Susan on the Shelf

Tags

Cambridge News, competitions, cover, Heffers, marketing, Susan in the City, WH Smith

OK, so it’s not a shelf – and it’s not quite the oak table – but yesterday I was delighted to see “Susan in the City” on the ledge at Heffers.  This is a, well, wooden ledge that runs at about chest height around the mezzanine floor of the bookshop, with the books angled towards strolling browsers, so it’s a prime place to be.  And I am sure you agree that the yellow cover of the book is very eye-catching:

In other news (I know I sound busy, but as all writers will know, it’s much easier to do all of this sort of stuff than to write, and you can still kid yourself that it’s “writing”…), I went into WH Smith and was told that the local manager has sent “Susan in the City” to head office for approval, and that he is going there today on other business and will chase for an answer.  I’m to enquire again next week.

And you may remember that I donated five copies of “Susan” to the Cambridge News (the newspaper in which the columns originally appeared) as prizes in a reader giveaway.  The competition is now closed, and the organiser told me that “we had 30 entries in total – the majority came from Cambridge addresses, with a few from Ely along with a couple from Newmarket and Haverhill.  The five winners reside in Balsham, Sawston, Fulbourn, Stetchworth and Cottenham.”  (Local readers will know what that means – all five are villages outside Cambridge, not Cambridge the city.)  I don’t know quite what I expected, and of course it’s impossible to gauge how many people saw the competition, thought “That’s interesting, but I never win competitions so I’ll just go and buy the book”, but I’m not thrilled with only thirty entries.  The five books cost me £4.50 (sounds cheap, but I bought in bulk and had them delivered by carrier tortoise to save money), so that’s 22½p per person for the publicity!  So maybe not too bad.

Columns of columns

Tags

bookmark, Cambridge News, CreateSpace, formatting, Heffers, Susan in the City

Well, here they are, at long last: my first batch of copies of “Susan in the City” – a collection of eighty of the 510 columns that I wrote for my local newspaper over the last decade:

I ordered these from CreateSpace waaaaaaay back on 17 March 2017 and (thinking to save the pennies) chose the slowest and cheapest of the three delivery speeds, being quoted an arrival date of 9 May.  I will never do this again: with the budget delivery option there is no tracking, and so – from the moment I had the dispatch notification on 26 March – I was looking out for the books.  And they never arrived.  The ones you are looking at are the replacement order that CreateSpace put together when I complained on 11 May and sent by super-über-speedy delivery to arrive on 15 May.  I cannot tell you the hours of angst I have had over this delivery, and so my lesson for today is: never order books without a tracking option.

As for the books themselves, I am delighted with them and their lovely, sunny yellow covers.  The interior is good as well: cream paper, clear font and plenty of space (I do loathe books that use every inch of paper and force their text to the edges, so that you have to practically break the spine to read to the end of the lines).

So what is their fate?  Five were donated to the local newspaper, the Cambridge News – where the columns originally appeared – to serve as prizes in a reader competition.  I don’t know whether this will lead to further sales (I never know whether anything leads to further sales!) but I did slip a Plank bookmark inside each, just in case.

And five were delivered yesterday to Heffers, the bookshop in Cambridge that has always been so supportive and encouraging of my Plankish efforts.  They hinted that “Susan in the City” – having local interest – might even make it onto the oak table.  The oak table is, as you might imagine, a large oak table and it is right at the front of the shop – in pole position, as Hamilton and Vettel might say.  Nothing I have written has ever appeared on the oak table, so I have everything crossed that the sunshine yellow might seal the deal.  If it does, rest assured that photos will appear.

A collection of columns

Tags

Cambridge News, Cambridge University Library, Plank 5

I’m in a bind: I have come up with a Top Tip for writing, but I can’t implement it myself, except in the short term.  Here it is: live alone.  My husband is away on a two-week business trip; we’re halfway through, and this has given me time to revert to my natural sleep/wake cycle – wake at 5.30am, lights out at 10pm at the very latest – and so gets lots and lots of writing done in the early morning, when I am at my most productive.  Of course I can’t wait until he gets home, but in the meantime, I am now writing two books.

Yes, two.  There is “Plank 5” (formerly known as “Plank 6”), of course, and I had the luxury of a WHOLE DAY in the University Library yesterday, researching early nineteenth century cults (weirdos and wackos, to a man).  And now there is “Susan in the City, best of”.  For ten years – April 2016 to January 2017 – I wrote a weekly column, called “Susan in the City”, for our local newspaper, the Cambridge News.  And then came budget cuts, and I was out on my ear.  Lemons, lemonade and all that, and a writing friend (Debbie, that’s you) suggested that I could gather my favourite columns into a book.  I suggested it to my (ex-)editor, and he agreed – and so I have been reading all six hundred (six hundred!) plus columns in order to select the eighty that I want to go down in history as the crème de la crème of Susan.

But I do need your help – it’s that blasted title.  The column was “Susan in the City” and I probably need to retain that in order to attract the, oh, dozens of regular readers who will remember me.  I was thinking of “Susan in the City: The Best of Ten Years of Writing for the Cambridge News” – but is that too clunky?  I think I need to get the name of the newspaper in, for people who know it but not me.  And it would be misleading to leave out “Best of”, in case people think they’re getting all six hundred columns.  Ideas please!

Sam storms the local press

Tags

Cambridge News, G David, Heffers, Samuel Plank, Toppings, Worm in the Blossom

Just a quick post today – I wasn’t planning to write anything, but then the features editor of our local paper, the Cambridge News, emailed to say that an article I had written for her about “Worm in the Blossom” would be going in the paper tomorrow (Friday 30 October) and was already online.

When I was writing the piece – she asked me to do it, because I am a regular columnist at the paper – I made sure to cover several key points:

• “Worm in the Blossom” is the third in a series – so there are actually three books you can buy
• there will be four more books, so even more ways to spend your money on Sam
• writing is a hard but rewarding process – this author (I tried to imply) does huge amounts of research both at her desk and on foot, and so deserves every penny of the £7.99 she charges per book (and remember, there are three available and four more to come…)
• you can buy all three books now in three local bookshops.

(I also wrote exactly to her specification: the right number of words, with the required photos at the preferred resolution.  But you knew that anyway: always give an editor what she wants.)

I’ll keep an eye on sales, and if I get panicked calls from bookshops tomorrow afternoon, desperate to stock up after stampedes of eager readers have stripped the shelves, I’ll let you know.  And if it makes no difference at all, I’ll let you know.  So hard for the self-published author to predict what will prompt sales, if anything apart from dumb luck.

Rolling in it – not

Tags

author, Cambridge News, columnist, Fatal Forgery, The Man in the Canary Waistcoat, writing

Yesterday I did my tax return.  I know that prospect fills most people with gloom, but I actually don’t mind doing it because it is one of the few times when being as obsessive as I am about keeping records and filing everything away actually comes into its own.  It’s a bit of a messy job because I am both employed and self-employed, but I’m used to that now, and I just assemble the piles of papers, ban the cat from the desk, open the chocolate biscuits – and begin.  (It’s a great improvement to be able to file my tax return online; before that, all of my returns went in to HMRC – or HMCE as it was – with chocolatey fingerprints on them.  They probably relied on it for verification of my identity.)

While I was assembling my self-employment facts, I discovered a couple of interesting things.  First, I have not been paid by Kobo for two years.  Granted, it’s not a king’s ransom – in 2013 they sent a statement saying that they had sold books of mine worth £2.07, and in 2014 it was £9.57 – but still, no money had appeared in the bank account I had specified when I signed up with them.  I emailed them to ask what had gone wrong, and received a prompt and cheery assurance that full payment would be made at the end of this month.  No explanation for the delay, so it seems that with Kobo they will send you a sales summary, but unless you ask for the money, they assume you’re doing it for love.

And second, this year I have made just under £1,500 from being a writer.  That’s mostly the payment I receive from writing my weekly column for the local paper; being a struggling author of historical financial crime novels has brought in a whisker over £300.  For the year.  Perhaps I’d best not give up the day job just yet.