Date
I opted for a couple of weeks after the publication date for two reasons, because things have been known to not run smoothly at the printing stage, and because if I left it too long I'd lose the high that seeing the spines of your new book produces. I can never imagine people wanting to come at the end of the week when they could have a wild night out, so I picked a Tuesday.
Venue
Previous launches had been at Borders (such a shame it disappeared), and View Art Gallery in Bristol. This time I thought it would be more businesslike to go back to a bookstore so I chose Foyles in Cabot Circus. Robb, the events organiser, is also a drag queen so if you want a rather fabulous intro, he's the go-to man.
Invites
Invitations aren't my job. Luckily I live with clever people. Guest list
was my job - I invited friends, teenagers aplenty, librarians, and every teacher I know. I didn't count the replies because I didn't want to set my expectations high and be disappointed. This is a head-in-the-sand approach. Robb asked me how many people were coming so he could order the stock. I answered with a well-considered lie.
Food and drink
I don't like messy food and books - it doesn't seem right. Majestic delivered red and white wine, fizzy pop and ice to the shop. I brought Maltesers and Flying Saucers (because there are drones in my book).
What to wear
Charity shops are the answer to everything. I invested £5 in a wee silver skirt.
THE TALK
There's something tricky, for me, about an audience of all ages, some that know you really well as a friend, and others that have met you briefly as an author. I was a bit nervous, despite being in the middle of a tour of secondary schools with audiences of up to 250 teenagers. Adopting the usual head-in-the-sand, I scribbled some notes at two in the afternoon, and arrived at Foyles at five with a postcard of drivel.
How did it go?
Like a wedding, in a blur, but there were lots of people, lots of books sold and a satisfying level of laughter. By half-past seven the crowds had thinned and a group of us headed over to Giraffe for something with chips.
Was it worth it?
I know not everyone has a launch, but I think the arrival of a book, knowing the ups and downs of the process, is something worth celebrating, but that's not to say I'm not pleased when it's over.
Tracy Alexander
I love being a writer, still walking up, ten years after I wrote my first short story, delighted to find I am published.
But, the last month has been fraught. So fraught that I offloaded my October blog, and forgot to do this one. It is 8:40 and I am about to share with you, as though it's Writers Anonymous.
In HACKED, the book published by Piccadilly Press yesterday, I casually mentioned, somewhere near the end, that the shadowy figure from the deep web responsible for the almost-tragedy was an eighteen-year old girl whose mother was Welsh and her father Yemeni. It was a whim, in that I could have picked anywhere that the US fly armed drones, so Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, and any European country, as she needed to be of dual heritage.
Anyway, that whim is now a second draft of TURNED, because the publisher was interested to hear her story. It should have been delivered seven days ago but is still a word doc on my computer, because I have been struggling.
TURNED is a circumquel, beginning before and ending after HACKED.
I am guilty of not planning, or planning in such a helicopter fashion that the detail is impossible to see. That has not helped me this time. I can normally wander off to wherever the moment takes me, but as the books are parallel I have to make certain elements fit. This has been tricky. But not the trickiest part.
Aaaarghhhh!
I was worried that going over the same period of time would be boring for those who had read the first book, so I decided to use a structure where the chapters alternated between the past and the present. All was going quite well until I read aloud to my writing group and watched their faces. I'd been doing that ostrich-thing, kidding myself that it worked when it was in fact confusing. It took a couple of days of riding my bike and baking to summon the courage to deconstruct my 45 000 words and put it back together chronologically. A short feeling of relief followed.
Oh no!
Naively I thought it would all flow, but of course you write differently if you're constantly switching time. The chapters didn't link.
I emailed the publisher, asking for an extension. The first deadline I've ever missed, and started to rewrite, in a panic.
Back at writing group the faces didn't look much more encouraging.
"Have you actually got to the end yet?" asked Eeyore.
"No," I said, fretfully.
"Just forget rewriting and do the end and come back," she ordered.
I obeyed.
I wrote, I hope, a scorching finale. Allowed myself a small smile.
Regroup.
I am back rewriting. I have three weeks to go. I am worried about the voice, still concerned that there is too much overlap between the books, and eating a gargantuan number of biscuits.
Help!
As I contemplated cracking on with my novel this morning – I’m only on Chapter Three – I had a comforting thought. The exact words in my head were Synopsis as friend. My mind’s circuitry led me straight to a case study from my long gone life as a marketer. The subject was dog food.
For ten years I was a proper PAYE employee, selling the likes of frozen food, tennis shoes and booze. For the next ten years I was freelance, selling money in the form of mortgages and investments. At some point I was invited to give a guest lecture at the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Given that I was seven months pregnant, I probably should have declined. Instead I pulled on a pair of black trousers with an oh-so-attractive stretchy panel fetchingly topped by an elastic waistband (for that little known waist that is in fact directly beneath your breasts), buttoned the matching black maternity waistcoat (what joker thought of that) and drove to Cookham.
I wasn’t nervous, until I opened my mouth and realised that my lung capacity, whilst adequate for conversations where you only have every other turn and the person is close by, wasn’t up to the job. I cut short my introduction, offering the delegates a chance to say a little about themselves while I recovered my composure.
My subject was segmentation. Bread and butter stuff. I had all sorts of examples from the world known as FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), from retail and from financial services. All I had to do was teach the theory, show examples – the brilliant dog food slides were ready and waiting – and then relate it to the fields they were working in. I could do that with or without oxygen.
The first attendee mumbled her name and said that she worked on treated mosquito nets. My mind gave a sarcastic ‘yippee!’ Never mind. The others were bound to be working on cars, shampoo, biscuits . . . something I could relate to.
The conch was passed round the room. My confidence ebbed. My smile became as fixed and unresponsive as my twenty-something pupils.
It turned out that I had a global monopoly on marketers of mosquito related products.
Inside I did the equivalent of a refusal at Becher’s Brook.
Whether it was the peppering of the content with irritating little breaths, the hideousness of my maternity waistcoat or my lack of engagement with the mosquito market, by the time I got to the segmentation of the dog food market, I’d lost them. A shame, because it was my favourite part.
Here’s the gist:
Categorising dog food in terms of form – dry, wet, raw – or flavour – lamb, rabbit, chicken – didn’t help marketers understand how to make their products attractive to dog owners. Nor did using the breed, age or size of dog. Research showed that the most meaningful way of sorting the market was by looking at how dog owners thought about their dogs.
Four segments were identified that most influenced the type of dog food chosen:
Dog as grandchild – indulgence
Dog as child – loveDog as friend – health and nutrition
Dog as dog – cheap and convenient.
My audience woke up slightly. Proof that a pet can always be relied on to liven things up, be it in business or school visits. We had our first interaction of any length, a welcome reprieve for my pulmonary gas exchange. The treated net marketers had never considered the relationship between dog and master.
Had they not read The Call of the Wild? Seen Bill Sykes mistreat Bull’s Eye? Or Hagrid berate cowardly Fang? Timmy was surely as much a friend as Anne, Dick, Julian and George.
They eagerly volunteered product names and quickly slotted them into the four segments.
Cesar Mini Fillets in a foil tray – Dog as grandchild
Asda Smartprice Dog Meal. – Dog as dog
Pedigree Chum Chicken – the clues in the name . . .
In what was overall a pretty grey-with-clouds lecture, I enjoyed the little spell of sunshine. Motivation wasn’t something mosquito experts thought a lot about. They thought about geography and insects and shelter and disease and mosquito net fixing kits. They didn’t think about what might be on the mind of the traveller, setting off alone to try and find traces of the Hairy-nosed Otter in Borneo, or maybe the traveller’s nervous father, buying the very best treated mosquito net for his passionate but impractical son.
Marketers often end up segmenting by demographics e.g. age, gender, income, despite the power of psychographics like motivation, personality and attitude. Perhaps writers should lecture at the Chartered Institute of Marketing instead . . .
Quite why my inner voice chose the words Synopsis as friend, inextricably linked in my hippocampus to Dog as friend, who knows, but it made me reflect on my changed relationship with synopses.
My first few books grew in a free spirit sort of way, meandering towards a vague nirvana shrouded in uncertainty. The synopses written afterwards, if at all.
This was: Synopsis as bureaucrat.
My new book,
Hacked, out in November, was the product of a synopsis I HAD to write because the publisher, Piccadilly Press, was interested in an idea I’d mooted and wanted it fleshed out.
This was: Synopsis as unwanted dependant.
I developed the beginning, middle and end of the story, my lovely publisher made a few suggestions and then I forgot about the four-page plan until there was a problem, at which point I reluctantly referred to it.
The synopsis for the sequel, however, is printed out and has its own space on my desk. It feels reassuring. Trustworthy, but not prescriptive.
857 words in, with 50 000 ish to go, I’m glad that I’m not alone.
This is: Synopsis as friend
I even enjoyed the discipline of writing it.
Tracy Alexander
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