Cameras Roll on Steffi McBride

This week the cameras started rolling at Twickenham Studios on a pilot episode of “Steffi”, a dramatisation of my book, “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”, which is destined to be broadcast over the internet and then go on to television through a maze of deals involving a variety of major sponsors and agreements so complex they make your head spin. In fact, I haven’t even tried to understand them, having total faith that the producers at Emerald Films know what they are doing in this “multi-platform” world.

The cast are a mixture of established television actors, pop stars, internet stars and Jasmine Breinburg, the young actress who won "overnight fame" herself in Danny Boyle's opening ceremony for the Olympics. The producers have been working on the whole package for a couple of years since first expressing interest in the original book.

In that time the print version, published in the traditional way by Blake publishing, has pretty much sold out and there are negotiations under way for them to produce an e-book version.

Blake Publishing has always been one of the more fleet-footed, broad minded and innovative of publishing houses, so I suppose it should be no surprise that they have also been open minded enough to give me the go-ahead to put “Steffi” up on Wattpad, (where her mother, “Maggie de Beer”, is about to pass the 300,000 hits mark with her memoir “The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer”). I have commissioned a new cover from the talented Mr. Elliot Thomson, making this the fourth cover he has done for me.

What an interesting new world we are living in.

Nine Million Readers Ready and Waiting to Read Your Book

I have now had my book “The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer” up on Wattpad for two months. Initially things were slow and then the number of readers started to speed up. The ultimate aim of any writer is to have their work read and http://www.wattpad.com/ allows you to see actual numbers, chapter by chapter, and provides a new addiction just as time consuming for an author as the compulsive checking of the Sunday Times and Amazon bestseller lists.


Maggie de Beer is divided into eighteen chapters and 100,000 readers have now opened individual chapters. That total is currently rising by over 6,000 a day, which means that around 250 people are reading a chapter of the book every hour of the day somewhere in the world.

Closer examination reveals that nearly 11,000 people have read the first chapter and just over 5,000 have made it all the way to chapter eighteen, (some presumably are still working their way through at any given moment). It seems therefore that half of those who open the first chapter to browse decide they would like to read the whole thing. Does that reflect the number of people who decide to buy a book in a shop or on Amazon after browsing an opening chapter? It doesn’t sound impossible, although of course with Wattpad there is not the barrier of having to ask the reader to pay, so maybe it would be better to compare these conversion figures with those of library users.

Wattpad, which is most easily described as being “YouTube for writers and readers”, currently has around nine million people who are actively and enthusiastically reading chapters of books on their phones or computers. I’m guessing that compares pretty favourably with the numbers of people taking books out in public libraries, and I am also guessing that they are a much younger age profile. They are, in other words, the future of reading and writing.

I am still a beginner. There are some books which have had up to ten million chapters opened by readers. They provide a clear picture of what sort of stories it is that most people want to read - vampires, werewolves, high school romances, fantasy, thrillers and sci-fi – much as in the traditional publishing world. There is, however, a variety of other material starting to make its way into the “Featured”, “What’s Hot” and “What’s New” sections, and Margaret Atwood – always one who likes to experiment with new technology – has joined in with a book of poems. As the good reviews and comments for Maggie de Beer start to pile up the rate of hits seems to rise and I am feeling optimistic that within a few months I will be able to report even more dramatic growth. Fingers crossed.

Rare Interview with Maggie de Beer

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/

The Naked Celebrity

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?

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

What Would You Sacrifice to be Famous?

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

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

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.

Self-Publishing an E-book

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.

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 public.

Blake Publishing Buys Autobiography of Steffi McBride’s Mother.

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.’