Just When ... will we do something?

Just published by the wonderful Beautiful Books, is this volume of short stories:

Inspired by Kipling's Just-So Stories, the Just When Stories focus on the animals we need to protect today. There are stories about turtles and cranes, seahorses and chimpanzees, ducks and elephants and dolphins, tortoises and tigers and more.

The stories are published (and there's also a CD of five of the stories) to raise awareness of the horrendous rate at which animals are becoming extinct in our world. I contributed a story to the book because I think we have forgotten that this planet belongs to ALL the creatures, not just us, and I wanted to do something, just a little something, to try to help restore the balance.

Tamara Gray, who put this whole beautiful book together, says:

One hundred years ago, when Rudyard Kipling wrote the Just So Stories, including his story of the rhinoceros with the itchy skin, rhino numbers stood at around 65,000. Today, fewer than 3,000 black rhinos survive. The same tragic story goes for too many other animals.

The title Just When Stories asks the question: when will the irrational and cruel destruction of wildlife stop? And when will we take action to make it stop? Estimated at between $6 and $20 billion a year by Interpol, the illegal wildlife trade has drastically reduced numerous wildlife populations and has some teetering on the brink of extinction. All profits from the sales of the book and associated media formats will be donated in full to WildAid and the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation. The authors are: William Boyd, Raffaella Barker, Anthony Doerr, Nirmal Ghosh, Romesh Gunesekera, Witi Ihimaera, Radhika Jha, Hanif Kureishi, Antonia Michaelis, Michael Morpurgo, Jin Pyn Lee, Lauren St John, Kate Thompson, Nury Vittachi, Polly Samson, Shaun Tan, Louisa Young and Angela Young.

Orchids for Simon

I am overwhelmed.

This orchid is for Simon at Stuck in a Book for his overwhelming review of Speaking of Love. See The word on ... at the top on the right.

Orchids, according to Clare Florists' flower meanings are flowers of magnificence and, although I'm not at all sure what the thanking-for-a-blog-book-review etiquette is, it would surely be rude not to thank Simon, publicly, for such a magnificent review, wouldn't it? So thank you, Simon.

It is also the most wonderful MAT yet ... I read the review early this morning, fell over, read it again, posted a thank-you comment on Simon's blog for it, failed to do my exercises, haven't even had a bath yet, and am sitting here in my PJs writing this before I do any of the above, let alone before I get down to writing for the day.

But there is a serious point to make, too. Speaking of Love is published by the wonderful, independent Beautiful Books and, as dovegreyreader says in this post 'small publishers work with limited funds' and so, if the literary review pages don't review the books the small publishers publish (and send out in their hundreds to them for review) - and they didn't review Speaking of Love - the bookshops won't stock their books. And if the bookshops don't stock the indie publishers' books how do the indies sell their books, when they can't afford to buy the space in the big-chain bookshops' windows? And it's almost impossible to get a review in the literary review pages if the writer and the publisher are unknown. So how does an indie publisher become better known if the literary review pages ignore them? See my post here on this Catch-22 situation-situation.

However, I think I have discovered a secret weapon. This Sunday, 19 August, I'm going to Mostly Books in Abingdon to take Mark Thornton's one-day course for writers on how to sell your book into indie bookshops. I heard him talk at the Society of Authors on 25 July (see my post here for more). And I will post about his course and my success, or failure - which I'm sure will be because of my incompetence, not his advice - when I am armed with the secrets of (t)his secret weapon.

In dovegreyreader's post about all this she says that she thinks the 'Indies should just band together and set up their own review magazine'. I heartly endorse that and enthusiastically forwarded her post to Beautiful Books, and suggested they go and hear her at the Publisher's Publicity Circle lunch at Foyle's on 30 August: see here.

But in the meantime, here are more orchids for Simon,

for giving Speaking of Love a helping hand on its way out into the world.

Thank you, Simon.

Selling a first novel, and writing

I've been thinking about Mostly Books ever since I typed 'sell my novel' into Google (it came up with 15,500,000 sites so I don't know now how I happened upon Mostly Books, but I am so glad I did). Because I discovered that Mark Thornton at Mostly Books runs a course which gently explains to writers how (and how not) to persuade a bookseller to stock a book. (I just missed the course he ran at the end of June, but he's coming to talk to the Society of Authors this week on the same subject so I shall be listening extremely carefully.) I sent him a - probably quite ridiculous - email suggesting that he stock SPEAKING of LOVE to which he, quite rightly, has never replied. I'm sure I made every mistake in the book(shop), so I'm looking forward to finding out what he suggests. (And, yes, just because a book is published - in my case by the wonderful indie publisher Beautiful Books - it doesn't mean that the writer can hand over responsibility for sales of her book. There's lots she can do.)

Anyway, today I'm thinking about Mostly Books because of the floods. The bookshop is in Abingdon and the waters are rising. According to Mostly Books's blog they're moving books from the lower shelves, so keep your fingers crossed for them.

And yes, I did write today. And I didn't start this blog until I had written. Hurrah! It was JB Priestley, I think, who when asked what he liked about writing, said, 'Having written.' He's right. It's a wonderful feeling, as long as you remain reasonably confident that what you've written is not one hundred miles in the opposite direction from the one you intended to write in; or at least that it remains so until the next time you pick up your pen/turn on your computer. I feel, though, a little as if I'm cheating because I am writing a short story which, until January, I had thought was a novel. But when I realised, as William Trevor said, that I had the 'art of the glimpse' in my hands and not the whole shebang I stopped writing the what-was-a-novel and, recently, I began turning it into the short story that it really is. This means I know what to leave out and the struggle of finding my material is (more or less) over.

I should be thankful. I know I should.

Speaking of sales figures

I have just discovered that my first novel Speaking of Love (published by the utterly wonderful Beautiful Books) has sold five copies in a week, in my local cafe, Il Molino, on Battersea Park Road.

These sales figures will not, self-evidently, make so much as a mizzle in the mugglemist of today's HP publication celebration, but to me they are reason for joyous celebration. It's difficult to get first novels into bookshops because bookshops find it difficult to make space for first novels unless they have been reviewed, and first novels tend not to get reviewed unless the author or the publisher are well-known. Beautiful Books are not yet well-known, although they surely will be, and I do not wish to be well-known for anything other than my writing (asituation), but perhaps Il Molino will gently spread the word from the lavender hills of Battersea, sweet-s(m)elling bookshops on the streets of London, so that the trail leads to bookshop booknoses in other towns and cities, perhaps even in Auld Reekie.