Wilton’s Music Hall

The second most frequent question I get asked about Kill-Grief (after “how long did it take to write?”) is “Did you have to do a lot of research?” Sometimes people say this in a tone of voice that implies research is a right pain, and poor brave historical novelists somehow manage to slog through the nuisance of it as a means to an end.

But this suggests that research is all school-like note-taking in chilly libraries. It isn’t – a lot of the time it means going to exciting places, which is what I did on Saturday when I visited Wilton’s Music Hall in London’s East End.

 

In the book I’m writing at the moment, my main character goes to see a friend (a real-life historical person) performing at a London theatre/music hall in 1857. Unfortunately ’my’ actual music hall is now gone, but as Wilton’s was opened in 1859 I wanted to go along and get an idea of the layout and atmosphere.

Wilton’s is in a crumbling state that gives it the most amazing character. It reminded me a bit of Venice, with its sense of decaying grandeur.

What particularly struck me was the closeness of the stage to the audience and how easy it must have been for the performers to engage in banter or come down and meet the punters rather than being set apart and inaccessible as with many modern stages.

Although the pictures show the room laid out with rows of seating, in the music hall’s heyday the space was filled with tables where people drank and chatted during the performance, or wandered in and out to the bar. I didn’t know this before, as I imagined more of a theatre-like set-up with the audience all paying attention to the performer, but the more boisterous and fluid arrangement perfectly suits the scenes in my book.

 

 I was hoping to see the dressing rooms, but they are on the second floor which is not open to the public because it isn’t safe. As the fabric of the building continues to decline, the Wilton’s Music Hall Trust needs to raise £4 million just to keep it standing, while maintaining the character and atmophere. Visit www.wiltons.org.uk to find out more and see how you can help save this wonderful building. Wilton’s is also on Facebook at www.facebook.com/wiltonsmusichall

Review from Farm Lane Books

A good review here from Jackie at Farm Lane Books, who recommends Kill-Grief to “historical fiction fans with a stomach of steel!” There are some great comments from her readers too.

I’ve been following this blog for a while and really like it. The reviews are helpful and concise, and there’s a good balance of well-known books and less high-profile ones. An excellent place to find book recommendations and to discuss the ones you’ve already read.

Are book signings worth it?

Some authors and publishers are ambivalent about the value of book signings – or even dead against them. The über-famous know that people will buy the books anyway, so a signing is just a treat for the fans. For others it hardly seems worth sitting awkwardly in a shop for three hours being asked where the latest Jade Goody biography is.

For those of us, however, who are counting our sales in ones rather than thousands, there are many advantages to book signings, regardless of how many copies change hands on the day.

Press coverage
A signing is the perfect opportunity to send a press release to the local papers. “Book gets published” is not a story. “Book got published last year” is even less of one, so you need continuing excuses to contact the media, and that’s where local events come in. Quite often the paper will send a photographer, so you get some publicity after the signing too. Added to that, the photographer’s presence in the shop attracts customers’ attention and makes you look more famous and interesting than you actually are.

Events listings
There are many online event listings sites, both local and national, to which you can add your event. Does anyone ever look at these? I don’t know, but they allow you to link to your website, thus boosting your search engine rankings.

Posters
If you live near enough, you can go round the town and ask shopkeepers to display posters about your signing. Many will do this for free. Include the book cover image and, even if people don’t come to the event, it will be vaguely familiar to them next time they see it.

Getting the book on the shelves
Even large publishers are apparently having difficulty these days persuading bookshops to stock all their books. For smaller publishers with little money for promotions, it’s even harder. Doing a signing means the shop has to get the book in, and will usually keep a few afterwards.

Bookseller recommendations
Being nice to the bookshop staff really goes without saying, as it’s nothing more than common courtesy, but it can also pay dividends later when they champion your work and recommend it to customers looking for something in that genre.
The opposite works against you, of course – if you waltz in and treat the first person you meet like scum because he/she isn’t the manager, then don’t expect any help. They get enough of that from the customers.

Giving out promotional materials
Producing some promotional stuff such as bookmarks or postcards does cost a bit of money, but is useful for two reasons a.) it’s much easier to approach someone and say “would you like a free bookmark?” than to say “wanna buy my book?” Only a really miserable sod will refuse a free bookmark. b.) if someone hangs on to the bookmark, it might prompt them to look up the book later. You can even offer to sign it, making it more likely that they’ll keep it in case you get famous and they can sell it on eBay.

 

Meeting people
Yes, real people. Not just characters you made up. They are out there somewhere and at a book signing you can even have a conversation with some of them.

Other unpredictable positive results
Any of this publicity can be spotted by festival organisers, local reading group members, WI programme co-ordinators, librarians – anyone who might be in need of a speaker and decide to invite you along. Then you get a chance to start all over again with publicity for your next event!

 

 

Weekly Geeks: Best Movie Adaptations

This week’s Weekly Geeks challenge is to blog about our favourite book-to-movie adaptations. I’m not that much of a film buff and I don’t have a TV, so I’m sure I’ve missed out on some great films over the years, but here are some favourites:

Gone With The Wind

 

Dangerous Liaisons

  

Kes

 

Pride and Prejudice (BBC version)

 

Although these tend towards history and literary-ness, that’s not so with my favourite movie adaptation of all time:

Back in the early 90s, a schoolfriend and I became huge fans of the book and when we heard there was a movie coming out, we were excited but wary. More specifically, we were wary that the dinosaurs were going to be crap. Dinosaur films meant The Valley of Gwangi, which was brilliant for its time but that time was 1969 and such rubbery stop-motion dinos weren’t going to cut it in 1993.

My friend was an usherette at the cinema so we got free tickets for JP, settled down with our popcorn to watch the film and… we loved it! It had everything – amazing effects, humour, suspense, excitement, Dickie Attenborough failing at being Scottish, and a  wonderful musical score.

Afterwards we had fun talking about the differences between the book and film, but each worked perfectly within its own medium, and where Spielberg departed from the book, he did it with good reason. One of my favourite aspects of the novel was all the detail about chaos theory. This was less pronounced in the film, but let’s face it – who wants to sit and listen to Jeff Goldblum giving a maths lesson for two hours? Not me, buddy! I wanted to see dinosaurs eating people, dinosaurs eating each other, people narrowly escaping from dinosaurs and… well, more dinosaurs.

The Lost World was actually a better film, but I don’t count that as my favourite because I feel it was already a Hollywood blockbuster before Michael Crichton wrote a single word. Much as I admire Crichton, I get the impression he was a little cynical there and just chucked in all the ingredients for big screen success, with less emphasis on making it work as a book because what the hell – we were all going to buy it anyway. By the time The Lost World film came out we knew how brilliant the CGI was going to be so it didn’t haven’t the same ground-breaking novelty as Jurassic Park. Here’s the trailer from the first film:

 

*****

Weekly Geeks also asks: what book or series would you like to see be made into a movie or movies?

Well, of course, there can only be one answer to that! It begins with K and doesn’t have any dinosaurs in, but all it needs is the BBC costume department and Andrew Davies, and away we go! (For any new visitors who haven’t seen the book trailer, it’s here.)

*****

By a happy coincidence, Vulpes Libris is discussing book-to-film adaptations all this week.

Photos – Chesham book signing

This is the first book event I’ve done where I’ve actually got some good photos! At Chesham today I sold five copies – which might not sound like much but the signing was well worth doing, not least because of the surrounding publicity. I was mentioned in the Bucks Examiner last week and a photographer came along today, so I should be in it again next Thursday. I was also in the Chiltern Voice newsletter and had posters up around Chesham and the local area, so I’ve hopefully reached a lot of people who might find my book vaguely familiar next time they see it.

A huge thank you to Vanessa and her team, who made me feel very welcome.

 

 

 

 

Book signing – this weekend

I will be signing Kill-Grief at Waterstone’s in Chesham, Bucks, this Saturday (18 July) from 11am until 2pm, so if you are in the area and would like to pop in and say hello, I will be delighted to see you.  For a map and further details, click here or contact me via my website.

I have been doing some publicity for this over the past couple of weeks and it has occurred to me how useful a signing can be to help raise a book’s profile in general. Even if I don’t sell a single copy on Saturday, there are lots of advantages to doing a signing and I will do a proper post about that when I’ve thought about it a bit more.

I’m also building up quite a few tips about organising and promoting an event like this, so I’ll blog about them soon too.

A World in Books

This is interesting (well, it is slightly to me, anyway).  World 66 is a travel site where you can create a map of all the countries you’ve visited. Weekly Geeks, which I heard about via Farm Lane Books, suggested using it to create a map of countries we’ve read about. I have based mine on what I’ve read since the beginning of 2008.

Although the furthest extent of my travel in the past year and a half has been to go Waterstone’s in Chester, I’ve read about lots of far-flung places, including Tucson, Arizona in Goats by Mark Poirier, Antarctica in Tania Hershman’s The White Road and a weird, hellish dimension somewhere parallel to Australia in The Pilo Family Circus by Will Elliott. I have clearly neglected South America, as the two Isobel Allende books I’ve ever read were a few years ago, but I have to confess I don’t have much motivation to remedy that at the moment. 

Instead, I’d like to read more about Africa, having recently finished Andrew Sharp’s wonderful novel The Ghosts of Eden, set in Uganda. I also like the look of Matt Beynon Rees’s Palestinian mysteries, and want to add Iceland to my map with The Blue Fox by Sjón.

 

create your own visited country map

A 1920s Steam-roller living van

This weekend was the Prestwood Steam Rally – the highlight of the local calendar, which sees exhibitors coming from far and wide to show off beautifully restored engines like this:

 

plus lots of vintage vehicles of all descriptions, such as this one:

 

 

The living van below was restored by the Green family, who live in the same village as me. It initially made me think of the Reddleman’s home in The Return of the Native, but it is too big for that and was not used in the wilds of the 19thC West Country but was pulled behind the steam-roller of a road-building gang.

 

The van dates from 1922 and housed the steam-roller driver’s family of 6 – which made it pretty sparsely populated compared with some vans of the time!

 

Similar vans would house the rest of the road-working team – one of these with six grown men living in it was possibly slightly less attractive and fragrant than this one.

 

Heatwave London

I was at the Exclusively Independent event at Fulham library last night, and had a great time meeting the other writers and reading from my book… but blimey, I hope the next event is in the winter. Out here in sedate Great Missenden it has been possible to keep cool by staying indoors or going out in the Jeep with the roof down, but the Tube during the rush hour was quite a different matter.

From Marylebone, I just had a short hop to Paddington and then it was the District Line to Parsons Green – straightforward, but after the packed train stopped for a few minutes in a dark bit, and then more and more people got on at Earl’s Court, I bailed out for a while. I got on another train a bit later and was still in plenty of time for the event in the library’s exhibition hall – and in my boiling and dishevelled state I probably did look quite an exhibition by then!

There must have been about 30-40 people in the audience, which was ideal – not too crowded but not too sparse. Also speaking were Alec Silifant, Candi Miller, Michael Marr and Peter Cave – all our books are in different genres and styles, and really showed the diversity of the independent publishing sector. Thanks to all at Legend Press and Fulham Library for organising the event, and to everyone who turned up on such a very hot day to show such wonderful interest in the books.

I haven’t got any pictures yet but a professional photographer unobtrusively took loads throughout the event, so I’ll have some soon - though I possibly won’t look very glamorous and author-like without some major photoshopping.

One thing that has changed since my book came out is that I now really enjoy reading my work to an audience. Before, I was OK with doing a speech or something, but actually reading out my fiction to anyone other than the dog felt embarrassing and stupid. I also didn’t like the idea of answering people’s questions at an event – I thought I wouldn’t have a clue what to say. Now I much prefer doing a reading + Q & A, not least because this appeals to my laziness by not requiring much preparation!

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******

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A few random bits of  self-promotional showy-offy news:

My Xtranormal video  was chosen as best video of the week on writers’ site Red Room 

I’ve been interviewed on WriteWords

I’m getting tons of website hits from Keele University as I think I must be on the intranet or forums there, so if you’re visiting from Keele, hello! Hope to see you at my Science in the Humanities seminar talk on 18 November.