Plans for the weekend
The power of a book
Wrong order
Sometimes I don’t engage all the bits of my brain in quite the right order.
Take this week. I went to the pub to organise my book launch. The lovely lady in charge remembered me from when I called in a couple of weeks ago, when her manager was on holiday. It turns out that the manager gets two holidays in May, as she was away again.
Nevertheless, I tentatively booked a date (awaiting confirmation).
Then I walked home.
Then I thought: So, if it takes 31 days for books to be delivered then I need to order them…
AAARRGGHHHHH!
Thankfully I was still in positive territory, but the last couple of days have been a bit manic!
So there is a book, and it is all but ready to print, and I have a launch date pencilled in (I’ll confirm it with you shout it from the rooftops when the holidaying manager returns), and that just leaves me…
- Advertising
- Promotion
- Available for book/blog tours
- Open to invites to talks
- Avocado recipes to experiment with
And – of course – the eBook to complete. (I have my secret chocolate supply stacked up and ready to go. That and a stack of gin and tonic…)
It is exciting.
The road to hell…
Paved with good intentions: pretty much sums up my life.
It is over a week into January and the post I was going to put up as dawn broke on the new year is yet to written. Or is being written, perhaps.
I am fully aware that the New Year often brings resolutions. I am also fully aware that I have rarely kept any of them, which must be part of why I refrain from doing them nowadays. I double-checked what I’d written last January. I wrote about Charlie Hebdo, my husband’s broken ankle and the overburdened NHS. No resolutions.
So I can safely say that I kept all of last year’s resolutions.
[In fact, I can record that I managed to fulfil a resolution that always permeates (lose weight) as I lost 10kg and have kept it off, though the Christmas/New Year celebrations have challenged that!]
This year? Well, I’ve a few incomplete and non-specific ideas…
- Publish Beware the Falling Avocados. (Perhaps a launch date in April. Can you hold me to that over the next few months?)
- Read more.
- Updating and redesigning the blog (might need my teenager’s help with that one!)
- Write the novel that is floating round my head.
- A renewed dedication to the education of my children and – probably more importantly – to helping them become fantastic adults.
- Lose weight (I told you: it always permeates…)
- Visit friends. Play games. Have fun. (Always good to resolve to do a few things that you know you will do: can’t fail!)
Life’s too short. I don’t want to be controlled by rules and targets that I won’t achieve, and then will feel miserable about failing. But it is good to have a review and reanalysis of priorities. I think there may be big changes ahead this year, but only time will tell. Come back next January and see.

Beware the Falling Avocados: frustrated writer update
No, honestly, it nearly is.
I’ve just got to write this chapter, and then a couple more, and then an epilogue, and then it’s done.
Oh, and I need to go back and re-write the third chapter (‘cos it was rubbish).
Maybe I should ditch that chapter all together? If so, what impact does it have on the rest of the book – before and after?
And, re-reading the middle section, it doesn’t hang together properly. *rewrite*
Spell check. Always amusing with Zambian place names.
Where did that rogue word appear from?
Haven’t I already mentioned that? Am I just repeating myself erroneously?
Another unnecessary adverb…
Why are my husband’s comments always right? *rewrite*
How come it was ‘one week’ on page 46 and ‘one month’ on page 47?
Present tense or past tense, or some other tense that I forget the name of? Perhaps I shouldn’t have all three within one paragraph?
And now my final chapter doesn’t seem…well, final.
Let me just go through it again.
No, really, the book is nearly finished.
It’s just not perfect.
Not yet…
A lucky break
Breaking one’s leg (see previous post) is only half a story.
Next, it has to be fixed.
Dropped quietly in at the end of the last blog post was the fact that my husband had to have an operation the next morning to pin the bone back in place. A straightforward procedure, even when the patient is an insulin-dependent diabetic (as my husband is). General anaesthetic required, and thus an overnight stay, but in all reality it is just a run-of-the-mill procedure for experienced orthopaedic surgeons.
And all would be well if the NHS wasn’t in the middle of a crisis: no space, no beds, no admissions. The doctor did describe the hospital as being in ‘black’ status… or even ‘worse than black’. I got his drift. My husband’s operation was put as an emergency (it had to be done relatively quickly or the bone would heal in the wrong place and be unable to be pinned correctly) and he’d be first on the list (that was a diabetic advantage).
So he fasted overnight: Saturday morning phone call at 8.30am – no beds.
So he fasted overnight: Sunday morning phone call at 8.30am – no beds.
So … are you getting the drift? First on the list, an emergency operation and after 5 days there was still no space to bring him in.
Meanwhile, the swelling in his ankle was getting more and more uncomfortable. By the Wednesday morning he could barely walk 5 metres without being in pain, so the lovely nurse (as frustrated as my husband and I!) told him to come in and they’d take a look at the cast to see if there was anything wrong.
In all reality, this was the back door in to get a bed. They took the cast off, assessed his swelling ankle (there was still crinkling, so they could still operate: if your skin is too tight, I learnt, they can’t operate as it’ll just splurge all over the place and can’t be sewn back together) and decided to admit him in order to lift the foot up and reduce the swelling. That decision was at about 10.30am. I left him there with the promise that I’d return at Visiting Time that evening.

When I walked in I was greeted by the receptionist with, “Oh, your husband? Is he the one who’s waiting on a bed? He’s in the waiting room…” Nine hours had passed and he was still sat in the outpatients’ waiting room, awaiting a bed to become available. Nine hours! He was quite bored, but a long way through his book…
Cutting a long story short, and omitting all the medical details (although I can’t believe I’ve told you about the splurging skin issue – sorry!) he did have the operation the following day, and was released back into the world with a pinned tibia (and two breaks to the fibula that they discovered as well…) the day after that.
Now he’s home – off work! – and resting the leg as much as possible. Meanwhile I’m practicing being a nurse/maid. Six weeks more of him being in a non-weightbearing cast: I think I might go mad!!
I told him he could write a book…
Kicking my book over the line
Two weeks ago I announced the title of my book: Beware the Falling Avocados.
Really, honestly, I’d love to give you a publication date, but whenever I set myself a target I seem to fall behind. Or, rather, I find more and more errors in my writing and I only want to publish when I know it is as good as I can make it. That is the joy of self-publishing: I am in control of it all. Obviously, that is also its drawback.
Nevertheless, I have set myself some deadlines and I made the first… kind of… so I’m feeling confident about the rest… kind of… but this will involve a lot of editing over Christmas and New Year! Two years ago I had the time to do it because my children were really emphatically sick. The usual obligation to entertain them and play games and rush around being social with everyone we knew was put on the back burner abandoned. I had time (in between my new role as nurse) to focus on my work. And the house was quiet – can you believe that? Over Christmas?!
Now I know it is wrong to hope they’re ill again this Christmas. Really, I do know that. Whatever the frustrated author inside me is saying.
This year my deadlines expect chaos and hope that nothing holds me back. Mostly it is editing, but there is still some writing: the final chapter is yet to be drafted, although I have a fair idea of how it will go. With luck, I’ll be back in January with a more positive spin on the book’s progress. In the meantime, it is head down and get it finished.
What’s in a name?
One of the hardest tasks with writing a book is coming up with a title. The title sticks with the book through thick and thin. It is the first draw for any potential reader. It defines the essence of the book: it’s story, it’s location, it’s timbre.
A title sets the scene; the writing tells the story.
Book 2 has gone through a few iterations. Originally it was The One with the Brain Event, and I’d labelled all the chapter headings The one with… just like in the TV series Friends. Then my very wise husband pointed out that Friends is over now, and perhaps no-one will get the connection (can you believe the programme finished 10 years ago?). And perhaps they’d laid some sort of rights to the phrase The one with… as a title starter.
So that was scrapped.
And, in fairness, for a couple of years it probably lay there labelled as Book 2. I shall be sorry to lose that, as I have quite enjoyed the title. If nothing else, it emphasised to me that I had completed Book 1!
But I wanted something that followed on well from In the Shade of the Mulberry Tree but also reflected Africa. As a sequel ‘More tales from the Mulberry Tree’ might have worked. Instead I concentrated on the tree theme and thought through all the trees I had come across while living in Zambia. This was made a little easier as the houses at my children’s school were all named after trees, but in the end I decided they weren’t appropriate.
What finally tipped the title into being was rediscovering a poem my father had written for his grandchildren. It is by no means his best poetry, but it is fun and light-hearted: perfect for a 5- and 3-year-old, as they were then. He, in turn, took his title from a sign that was nailed to a tree at a cafe we frequented in Lusaka.
Beware the falling avocados
What do you think? All I have to do now is finish writing and editing the book!
One year on – have I been successful?
It is almost exactly a year since I launched my book In the Shade of the Mulberry Tree on you, the unsuspecting public. Years in its production (by which I mean writing and editing) I decided to self-publish…then worked furiously to get it ready for my deadline of 16 March.
A year on, I was intrigued to know how it had done. Historically, self-publishing has seemed to be the loser’s option: you can’t get published with a ‘proper’ publisher so you go and print it yourself. For some, this has just shown the traditional publishers to be fools: how could they possibly have missed such a gem? Others have sunk into the oblivion that the professionals had anticipated.
Advancements in technology have allowed the self-publisher to be much more respected. It can be cheaper to produce, due to print-on-demand and ebooks. It can be cheaper to promote, due to social media and the internet. And once you have got over those two major costs, your position is little different to that of most first time published writers. Though publishers have better access to nationwide media, most authors need to generate a lot of their own publicity. As with so much, it is so often who you know rather than what you know.
So what did I think I would regard as successful? I had two measures.
Firstly: sell 100 copies. That was my minimum aim. I would have been very disappointed if I couldn’t reach that target.
Secondly: sell 200 copies. That was where I expected to be. I thought I probably had enough friends and family whom I could cajole into buying the book that I would be satisfied with that.
Would that break even? That all depended on whether they were print books or ebooks, or whether I sold them myself from the box I pre-ordered. The latter had the greatest profit margin, although the biggest risk as I had to cover the cost of their purchase, whether or not I sold them.
Furthermore, it depends on how you calculate the cost. Seven years of drafting and redrafting has used up a lot of paper and ink! I have gone on occasional courses to learn how to write (I don’t have an English or Creative Writing degree) and I have paid for professional editors to criticise my writing. This doesn’t begin to count the actual costs of publication and promotion, which were not negligible: the cover design, the book launch party, posters, promotional bookmarks, not to mention the books given away as prizes, or as gifts to people who had helped along the way.
Ignoring the costs of the previous years, I estimated that the book had cost me in the region of £1,570 – a lot of money! Could I possibly break even?
Well, certainly not based on the book launch alone. I recognise now that I took a lovely but expensive route – lovely, as I had a wonderful evening with family and friends, but expensive as there are cheaper options than hiring a restaurant for an evening! I’m not decrying the book launch itself – that was wonderful, and a great boost to sales and publicity – but a different venue or style will be chosen next time. Another extravagance that I wouldn’t repeat was the printing of business cards: I don’t use them, I’m uncomfortable handing them out and, on the one occasion that I did, I realised that they didn’t have the relevant information on for the lady concerned (oops!).
But sales over the year have gradually built up, peaking over the pre-Christmas period. Since January I haven’t promoted the book so much, and sales have fallen away. However I did have a look at the sales that I had made up to 31 December and practically fell off my chair.
About 120 from home, 110 paperbacks and 313 ebooks. Total: 543 copies.
Happiness (you may recall) came at 200 copies; ecstasy when I realised I had more than doubled my estimate. Double ecstasy (if such a thing is possible!) when I compared that with authors in an article on self-publishing in Writing Magazine who stated they had sold about 200 copies and were pleased with that. Quite chuffed when I read that:
“The average book in America sells about 500 copies”
(Publishers Weekly, July 17, 2006)
and that, on average, a self-published book sells less than 250 copies.
Would 200 copies have broken even? At £2.32 per copy, no. (I’m giving an approximate royalty: the amount received does vary according the type of book, and whether I had it on promotion or not.) Has 543 copies done the trick? Just about. Have I made enough money to retire to the Bahamas and live off my hard work? Certainly not!
Shame.
Writing and promoting a book is genuinely hard work. When I first typed ‘The End’ I thought I’d done the difficult bit by writing the book, but in reality the most time-consuming and non-instinctive part of the job was still to come. My hat is doffed to all professional authors, for it is very difficult to make a living from writing alone (as can be seen from the average sales quoted above).
Would I do it again? Oh yes! I loved the experience, and I love the writing process. Indeed, the plan is to have Book 2 (a sequel!) ready for autumn this year… although I’m definitely finding it harder to write than the first book. Success in writing books is more than a financial reward: there is something intangibly magnificent about seeing… holding… sharing your created work.
But best of all was discovering this today:
If you look at Kindle store > Books > Non-fiction > Travel > Africa, I am a No 1 Bestseller!
Success indeed.
In the Shade of the Mulberry Tree is available here in the UK and here in the US, both as paperback and kindle versions, as well as on other Amazon sites around the globe.