Take Off Your Running Shoes

Advertising progress

IPC superwoman has now taken complete control of this free advertising operation. See this from her latest email:

So, the brief for your approval:

Aim: Sell as many copies of TOYPD as possible. Secondary aim: drive donations to www.cancertreatment.org.uk/ctrtappeal

Audience: as many of IPC's magazines & websites as we can blag filler space in/on, focusing on the TV weeklies & women's weeklies (& monthlies if at all possible).

Message: buy this book or donate & make a difference. All proceeds go to CTRT Appeal for Cancer Research at the Mount Vernon Cancer Centre, UK.

Mandatories: book cover (which Kerri sent, star!), CTRT logo (spoke to Daniel & have that too), buy from www.cancertreatment.org.uk/dinasbook , registered charity number: 1053338.

Formats: I'll put these in the document I'm giving to a mate of mine who's going to do both print & banner creative.

Let me know if you want anything changed, added, emphasised….

I haven't forgotten about the editorial side of things - Evelyn has suggested getting her editors to talk up the book in their editorial letters at the start of the mags - not confirmed yet but it's a great slot, especially if backed up with filler space. Online stuff will be easy to get, we can get house space rotations (it makes sense to me, don't worry!). Will keep you posted.

Lots of love

Angie x

Is this woman great or what?

That ad....

While I am on a rain-defying school outing to Princess Diana's pirate ship with Elon's class, Simon and Schuster's Kerri Sharp and the wonderful IPC person have several exchanges. Kerri explains that she has sent the marketing department four emails about the IPC offer - for those who are just joining the story now, let me explain that this is an offer of free advertising across the IPC magazine titles for TOYPD, so a good offer, not one to turn down lightly. But marketing, alas, have yet to respond.

Luckily Daniel Fletcher of the CTRT appeal has stepped into the breach. "We can produce a banner ad," Daniel says. (My daugher Nina says she can produce one as well, actually.) So, we will take advantage of the advertising offer, and it will be a home-made ad, an ad produced by the people who really are involved with this book, and this fundraising appeal, and so it will be a great ad!

Also, there will be selling this week. On Thursday I am talking to another group of Breast Cancer Care employees, and this time I will be able to sell copies of TOYPD and do a book signing, as you can see from this nice note from BCC's Director of Communications:

We are very happy for you to sign and sell books at our staff conference during the lunch break, and we already have copies of your book in our library, which a few staff members have already read, though it won’t do any harm to encourage everyone during your talk. But, far more positively, a review of your book is going in our next newsletter which is sent out to approximately 13,000 people and is due at the beginning of June and a copy of the newsletter along with the review will be published on our website which is accessed by over 130,000 people a week. I also understand that our New Media department are looking at projects that would allow you to share your experiences and promote your book on our website. We are immensely grateful for the support you have given us and hope that we can continue to offer you support and information whenever you should need it. If there is anything that you need, as a user of our services, please do not hesitate to contact us. I am sure you have our helpline number, but just in case….. 0800 800 6000 and, as you are probably aware, we do have an Ask The Nurse service on our website.

The thing is, when I say I will be able to sell copies, I mean exactly that. Simon and Schuster are short-staffed this week apparently, so nobody from my publishers can come along to take the money. I will do the selling and the receiving of cash into a lunchbox or something that I'll bring along, as well as that useful adjunct of many a school bazaar, "the float" from which to provide change. "You'll have to get the money to us somehow or other," my Simon and Schuster editor says. But I don't think so, do you? I think whatever money I make on Thursday goes straight to the CTRT appeal.

How not to sell a book 101

Never one to ask bloggees to do something I wouldn't do myself (or at least get a daughter to do) I'm standing in my local Waterstones' the other afternoon, and telling my daughter in increasingly frantic tones that I can't find a copy of Take Off Your Party Dress anywhere in this wretched excuse for a bookshop. It's not at the front where I thought I would find it, it's nowhere on any of the shelves downstairs, and even when I take myself - heavy footed and down at heart - upstairs to the wilderness of the Health section, where I firmly, if despondently, expect to find it....even up there, it's NOT.

Daughter offers to ask for it, but I'm just about to pay for a pile of books with my card and even though these days that doesn't involve a signature, just the typing in of four numbers, I'm sure the sales assistant will somehow see my name on the card and I'll be exposed as a manic, chasing-my-own-book author. So while daughter is hissing that she'll ask for it, I'm hissing, "NO, don't" and so just exposed as manic hissing mother.

Five minutes later we're in the car, and after attempting to talk about other things I suddenly say, "ok, call directory enquiries, get the number of Hampstead Waterstone's, and just phone them and ask for it." She does this with great aplomb, much pretence of not being able to pronounce the author's surname, and various other subterfuges, only to find out that the person answering the phone at Waterstone's claims that they do indeed have the book in stock. "No, they don't" I'm hissing, "find out where it is then!"

Back at home, still obsessed, I get my husband to phone the local Borders. "Yes, we have three," the assistant says over the phone. "Oh good," says the good husband, "I'll be buying two or three - you'll probably need to order some more." "Yes sir," says the assistant, "can I have your name, so I can put these three behind the counter for you?"

So now I've successfully managed to get the three copies of TOYPD that were actually on display in a bookshop shunted behind a till where nobody will ever see them.

You magazine

...is printed on silk. I bet you didn't know that. But Louette Harding, who comes to interview me loaded with sunflowers which fill the (cold) kitchen with light, tells me that she has to have her story written by this coming Tuesday for the magazine coming out in March, and that's because You magazine is printed on a fantastically high quality silk-based paper. This is useful information because I may be able to turn several copies of it into a party dress. The Guardian has very sweetly asked whether I possess such a thing - a party dress that is - to have some photos taken to publicise the book.

Marketing update...

Do you know about "hard" and "soft" holidays? I learnt about them from Hannah and Grainne, the marketing team at Simon and Schuster. So, a soft holiday is one where you take your blackberry along, but a hard holiday - last of the real holidays - is the kind where you leave your blackberry at home. But you do still take your mobile phone...

Also, I learnt that fantastically successful publishers still use floppy disks, and are absolutely incapable of translating a document that has been emailed from a Mac rather than a PC. This is very gratifying information for those of us who work in a low-paying, but highly technically advanced, way from home; without the job perks, the office gossip, the coffee machines, the status etc we have to take our comforts where we may.

Mothers Rock!

There are marketing meetings with publishers - of which more later, when I have more time - and then there is the mother's network, so...Emma, friend of Elaine of the Tonight show, and of the school playground, has sold a piece about Take Off Your Party Dress to the Sun with all its billions of readers. Excellent.

Gold shoes

To Simon and Schuster - the publishers! - this morning, then the Mothers and Daughters launch this evening, so not a pink crocs day then, but rather....

Marketing expert

Ten things I learned about marketing from EuroDisney

1) Make sure your target people are never more than ten steps from a shop
2) You can cloak French disdain for foreigners inside brightly coloured, soft, furry things and people will line up to be hugged by it
3) You can make magic with huge amounts of electricity
4) uh..well...I'm sure there was more but it's nearly Shabbat again here in London, so everything else will have to wait...

Vogue

Vogue turns out to be a completely lovely long black-haired, blue-eyed girl with a two-year-old son and what sounds like a mother who made her love felt even through the series of nannies. Vogue comes down into reception - which, exactly like The Devil Wears Prada, is populated by very tall people in very high shoes - bearing gifts of latest edition glossy magazines, than which there is no better treat.

The baby son and the mother were not at lunch, but Vogue asked me, "how is it with four children, how does that work, loving them all?" And I said, "I know...I was so worried when I was pregnant with my second, how could I ever compensate for the fact that I'd used up all the love on the first, I could never love another the same...but it just works, your heart just stretches, you can feel it happening." And she said that her mother had told her the same thing. Which I thought was very nice. She is the second of seven children, I am the fifth of six.

We did have the clothes conversation too. She said, "it's just how it is at Vogue, you do have to wear the clothes." She had a pirate-y, fluffy salmon pink silk blouse thing on, and some animal print huge bag. She hasn't seen The Devil Wears Prada though, because there's the husband and son and the problem of getting babysitters.

And of course, we talked about the book, and its pretty cover, and the piece I will do for them.

Meanwhile, in another part of London, the mothers' network was organising another nifty bit of marketing. Elaine, who I met in the school playground first of all, spoke to Emma (whose brother I was at university with) and Emma spoke to the Sun newspaper and the woman at the Sun is now being sent some proof chapters of Take Off Your Party Dress. So, we will see...

Tomorrow - a mid winter term school break - we are off to EuroDisney, where I will get to see how the most superb marketing experts of them all do it. If I can't learn something, anything, from Disney, then I guess I will be running that marathon after all.

Cancer: good for the Jews?

During this current spate of Jewish holidays, I've been sitting in shul, looking around at the wholly non-Guardian reading population in the women's gallery and thinking, hmmm, there's about three hundred people here, how do I get a copy of Take Off Your Party Dress into each set of these hands? Then, hey presto, David Rowan of the Jewish Chronicle sends me a postcard, saying he read a piece I wrote in UK Press Gazette complaining that cancer shouldn't be a feature story, it should be op-ed, kind of like what I say here, and I can have access to his op-ed pages.

Which is why we have a new party game in our house: just how many different Jewish angles will I get out of this illness? Anthony says, as a joke, "chemotherapy and Jewish morality" which keeps him amused all the way from kitchen to his study, leaving me a little non-plussed, because I've just written - for real - the following phrase: "...it's amazing how many people round my way seem to think there's a kind of moral backbone in the way one deals with chemotherapy..."