In the Shade of the Mulberry Tree

Beware the Falling Avocados, In the Shade of the Mulberry Tree, Publishing

Memory lane

In a rash moment yesterday, I decided to tidy up some paperwork in my study. Were you to walk in right now, you probably couldn’t tell that it looked much better (though it does!) I have slimmed down the in-trays, so there is a lot less of the ‘that will come in useful sometime’ stuff. I’ve even managed to put aside 4 books for the charity shop. (It hurts to get rid of them, even if two of them are my daughter’s…)

Some of the remaining paperwork is old print-outs of my books. Somehow I don’t feel I can get rid of all my editing until the book is officially for sale… (and even then…?) You will spot I am a hoarder – not as bad as some, and certainly kept in check by having moved so often in the early years of our marriage. However we’ve now lived here for six years and the rubbish is accumulating.

One of the things I found were my first attempts at designing a book cover for In the Shade of the Mulberry Tree. This was before I discovered designforwriters.com, who have produced the covers for both my books and are professionals and are fantastic.

I am not a fantastic book cover designer. See.

Would those books have sold? Would you have looked twice at them (other than to laugh)? This is why you should leave cover design to the professionals.

On a more cheery note, I also found this picture.

Old ladies laughing while they work. Beautiful, and captures so much of Zambia for me. (Photo copyright, if you exclude my amateur snap of the poor print on paper, is Gareth Bentley – for more, see garethbentley.com)

Beware the Falling Avocados available as paperback and ebook from 18 June 2016.

Memoir

Memories

What is a memoir? Memoir comes – unsurprisingly – from the French memoire, which ultimately has its roots in Latin words for memory and mindful. It is the telling of one’s own story, the recounting of memories.

I fell into memoir accidentally. When we returned to the UK we moved to a new city where I knew no-one. My husband was at work (he’s a doctor: this means many long hours), both children were at school and I had no paid employment so, to kill the six hours on my own each day, I started to write about our experiences in Zambia. Others would have watched Jeremy Kyle or Homes under the Hammer: I needed something to keep the little grey cells moving.

Back then the memories were fresh and vibrant: now they are ageing. Some stories are etched on my mind and I cannot let a drop of them go: not the colours, not the smells, not the life-threatening nature of the events. Others are more vague: I remember the punchline, but not the joke.

Memoir comes in many forms. There was a ‘craze’ a few years ago for misery memoir. These had the general structure of an awful childhood, which metamorphosed into a successful adult life. They went out of fashion as the market was saturated with such stories, although there is a lot to be said for a book where good overcomes evil (see the Harry Potter franchise, for example!) The Christmas bestseller lists are usually dominated by the memoirs of the rich and famous. Some are clearly ghost-written, but the well-known name sells books. The publishing industry has a lot of say over what is successful and the trends the market may take.

It was when I started writing my memoir that I realised how much I enjoyed reading stories about other people – real people, rather than the delights of fictional characters that feel real. One piece of advice I was given to improve my writing was to read lots of books in the same genre. I realised I was already doing this! And so I have enjoyed all of Carol Drinkwater’s Olive Farm books, and Chris Stewart’s Driving over lemons series, and (after a successful family holiday on a narrowboat) One Man and his Narrowboat by Steve Haywood. I caught the whole of Wild by Cheryl Strayed when it was broadcast as Book of the Week on Radio 4 and am looking forward to the upcoming film version. I like nosing into other people’s lives! I like knowing that they can overcome adversity, in whatever form it may be.

And how accurate are they? Do they tell all the ins and outs, all the details? Of course not! When I was about 7 years old I amused my parents with my argument that the bible couldn’t be 100% truth when it didn’t tell everything about Jesus, for example when he went to the loo. (Read it: nowhere does it say that he relieved himself!) As my trivial example illustrates, every detail would clog up the story. It wouldn’t let the real tale shine, it wouldn’t let the purpose of the story be paramount.

Yet the memoirs are accurate enough to be real: to be logical and entrancing. They may not show every event but they give an overarching picture of the person’s feelings and lifestory. As a writer, I know that it cannot be totally accurate, as it is impossible to remember every word of a conversation; but it is possible to recreate the gist of it, and thus to expression emotions and reactions.

My dictionary defines memoir principally as a written record set down as material for history or biography. As a definition it is true, if a little staid and stiff. Personally I like it’s second definition: a biographical sketch.

That’s what I’m creating: a biographical sketch. A picture my life – or a portion of it – that reflects my feelings and surroundings. Accuracy? Who needs that, when there’s a good story to tell?

In the Shade of the Mulberry Tree is available to purchase now, and Beware the Falling Avocados is coming… soon…

Beware the Falling Avocados

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!

In the Shade of the Mulberry Tree, Publishing, Writing

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.