Yes, thanks Kate, aka Ms Baroque in Hackney - this is the IPC advertising 'screen grab' although you can't see it moving on the page in this still photo...but still, a blog triumph, managing to post it.
If you type the IPC magazine name into Google, e.g. Web User, you get to the magazine site, then click on anything to enter the on-screen magazine, and the whizzing, moving ad comes up!! Very exciting!!
And all this done by Angie o' Farrell...people are really good.
Here's an update on that IPC advertising from BFFE Angela O'Farrell, although I can't reproduce her "screen grab" on this blog yet, but I will try to keep playing around till I work out a way to do it.
Hi Dina
Hope you're enjoying the sunshine. I just wanted you to know that your banner & skyscraper & MPU are running across a lot of our specialist sites (in total approx 1m users & about 15m page impressions), here's a screen grab from one of the sites just so you can see what it looks like. Hope it's translating into book sales!
As soon as I get a physical page, I'll send it to you!
Much love
angie
Angela O' Farrell
Publishing Director
TV Times, TV & Satellite Week, Soaplife
...continues here
Thanks to L. Lee Lowe sending out three copies of TOYPD to the first three people who offered to blog about the book, that original offer has taken on an internet life of its own, so each recipient has passed it on to others who keep passing it on. This is just the latest place round internet-land where TOYPD has now lain its hat.
A review in today's Times Literary Supplement, by Sarah Curtis.
The week in which Dina Rabinovitch was diagnosed with breast cancer, she emailed the Guardian, where she reviews books for children and interviews their authors, asking for a column in which she could tell her ongoing story. Other journalists have done this, notably the late John Diamond in the Times, winning acclaim for their candour and courage in revealing the details of their treatments - Rabinovitch's includes the controversial new drug Herceptin - and the kaleidoscope of their changing emotions.Everyone who suffers from cancer has a unique story to tell, but Rabinovitch's starting position was particularly distinctive. The mother of three daughters by a first marriage, she is also stepmother to the four children of her second husband, the eminent lawyer Anthony Julius, and she was still breastfeeding their son, Elon, who was nearly three years old. They live in a house with six bedrooms and five bathrooms, and she could afford to buy a Missoni scarf to hide her loss of hair after chemotherapy and Issey Miyake clothes after her mastectomy.
Money, however, could not help her with the organizational feats of continuing work and attending all those parents' evenings, or give her the ability to meet the demands of all those for whom she was responsible. She has unfailing support from their friends in the orthodox Jewish community of North London. Some of her most absorbing pages describe her worries and pleasures preparing for religious festivals or visiting the mikvah after her mastectomy. When the cancer returns, and then spreads throughout her body, she confronts every set-back with wry humour. This is not a book for the squeamish, and its brio may be daunting for other sufferers from breast cancer, but there is something glorious about Dina Rabinovitch's determination to live life to the full.
yup! perfectly happy with that as a review in top literary journal! And also, it comes at a low moment, so providing a boost, because having managed to get out to the West End (by taking a minicab) to go and find Sara-Jenny a nineteenth birthday present, only to get back home to realise that's it, I now need to go right back to bed - after one outing to a shop!!! So, Anthony phoning and saying his friend Dan Jacobson had just phoned him to say TOYPD is reviewed in the TLS is making bed a worthwhile place after all...!
Hurrah - lovely Adele Geras, doyenne of children's writers, and supporter of Dinas, sends me this quote about our baby book from a magazine called Newbooks, where staff say what they're reading, and the UK contributing editor wrote this:
Think there's nothing funny about breast cancer? Think again. Dina Rabinovitch's brilliant debut TOYPD is infused not only with the author's wonderful wit but a quiet rage about the maze of treatments available. Warm with razor sharp observations and beautifully written, it's destined to become a classic.
First, sorry for intermittent posting - still exhausted. Loads to post though - photos of the very rain-soaked Nina and friends running for the CTRT appeal, amongst other stuff.
And this.
Well, I sold 25 books, and this is three of the BCC staff, Diane, Jan and Samia, who kept plying me with salad and tea while I tried out Apprentice-style techniques on passing conference folk. Most people gave ten pounds, rather than the £7.99 cost price because the money was going to the CTRT appeal - so that's over two hundred pounds to add to the coffers. Although the table looks empty in the photo, sadly there were another twenty-five books in a box underneath, and I had less success getting rid of those, attempting to flog them to anybody passing by while most of the Breast Cancer Care people were in other meetings. I don't think Alan Sugar will be giving me a job any time soon. It's hard selling stuff - as you smile widely at people their eyes shift rapidly away, they start to shuffle sideways out of your sightline, and you start to feel very pushy indeed.
What surprised me once again was how beat I was by the time I got home. I stayed out only an hour perhaps more than I'd originally intended - really trying hard to get rid of the last copies - and getting home was hardly an exertion as I was in a minicab, but half-way through the journey home I had to stop the taxi so I could be sick by the side of the road (something I last did when I was about eight, I'd guess). A reminder, after a day spent talking breezily to people about "living with breast cancer with all these new drugs" that it really is a sickness, and it really does take it out of you.
So this is me, on the far right, looking exhausted and being propped up by BCC folk.
...I defy even the most dilettante of readers to stand firm against the efforts of these two. Firstly, Myrna, now in daily contact with the buyers at W.H. Smith, and decidedly not happy with what they're telling her - namely that TOYPD is not on their list. She is at this moment gift-wrapping a copy of the book, with a personal letter straight to her main contact at Smith's complete with request that the contact makes up her own mind in life, and does not just do what the overall buyers have decided. So, that's one person who's going to have to read the book whether she likes it or not. And you know what? I bet Myrna gets Smith's to take the book, I really do.
Also in my corner, the IPC director who dropped in from the blue last week, and not content to just let her fantastically generous offer - of free advertising in their titles - stand, has written again to ask whether I need her to contact my publishers' directly to "get things moving" and has come up with various other promotional ideas as well. Frankly, who needs publishers when there are mothers-in-law and people who drop in from the blue?
Just having a lengthy moan to my friend Chany about how everything's such a slog, nothing ever just falls into your lap, you have to work for every little thing that happens...when I open my email box, and this falls out! An incredibly nice email from a director of publishing at IPC mags, who's read TOYPD and likes it, so I ask if I can do any features or anything at all really for them to drum up some more publicity for the book, and she comes back with a fantastic offer:
If anyone from your publishing house could send me a banner ad & a page ad, I could get your book free space online & in various titles.
How great is that?! So of course I email Simon and Schuster straight away, and some hours later I phone Grainne, who's in charge of publicity for TOYPD to see what's happening, and she tells me she's passed it on to marketing - a phrase which fills me with dread, actually - but hopefully it will not end there and they will actually produce an ad and take advantage of the free advertising that just fell out of the sky into our laps...we'll see.
