigeon-hole them as "misery" or just call them "powerful stories".

People overcoming adversity, (or misery if you prefer), always make for gripping reading in both fiction and non-fiction and the subject matter they deal with will always develop as we learn and understand more about the world about us. No publisher would have been willing to touch the incendiary material contained in "Cry Silent Tears" five years ago when Kevin Lewis's "The Kid" was first published. We have all learned a lot in those five years and I suspect there are many more moving, inspiring and powerful personal stories to come, whether we choose to call them "mis-mems" or not.