The Word Cloud

When I was at primary school (many years ago), I read a book called 'King of the Copper Mountain'. It is a story that has lived in my memory for years, but I have never seen the title since the 70's.

Last year, I was prompted to search for any remaining copies of the book, assuming that by now, it was out of print. Oh, yes, I could get a copy - for nigh on £100! I wasn't that desperate...I shelved the idea, feeling a bit sad.

Now, at work, I help with some of the not-so-confident readers in Y6, and part of that role is helping them to choose books. Whilst checking out the 'ruby' shelf with one of the pupils, I made a fantastic discovery! I think Kieran thought I'd gone mad; I could hardly speak - there, on the shelf...now in my hand...was the very book I'd been searching for!

King of the Copper Mountain - re-published! It even had pictures - the same ones I remembered; the king with his enormous flowing beard...the bees buzzing round his head as they told their story, the faithful hare. I was, quite frankly, blown away. I toyed with the idea of sneaking it out there and then - I didn't care that it was there for the kids - I wanted to read it. I resisted.

 Instead, after explaining why I was so excited and the impact the book had had on me as a child of about his age...Kieran decided to give it a go. Now for someone who's normally into 'BeastQuest' and action stories, I had reservations about how he'd receive this magical story. But getting the kids interested in a book is the first hurdle, and he'd just jumped over that one. 

Last week, he told me how much he was enjoying the book.

I am delighted that the book continues to weave its magic to a new generation...and I'm watching the post eagerly so that I can dive into my brand new copy when it arrives.

 

 

You've no doubt had someone say to you, 'you should write a book.' Several people said that to me over the last ten years. Flattered, well yes! The only problem was what to write about? I hated English classes at school - hated school generally to be honest. I'd probably forgotten more than I ever knew about grammar, tense and punctuation. I could do verbs, nouns and adjectives I thought, but a participle? That only provided an degree of mirth; my dad's name being Percy Tipple. I rarely read anything other than car maintenance manuals, or electronics magazines or articles connected with work.

So what happened? Why do I want to write now? For starters, I've read lots of books over the last twenty years and enjoyed them. The more I read, the more I wanted to read. I knew which authors left me cold and those who worked for me, eager to read their latest. When I retired three years ago, we spent a lot of time in Thailand, especially over the winters. I began to write short articles about living here mainly for the benefit of those back home: perhaps to reassure them that we were alright living in Asia. Those early scrawlings were loaded with errors; all the things I'd forgotten about. But I enjoyed doing them.

This month I self-published them as a short e-book on Smashwords and Amazon, under the title of My Thai Eye, a wry look at things Thai. And they're selling, not in vast numbers - I didn't expect they would - but selling. I  did this for a number of reasons;

• It would raise some money for Thai flood relief: I have chosen a book library for children's charity. Seemed fitting as many were destroyed,
• It would help to get my name 'out there',
• I would gain experience at placing my own work in e-book stores and to learn how it all worked.

But My Thai Eye is done with now, apart from the marketing - which I think I'll enjoy - and checking from time to time to see how sales are going, which I might not. As part of my marketing, I designed my own website - and the cover for My Thai Eye - so gradually I'm learning quite a lot about more than writing.

I haven't acheived this alone and want to thank all of the Clouders at The Writers' Workshop - the best on-line community for new writers - and their editors who nicely but firmly pointed me in the right direction. Plus David Gaughran - you should visit his site Let's Get Digital if you want to e-pub, he's a real enthusiast.

So, what now? What to write about next? Two years ago I had no idea. Then one balmy evening, I had that eureka moment. I knew what my first novel would be about.

Edwin Tipple edwintipple.com

January 2555 (2012)

http://www.edwintipple.com/blog5.html

My eBook - 'Wormybrain and Stinkfoot' - a SciFi trilogy, is available to download here for the princely sum of 77p.

If you don't have a Kindle or other e-reader, you can download the software FREE here for eBooks on your PC.

Since e-publishing now seems like it could be a very important part of all our futures, I'm gonna create a group where we can discuss issues arising, share our experiences, ask questions and give helpful tips etc.

But wait, there's more...

I've snaffled these from locats:

I've decided to put the best of my short stories and blogs to work. I'm going to collect them together and publish the result as a ebook (probly on Amazon Kindle).

I have 17 public transport blogs, and 17 short stories, also 31 general blogs. So I thought I should alternate them: a bus blog, a story, a general blog - 17 times, then use the leftover general blogs (14, but I may drop some) alternating with 5 poems and 3 novel excerpts. I've added up the word counts, it comes to 116K, so since I'll probly drop some of the general blogs, it will probly come out at about 110K words.

There's a bit of editing needed here and there, and I need to find out more about e-publishing, but when I do upload the thing, I'll let you guys know where to find it, and keep you updated on its progress.

In the meantime, any advice?

An interesting idea at work today. Everyone brings in their unwanted books, and they get sold for 50p each, with the money going to charity. Fabulous - I was pleased to see all the neglected books going to smiling new owners. However, I decided I would be strong. As I neared the tables, and saw the books seductively displaying themselves, I had a word to myself.
'Self,' I said, 'There's already a book overflow problem in the flat, you have a leaning tower of Pisa waiting to be read, and you'll have to carry them home.'
Self totally ignored this and got out my purse, and bought these two:

Well, they are for research purposes... and I got a seat to myself on the bus.

I've been having chats with an ex-colleague who's helping me with the marketing of my book and one of his first questions was whether it was being translated into German. We had a bit of a laugh about the pitfalls of trying to get the "jolly good chaps" lingo into German and the potential misunderstandings about the RAF (in Germany, the first thing that comes to mind for many is the Rote Armee Fraktion - aka Baader-Meinhof Gang!)

I know that agents and publishers are on the lookout for fiction - not just for children - that will work internationally. Interestingly enough, my son and his class have just compeleted a project to pick a book for review to the whole class and I thought it might be interesting to see which titles 11-12 year olds in Germany chose.

Interestingly enough, the boys were more likely to choose books originally written in English:
Harry Potter
Enid Blyton Famous Five
Eragon (I think was English originally?)
2 x Magic Tree House
Star Wars
SilverFin (Young Bond - hmm, guess who that was...)
and 4 x Diary of a Wimpy Kid!
3 German original books (one a classic, two others modern adventure)

From the girls:
Harry Potter
 Magic Tree House
Twilight
Spiderwick
6 German original books (mostly junior chicklit)

The Magic Tree House is a bit of an odd one - I would have thought that children of this age would have grown out of that but it's obviously a winning formula for both boys and girls.

Now the trick is - how to have universal appeal without being bland?

When you plan your ‘Bestseller’ you can do it in one of two ways: write the story you want to read in the bathtub or write the story everybody else wants to read in the bathtub. Occasionally, for example, the wonderful J K Rowling and her Harry Potter books, the two coincide, but usually, 99.999999999% of the time, they don’t. So, which to choose? Well, it depends on you and why you decided to spend the next year or so torturing yourself at a keyboard. If there’s a wonderful but totally unmarketable story in you and you think ‘Hell to it! I’m gonna write it anyway!’ then I think ‘Good for you’ and ‘Go for it’ but sadly, the hard, inescapable truth is you probably won’t sell very many. But maybe that’s ok. Maybe to you the book is simply a trophy, to sit happily on a shelf in the front room just over the TV so anybody who visits will spot it, particularly Cousin-Alfred who always seems to have a much bigger car than you. But, if you decide to check out the market and try to write a book that fills a niche, then, in my opinion, you’re not just a writer, you’re an author too.

When I wrote my latest children’s novel, The Gullfoss Legends, I decided to spend a lot of my time pouring over the primary school curriculum for English and consequently I discovered the importance of myths and legends, historical setting and understanding a different culture, to teachers responsible for stocking the book cupboard. Consequently my novel is based on a legend in Iceland in the early 1900s. BINGO! My book fulfills three of the key elements of the school curriculum. Now, when I market my book to schools, parents and even the odd library, I can explain this to them. The result: I pre-sold 90% of the 500 books initially planned to be printed before they had even been printed! I sold thousands of my first set of books all about a girl called Felicity Brady who finds a magic bookshop (Felicity Brady and the Wizard’s Bookshop), and I realistically plan to sell 6,500 Gullfoss Legends in the next academic year. But to do this I must do a colossal amount of marketing. This is helped by the fact I already had a market in mind i.e. schools, prior and during the writing of the novel.

But if you too wish to market your children’s book to schools then STOP! THINK! There’s an awful lot to do. You can’t just pop in the school, set up a table in the hall and sign away. First, you must persuade the literacy co-ordinators to allow you to visit. This is no easy task! I offer free literacy workshops - this gets me in the door - but I’m an ex-secondary school English teacher so I (sort of) know what I’m doing. Also, if you suffer from stage fright, this might not be the route for you. I visit approx. 200 primary schools in the UK a year and I talk to small groups of children (20 or so) and large groups of children (up to 1,000!) so it’s important you enjoy being stared at by so many critical eyes. And my job in these workshops is not just to educate; I must entertain too. Basically, my job is to get them to laugh, and by doing so, get them to learn (and buy a book too).

I no longer teach; I’m a full-time author, so I guess my workshops must be a success. I think (hope) they get better and better. Last year I spoke to over 27,000 children just in London. My secret formula to a good workshop for kids: energy, lots and lots of energy. I do get fantastic feedback from teachers and pupils and they do buy a lot of my books. And doing this: writing and giving workshops; well, I would not give it up for anything. Half of my life is spent writing and half in front of a hall full of kids. Wonderful fun!

Knowing the market for your book also helps when you’re looking for a publishing contract with the ‘Big Boys!’  Often a publisher wants to know how you, the author, see the market for your book. If you can confidently tell them you planned and wrote the book with an affluent market in mind then Bob’s y’ uncle and y’ best pal too. Even better if you self published your book and now with so many orders flooding in you need help!

I understand many authors believe a book is sacred and the idea of a marketing plan prior to writing it is sacrilege. I guess Tolkien did not have multi-million dollar films in mind when he wrote The Lord of the Rings, and nor did C S Lewis when Aslan growled in his mind. But we live and write now, and now is a much more competitive world with wild, hungry packs of authors all juggling for shelf space and a publishing contract. So think market. I knew prior to writing The Gullfoss Legends that there was a tourist centre by the waterfalls. Now, there’s my market, I thought, and happily, they ordered a truck-full.

Just a note on bookshops. Personally I think most of them want too big a cut and frankly, unless you do a book signing or your novel hits it big, your book will be lost on a tiny shelf in a dusty, slightly cobwebby corner of the shop. The trick to self publishing is to sell direct and the trick to selling direct is to identify a market you can tap directly in to. No greedy middle men!

Finally, the title of the book. These days, think Google and think Amazon. Do not choose a title that will get lost in the vast world of the internet. For example, if you decide to call your new fantasy book, ‘The Wizard and His Magic Wand!’ then anybody looking for your book who puts the title in Google will be met with an eye-popping 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 hits (most of them probably rather unusual and very creative porn!). With The Gullfoss Legends, Gullfoss is a word which is only associated with the waterfall in Iceland I’m writing about. Consequently, there are hundreds, not trillions of hits for ‘Gullfoss’ on Google so my book has a chance of being discovered on the first page or two of the results.

So, if you want to self publish your novel, wonderful! The very best of luck to you. But if you want to sell it and sell it ‘BIG!’ then you can’t just be a writer, you must be a very enterprising entrepreneur too. And the time to be that entrepreneur is when you plan the book. Basically, first think ‘Market’ and then think ‘Book’.

Billy Bob Buttons, the pen name of Edward H Trayer, is the author of six independently published books and the organizer of The Wishing Shelf Independent Book Awards (www.thewsa.co.uk), the first independent book award based in the UK. His next YA book, TOR Assassin Hunter, will  be in the shops in February, 2012.

Visit his website: www.felicitybrady.co.uk.

Today began with a visit to a car dealership. (Well, almost. It actually began with my daughter's school assembly, a humorous and well-performed take on the Ancient Greeks that started with a completely random rendition of Jessie J's Pricetag. Perhaps it was the 'we need to take you back in time.' Anyway. I've only just begun and already I've digressed.)

 

Where was I? The car. To a dealership. It's developed a squeak that sounds like a repertory company of mice has moved into the boot to continually rehearse the shower scene from Psycho. A cheery 'Leave it with us' meant that the bus home beckoned. This being Clapham, I became the genuine Man on the Clapham Omnibus. How prosaic. However this particular MOTCO had stupidly forgotten to bring anything to read, so my mind, possibly encouraged by the aforementioned randomness of Ms J's work vis a vis Ancient Greeks, began to wander.

 

'I've had a lot of cars over the years,' I thought.

 

And then later -


'I've read a lot of books over the years.' I thought.

 

(Told you it was random.)

 

'What if the cars had been books?' I thought, warming to the pointless nature of such random deliberation. Well let's see...

 

First up, there was the Triumph 1500TC. A vision in chocolate brown with creamy-white go-faster/just-bloody-go stripes, like an automotive spongecake. A pretender, I decided, a book about a boy wizard called Henry Porter, a car that so wanted to be a Triumph Dolomite but had neither the verve nor the geography of its Italian mountain-named cousin.

 

A Vauxhall Cavalier followed this. A work of non-fiction, probably about something dull but worthy, like How To Carve A Peruvian Noseflute or Loft Lagging Made Easy. Next up was the celebrity autobiography. Not a proper, lots of talent and erudite to boot type of celebrity. More of your 'I was in Big Brother once' or 'I used to go out with a footballer' type of celebrity. I give you the Opel Manta GT. In red. With a hand-wound sunroof and a deep front spoiler. All flashy appearance with not much else to say for itself.

 

Then came the novella, a car whose bookish self would have been trumpeted as a work of greatness but on inspection was actually struggling to qualify for the term 'novel' due to its paucity of pages. Think, perhaps, On Chesil Beach. The vehicle in question was a Fiat X-19. (I know, I know. It was a long time ago.) Somewhere around this time, a Mini Metro Van den Plas (no less) entered my life. Not for long. It really shouldn't have made it out of the slushpile.

 

There was another Triumph, a Vitesse. This was an early Jilly Cooper, an old-fashioned rip-roarer that thought itself a classic but actually had more holes than a fishing net.

 

There were three BMWs, each a 3 series coupe. A Robert Ludlum, a Len Deighton and a John Grisham, each doing everything you'd expect it to do in a solid, powerful way, never winning a Nobel prize for literature but enjoying wide acclaim and deserved popularity.

 

I should also mention That Mercedes. A car that evoked on first sight the same feeling that I'd had as an eleven year old about to embark on Lord of the Rings, namely 'my God, that's long.' A little over five metres long, to be precise. I worked at the time for a reasonably well-known man whose passion was cars. He had a Porsche 911 Carrera 4. He had an Alfa. He had a Citroen. And one night he went to a car auction in Kensington and raised his hand one too many times at a 1977 Mercedes-Benz W116, otherwise known as the 450SEL. This behemoth boasted a 6.9 litre V8 engine, the largest that Mercedes had put in a post-war car. And this, he informed me, since he'd run out of parking space outside his elegant Notting Hill home, was to be my new company car. I remember saying something about petrol. I remember mentioning my salary. 'Oh don't worry,' he said cheerfully, 'you put in the first twenty quid a week and I'll pay the rest on expenses.' My weekly expenses claim increased by three figures. And this was 1993. As to its literary counterpart, Lord of the Rings remained true. To drive this car was to live a life of epic fantasy, a chance to adopt a new fantasy persona. Many of these began with 'P'. Like Pimp. Or Pusher. Or Panzer Division.

 

What else? I've had a Lexus iS200. That was the book that you pick up in the holiday hotel's reception, the one you've always wanted to read, and it doesn't let you down, it zips along using precise and artful prose, until it's the day before you fly home and you've only got ten pages left, and you discover that...someone's ripped out the last four. And you feel cheated, cheated beyond anything you can possibly imagine that this wonderful literary experience has come to such a disappointing end. The Lexus was a bit like that. A great car. And then you closed the boot lid and instead of 'thunk' it went 'ting' and you knew that underneath all the lovely engineering and the leather seats and the BMW-like handing was a Toyota.

 

The Lotus Elise was, with apologies to DBC Pierre, Ludmila's Broken English, a car that should never have been made, just as after Vernon God Little, DBCP should never have embarked on his tale of conjoined twins and east-European winters. Sure, it had some purple prose, just as the Lotus could occasionally feel like a real contender, diving into bends like a Scalextric racer. But there were also moments when the glass to the window just slid down inside the door of its own volition. ('Oh yeah, they do that,' said the Lotus technician.) Or when you wanted to remove the soft top and found that you needed five arms, three hands and an Allen key. I prefer to think of Lotus as the Esprit that Bond drove in The Spy Who Loved Me, or as the car in which Graham Hill won the F1 title. Just as I prefer to think of DCB Pierre as the author of Vernon God Little. Not the other one. To potentially over-egg the point, having that car was like finding a first edition collector's copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It was mad, it was zany in its truest sense, it was exciting and then you discover that this particular edition is so collectable because its chapters have all been printed in the wrong order and the finished book makes, literally, no sense at all.

 

Two more to go, I think. The Saab 95 estate, a leather-lined, airconned, cruise-controlled comfort wagon, a John Irving book of a car, filled with familiar themes and luscious, relaxing prose that just makes you feel good. Of course, there are those that would point to Until I Find You and say that Mr Irving, too, reached a nadir. That'll be the chronic depreciation and the car's eventual explosive demise, then. But I liked Until I Find You and I still have a soft spot for the Saab.

 

And finally, the best saved until last. The James Ellroy, the David Peace, the wild-eyed, wide-scoped, scattergun poetic tour de force with extremely. Short. Sentences. The year was 1990, the year Car Magazine declared this particular motor as The Car Of The Decade. Peugeot were winning world rally championships. Its TV ads were eagerly-anticipated events. And for a year I had the best car I've ever had. The Peugeot 205 GTi. In white. Not the 1.6 litre one with the ugly vegetable strainer wheels, but the 1.9, whose alloys were works of art and whose package of engine and handling evoked gunfire and confidence in equal measure. Like an Ellroy trilogy that engages your intellect as much as your passion and leaves your breath less and your admiration unbounded, this was the crack cocaine of the motoring world, a car you couldn't stay away from, a car you woke in the middle of the night for just to drive on deserted roads. There's a rumour that Ellroy may yet release a fourth part to what is, for now, his American Tabloid three-parter. If he does so, I'm in. So take heed, Peugeot. Make something like this again and I'll sell my soul on a dark street corner to a man peddling used Dan Brown's if I have to. I'll even have my main character drive one of your ugly people carriers in lieu of a deposit.