Take Off Your Running Shoes

Myrna hears from W.H.Smith

Well, like the Mounties, Myrna always gets her man, and even corporate bodies reply eventually. No, Smith's won't be stocking TOYPD, but...she did get a reply from them!

Hi Myrna I am sorry for the delayed “email” response to your original email – send May 21st. As you can imagine, I receive in excess of 200 emails a day, many of which are from independent authors such as yourself. I hope you will therefore understand that as well as it being an extremely busy time at work (we are buying for Christmas!) I am also under pressure from many other independent authors! However, I do hope that you will accept my sincere apologies for not responding sooner – by email. We did however post a letter to you on June 13th – I have attached a copy of this letter. Unfortunately, at this moment in time I have decided not to buy your book for our range. If you can register your book with Gardners (details included in the letter attached) then our individual stores can use their budget to buy the book if necessary. Similarly, if one of our customers request a copy of it, we can order it quickly from Gardners . Again, I do apologise for the delayed response, and I will investigate why you haven’t received our letter. Kind Regards Lucy

Cancelled!

Ok I have cancelled my subscription to the Bookseller; it just wasn't doing me any good. Don't know what the word for the condition described as publisher-envy is called, but I was getting it bad! No longer will I have to read about all the money Simon and Schuster spend elsewhere...

Francesca, you were so right about the Bookseller

Why can't Simon and Schuster spend ten minutes making a banner ad? Now I know. Because - stupid stupid me - I still haven't cancelled my subscription to the Bookseller, and what's today's publishing news? Simon and Schuster are launching video promotions for (some of) their new authors - stuff that will be available on their new video website and on Youtube. Kill me now, is the phrase that comes to mind.

Huh?

Should have said that the Spectator says "serious bookbuyers buy six books a year..." This is serious; can't bear to think how hard it is to get the flibbertigibbet bookbuyer to spend £7.99....

Book worms

The Spectator reports that 200,000 books are published every year, and publishers assume people will buy, on average, six. On which note, shabbat shalom.

Boy, they really could have afforded to pay me more

I've just taken out a thirty-day trial (that's me, trial babe) subscription to The Bookseller online and what's the very first article they send me? This. Simon and Schuster recorded profits of $229.3 million this past year, up several millions from the year before apparently, according to these latest figures.

What do publishers know?

I sent two signed copies of TOYPD over to the States to a friend who wanted them, and here's what happened:

Also wanted to let you know that I received your package on Saturday 4/28. It appears that the contents of the package were removed prior to delivery. There was nothing inside the envelope. There was clear tape on the seam of the envelope and a slight tear that also had been taped. I can't believe this happened.

See? Not just worth buying; people are actually going to the trouble of stealing it.

How , oh how, does anybody manage to sell books?

Depressing news from that home of depressing news, otherwise known as my publishers' Simon and Schuster:

Dina

I so, so wish I had better news on your book. The book itself is a success, of course. It wouldn’t have been Paperback of the Week in the Observer a few weeks back if it wasn’t so eloquent, sharp and entertaining. And everyone I know who has read it really has given it the thumbs-up. Unfortunately, it’s currently registering at position 1010 on Nielsen Booktrack, with 145 copies sold last week, and a total of 1093 through the tills. It’s so very difficult to ascertain why this hasn’t flown higher. With the great coverage that yourself and Grainne instigated, we would have hoped for better sales. It’s so tough on you, especially as the book is so enjoyable and it has that nice package and everything.

All I can say is that we are keeping a close eye on it, and we will continue to push for promotions.
Warmest regards,

Kerri

And, apparently, she says in a later email, supermarkets have all turned it down. How could they????!!! Waterstone's, according to Agent Tracy, is "our friendliest buyer". So that's a gold star to Waterstone's and little skull-and-crossbone stickers to all the supermarkets. To think I nearly went to a supermarket today to get some of that nice long broccoli, instead of my local fruit shop which only has the old-style round headed green stuff...

Progress!

Reporter on the spot Emma Jacobs - whose father Sam, is running billions of miles for the CTRT appeal and can be sponsored here - tells me that there are five copies of TOYPD piled nice and proud on the 3 for 2 table at Waterstone's North Finchley.

Which made me very happy for exactly two seconds before I began worrying about them just sitting there in full view of everyone and not being bought...

This is now ridiculous.

The Male Market

When - after several months of zero publisher interest in TOYPD - I suddenly had five publishers offering to buy the book all at once, and for a week I went to a publisher meeting every single day, the one question all the publishers asked was: "do you think the book will sell to men?" I told them all that funnily enough most of the emails I received in response to the Guardian column (and there were thousands) came from men: husbands of breast cancer patients, brothers of same, and a huge response from doctors, mostly outside the UK, saying stuff like, 'this is so interesting for us, we have no idea how patients feel, ordinarily'.

To date, outside my immediate family, I know of only one male reader. Daniel Fletcher, MinstF (Cert), Head of Fundraising Development for the East and North Hertfordshire Trust (and therefore the CTRT appeal) tells me he read TOYPD on holiday. It's the only book he read during his two weeks away, but he says, he does have a two-year-old. His wife Fran managed two books, he added, with no bitterness at all.

And Daniel's review? "It's not unreadable from a male point of view". But if he wasn't connected to the CTRT appeal, there's no way he'd ever have picked it up - "because of the cover I suppose". The book he finished before TOYPD was J-pod, by Douglas Coupland (who coined the phrase Generation X), described as "a lethal joyride into today's new breed of technologies". Now that's he's finished J-Pod, he's gone back to another Douglas Coupland that he first read ten years ago, Shampoo Planet (the closest Fletcher's ever come to chick-lit, I guess). A fan of fantasy fiction - his favourite book of all time is Tolkien's prequel to Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion in which High Elves make war on the first Dark Lord - it has taken a book like TOYPD to give Daniel his first out-of-body experience. "It was quite surreal," Daniel says, " reading a book about people I know."