Jonathan Pinnock's Blog, page 6

Archie and Pye get Launched

THE TRUTH ABOUT ARCHIE AND PYE was officially launched last night at Cheddar Library and a very good time was had by all. At least, it seemed to be – I spent most of the evening in a bit of a sensory blur. For someone who is (albeit self-diagnosed, but increasingly convinced of it as the years go by) somewhere on the spectrum, these events can be somewhat challenging, but I just about coped, only managing to knock over two glasses of wine during the course of the evening.

Anyway, let’s start off with THE CAKE. This is it, in all its awesomeness:

It almost didn’t happen, because when I presented the chit to the Asda bakery staff, they took one look at it and said ‘What’s this?’ ‘It’s a book cover,’ I said. ‘Ooh, we can’t do that. Copyright,’ came the reply. ‘But it’s my book,’ I said. ‘Look, that’s my name there.’ A supervisor was sought and several minutes later, the response came that they were prepared to go ahead with it just this once, if I could show them some ID. Good thing my name was on the cover. Still, isn’t it amazing? For £16, I don’t think you could improve on that as a centrepiece for a book launch, and the process is so straightforward.

The wine purchase was eventful, too. The chatty manager at Majestic Wine asked me what the occasion was, and of course I told her. ‘What’s the book about?’ she asked. I gave her a brief precis as best I could, but when she and her colleague helped me carry everything out to the car, I realised I had a few copies in the back. So I showed her the blurb on the back cover.

The blurb starts like this:

Something doesn’t add up about Archie and Pye…

After a disastrous day at work, disillusioned junior PR executive Tom Winscombe finds himself sharing a train carriage and a dodgy Merlot…

at which point she stopped reading and looked at me curiously, and I instantly realised why. Because the wine I’d just bought from her was (you’ve guessed it) a Merlot. It hadn’t even occurred to me. What’s weirder is that it was Chilean Merlot, which anyone who’s read the book will know that’s exactly the type that Tom ends up drinking in Chapter One. Even stranger, the only other wine mentioned in the book is a Sauvignon Blanc. Guess which white I bought from Majestic?

Anyway, call me superstitious, but I think weird coincidences are auspicious.

Back to the launch itself. Here is a picture of some of the people there.

Notice, first of all, on the far left of the picture, none other than my lovely editor Abbie Headon, who drove many miles across inhospitable terrain to be there. It was fantastic to finally meet her, and I was amazingly chuffed that she had taken the trouble to come.

In the middle of the room, there is a cluster of ex-BSU CWMA students, including almost all of Celia Brayfield’s first term class who were present when Archie and Pye made their first stumbling appearance: (from L to R) Linda Pinson, Anthony Hewitt, Paddy Edwards and Polly Hall. Emily Koch (author of the stupendously excellent IF I DIE BEFORE I WAKE) was also there, but arrived after the photo was taken. Other BSU alumni there were Morag Shuaib, Dixie Darch (back to the camera) and Julie Targett. I was so pleased that they all managed to come. See you all when Paddy launches the brilliant RUIN’s WAKE next year.

So, now that’s all over, I can at last get down to the job of finishing off Book Two. See you on the other side of that.

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Publication Day for Archie and Pye

Any excuse to stick that gorgeous cover up again.

Well, it’s publication day today and I am quite unbelievably excited and if the truth were to be told, just a bit emotional too. In fact the paperback snuck out under the cover of darkness on Monday morning, so it’s only really the Kindle version that’s being released today, but it’s a Thursday and PROPER BOOKS ARE RELEASED ON THURSDAYS. I’ve no idea why this happens, but it’s one of those weird quirks of the publishing industry.

Why am I so excited about this one? I think it’s because this is the book I’ve always wanted to write. I mean, not this EXACT book, but the kind of book. I’m not saying I’m not proud of any of my other books, but I don’t think I was ever destined to be – look away now, Silhouette – primarily a poet, or even – look away now, Salt and Cultured Llama – a short story writer. Or even a memoir writer. It’s OK, I think Two Ravens Press are looking somewhere else already.

Ever since I discovered that it was possible to make people laugh by writing words – round about the time I came across Sellars and Yeatman along with Willans and Searle at the age of 8 – it’s the only thing I’ve really wanted to do. I had a shot at it a few years ago with Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens, but while I think there are parts of that book that I’m really proud of, I have to admit that it’s flawed. I could spend an entire blog post explaining why, but that’s for another time.

The Truth About Archie and Pye is a proper book. It’s the one I’ve been waiting to write. I hope you like it.

[Ooh, nearly forgot to say. I’m about to go on a blog tour. These are the dates confirmed so far:

October 6th: Jo Derrick
October 8th: Nik Perring
October 10th: Kirsty Stanley
October 12th: Mandy Huggins
October 14th: Neil Laurenson
October 15th: Ruchira Mandal
October 17th: Joanna Campbell
November 12th: Ali Bacon

If anyone else out there fancies joining in, drop me a line.]

 

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Archie and Pye on NetGalley

OK, this is where the scary stuff starts. THE TRUTH ABOUT ARCHIE AND PYE was uploaded to NetGalley today. There’s still a week and a bit to go before the official publication next Thursday, but members of NetGalley are now able to request advance copies for reviewing.

I haven’t been through this process before, so I’m no idea what the NetGalley readership is like. I’m guessing they’re avid bookaholics who have pretty much read everything going, so OH GOD I’M SCARED. WHY DID I AGREE TO MY PUBLISHER DOING THIS?

I am not scared. I am not scared. It’s going to be fine. The one really good thing about it all is that it should at least ensure that Archie and Pye get a few more reader reviews than any of my last three books, and of course, we all know that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. At the time of writing, the cover has got four thumbs up and no thumbs down, so at least that bit of it is looking promising. But as for the stuff inside, time alone will tell.

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Archie and Pye Get Covered

Obviously – I mean OBVIOUSLY – you should never judge a book by its cover, but I’m prepared to make an exception here. You are quite welcome – no, you’re positively ENCOURAGED – to judge THE TRUTH ABOUT ARCHIE AND PYE by its cover, because the cover (by Mark Swan, aka Kid Ethic) is ABSOLUTELY BLOODY AMAZING.

Isn’t it?

And according to the countdown timer on Vavasorology.com, we only have 24 days to go until publication! Exciting times. Archie and Pye are on their way…

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Today’s Word is… VAVASOROLOGY (n)

Here we go, then. Watch and wonder.

There’s a website too.

It’s coming, folks. It’s coming.

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Flying by the Seat of My Pants

I am in the middle of writing my third novel, the sequel to THE TRUTH ABOUT ARCHIE AND PYE. OK, let’s be honest, I’m about a third of the way into it, and – after a MASSIVE wobble at the start of this week – I think it’s going pretty well. However – and this may surprise you who aren’t in the habit of writing novels (and maybe some of you who are in the habit of writing novels) – there are still vast swathes of the narrative still to come that I know nothing at all about. Indeed, there are several important things that have already happened that I don’t have an explanation for yet. I have a rough plan for the BIG SPECTACULAR SET PIECE somewhere towards the end, but apart from that, the only way I’m going to find out what happens in the rest of it is by writing it.

This may surprise you. It certainly surprises me.

There are two types of writers in the world: plotters and pantsers (autocorrect turns the latter into panthers, incidentally, which is a LOT sexier). It turns out I am a pantser. I used to think this made me some kind of hopeless amateur, who didn’t know how to do things properly. I used to hate envy those people who used to post pictures of their work-in-progress laid out as complex multi-coloured post-it note mosaics. Every time I saw one, I felt more and more inadequate.

So when I did my CW MA at Bath Spa, I fully expected to be educated as to the PROPER way of plotting, and it was a big surprise when my manuscript tutor, the unbelievably wise Celia Brayfield, gave me permission to plan my novel in whatever way I felt most comfortable with. So pantsing it is.

Apart from the fact that I’m too lazy to plot (which is true), why does pantsing work for me? Here are a few reasons.

It suits my style. When I write, things tend to emerge in the weird interface between the brain and the screen. My unconscious is a peculiar place and my writing works best when it’s allowed to draw on that. Particularly when it’s backed into a corner (I’ve written about this before – in particular with reference to the opening sequence of “Back to the Future” and my theory as to the genesis of “The Full Monty” – link down, but maybe I’ll re-host it here some time).
It allows for possibilities to emerge from the detail of the writing and not just the overview. Odd things emerge during the writing process – things that it seems right for a character to say, for example – and they can steer the plot in a hitherto unforeseen direction.
If I’m not sure where the story’s going, sure as hell my readers won’t, which makes for a more exciting and surprising read.
It saves on post-it notes.

But I have to say it’s scary. Particularly if your current deadline is just under three months away. The great thing about deadlines, however, is that they brook no alternative. I’m stuck with whatever I’ve done up to now and I’ve got to make it work. I think it’s going to, though.

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Back for a Quick Flash

Yeah, well. I admit it. I’m a two-timing bastard. I wrote this book of short stories and flash, called DIP FLASH. And people liked it, you know. Here, for example, is Maryom from Our Book Reviews Online:

All in all, an interesting set of stories, thought-provoking, funny, and/or scary; good, I’d suggest for watchers of ‘Black Mirror’.

And here’s Scott Pack:

Just finished reading Dip Flash by Jonathan Pinnock, a book I have, appropriately enough, been dipping into over the past few weeks.

It is a collection of stories sequenced so there is one short story, then a piece of flash fiction, short story, flash, and so on.

Full of gems. pic.twitter.com/klgyaWSsEG

— Scott Pack (@meandmybigmouth) June 30, 2018

However, I have to admit that most of my time at the moment is devoted to my novel The Truth About Archie and Pye (COMING OUT IN OCTOBER! LOOK! IT’S ON AMAZON ALREADY!). Or rather, my time is devoted to the still-as-yet-untitled sequel, which I am deep in the middle of writing. Incidentally, if you ever want to wrote a novel very quickly, get yourself a contractual deadline – I can thoroughly recommend it. It’s terrifying, but it doesn’t half focus the mind.

Anyway, I had a chance to spend a bit of quality time back in the short story world on Saturday evening, when I was invited to do a reading from the excellent FUNNY BONE anthology at the Bristol Flash Fiction Festival. I read my story “Embarrassing Dad” and it seemed to go down quite well. It was also lovely to bump into so many friends I hadn’t seen for ages, as well as meeting a few people I know online but have never actually met in real life. Basically, anyone who was anyone in flash was there, and it looked as if everyone was having a wonderful time. The food was awesome, too.

(At this point I was intending to post a link to my recording of my reading, if it weren’t for the fact that I completely forgot to record it. Ho hum.)

If you’d like a signed copy of DIP FLASH, I still have some available here, in the shop. Grab one now so you can tell everyone you knew all about me before The Truth About Archie and Pye became a massive worldwide publishing sensation.

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Vanity and Publishing

Well. You may have noticed that this place has been a little quiet of late. This isn’t because I haven’t got anything to write about – far from it, because things are really quite exciting at the moment. But the problem is that the fact that things are really quite exciting at the moment is getting in the way of things like blogging. Or indeed vlogging – you may have noticed that The Lit Fart is also a bit quiet right now.

For one thing, I have been busy finalising the manuscript of The Truth About Archie and Pye (did you see the link there, BTW?). I’ve also been busy trying to get the as-yet-unnamed sequel off the ground, too (and just in case my editor is reading this, YES, IT’S ALL GOING FINE, ABBIE, NO NEED TO WORRY WHATSOEVER, REALLY IT’S ALL GOING SWIMMINGLY). And, of course, I still have a day job to attend to from time to time.

So this is just a very quick post to introduce my new author photo. Now this may seem massively vain, but for someone like me who has always absolutely hated the way they looked (yes, blokes do have this problem, even though we don’t like to admit to it), it’s an amazing thing for once to see a picture that actually doesn’t look too bad. I’m dead chuffed with it.

(And if you’re in the Weston-super-Mare area, I can thoroughly recommend CA Photography, who are stupidly inexpensive, quick and efficient.)

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Unconventional Marketing

This week I did a brief presentation on Unconventional Marketing at the Bristol branch of the Society of Authors, and I thought I’d share the gist of it with you. I should begin with a disclaimer that I am not an expert in this area. I have, however, had some interesting experiences that may be helpful to others.

I began with an example of marketing that was (a) entirely accidental, (b) poorly conceived, (c) oddly successful and (d) completely unrepeatable.

I am, of course, referring to the Day I Went Viral. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the story (see here and here for more details). In summary, I was sitting in the Costa café in Weston-super-Mare General Hospital, waiting for my eyes to readjust to normal following an appointment with the ophthalmologist and I thought I’d use my phone to tweet about a book I’d just finished reading.

This was the tweet:

Best final line of any book I’ve read for a while. pic.twitter.com/xtbKLxHrxY

— Jonathan Pinnock (@jonpinnock) March 12, 2018

Note that there are no hashtags nor even a single mention of which book I was referring to. I did correct the latter several times later on in the gruesomely long discussion that followed, and that presumably was what helped in selling over 100 additional copies of the ebook and maybe 15-20 extra paperbacks. Not a bad result, frankly. If only I could achieve something like that for one of my own books.

Anyway, the point is, a lot of marketing is (I suspect) like this: largely accidental. However, as with all these things, it’s possible to tilt the odds in your favour by adopting a few key strategies.

Let’s start off with the conventional stuff – the stuff that every author should be doing as an absolute minimum. You probably won’t be able to do the heavy lifting – things like getting your book into Waterstones and so on – but there’s plenty of low-level stuff you can do. And you need to get involved with this kind of thing. You really do. Because either:

you’re doing it all yourself, or
your small publisher hasn’t got the budget, or
your big publisher doesn’t want to commit the budget.

And anyway, it’s fun. Trust me on this. So here goes.

You really should have your own website, preferably hosted independently (i.e. not on WordPress.com, for example). Ideally, it should incorporate a blog as well, if you have the stamina to keep on going. See here for more stuff on blogging.
You should have your own Facebook author page, even if you’re not on Facebook personally (although that can be a useful way of finding readers too).
You should be active on Twitter – although you need to earn the right to tweet about how wonderful your books are by tweeting interesting other stuff as well. If all I see in your Twitter timeline are endless tweets urging me to buy your book, chances are I won’t follow you back.
You should have a mailing list – but be careful and make sure you’re GDPR compliant. This is an example of a GDPR-compliant landing page, by the way. Whilst you’re taking a look, please do feel free to subscribe. Also note the use of a free gift to lure the punters in. (By the way, free ebooks are ridiculously easy to produce if you have a Mac – and maybe if you have Windows, too. Mac Pages can generate ePub output, which can then be fed into the free Calibre program to turn it into mobi format suitable for Kindle.)
Most importantly of all, make sure all of these connect up. Set up your blog so it autoposts links to Facebook and Twitter. Include links to your website in your mailshots.

Now for some less conventional things.

You have business cards, right? (I have loads, but I usually forget to take them with me when I go out. This is not good practice.) Do they have QR codes on them? This is a really easy way of driving someone new to your website, and there are plenty of places online that off free QR code generation.

Make a trailer. Back in late 2009, I had a problem. I was a little way into writing a book called Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens (although in those days it was actually called Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens). But I was making slow progress, mainly because the appearance of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies earlier on that year had seemed to put the kibosh on the whole project. I didn’t want to appear to be jumping on a bandwagon, after all, and in any case, the bandwagon would already be rumbling out of town by the time I’d finished. But I still wanted to write the book. So I started serialising it on the internet in the hope that (a) it would acquire an audience and (b) the existence of that audience might somehow force me to keep on working on it.

But how could I market my serialisation? Obviously I promoted it wherever I could, on social media and various writing forums where I lurked, but I needed more traction. I needed something that fans could share with their friends. So I decided to make a trailer. My initial idea was to do one of ones that repurpose the bunker scene from Downfall – I think the script was going to be something to do with setting up a Jane Austen theme park in Berlin – but the whole Downfall thing was getting a bit tired (and in any case my idea was pretty weak). So my next plan was to find a foreign language version of the BBC Pride and Prejudice on YouTube (there had to be one somewhere) and add my own misleading subtitles to that. However, I couldn’t find one at all.

This called for radical action.

I decided to create my own foreign language version of Pride and Prejudice. I grabbed a suitable scene from YouTube, and imported it into iMovie. I wiped the soundtrack, then added my own cod French and English subtitles. This was the result:

Now if the truth were told, it’s a bit stilted, but it was a start.

I had another go. This time, I also intercut a couple of scenes from Creature from the Black Lagoon (and I know someone’s going to say something about copyright violations at this point, and my response is (a) I think it’s sort of covered by ‘fair use’ – although I Am Not A Lawyer and (b) I can always take it down if anyone asks my to). I also decided to put it into black and white to match the Creature segments, and I think it works rather well like that. The dialogue is a bit slicker this time, too:

I guess the point here is try to be original. Use your limitations as a virtue.

Other mad stuff. What else can you do? When Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens got picked up for publication, there was a gap of about a year before it got published. What could I do to keep the momentum going? Well, I could create a few special episodes. (I’m currently working on something similar as a teaser for my next book, The Truth About Archie and Pye, by the way.) These can be fun and possibly a collector’s item. Or possibly not. I was inspired to do this kind of thing by the work of Steven Hall, whose extraordinary Raw Shark Texts has all sorts of odd extras dotted around the place, in special editions and on the internet. Well worth checking out.

The other thing I did was create Wickhampedia. My original idea here was to create a Wiki that would explain some of the references in Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens that some people might not get (to be honest, if there’s anyone out there who gets every single one of them, I’ll be very surprised indeed). For example, an American reader might not appreciate the significance of Bradford & Bingley, or indeed Northern Rock. So I downloaded the free WikiMedia software and began to set up my own Wiki. But it wasn’t long before I realised that there was MUCH more fun to be had here, and Wickhampedia was born, taking the project off in a completely different direction. The great thing about this was that I could add as much to it as a liked, and every new entry was something new to be shared. And like the videos, it didn’t necessarily add anything to the story of Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens, but it enhanced the experience.

As it happens, there’s a website of some significance in The Truth About Archie and Pye, and I’ll intending to do some interesting things with that over the next few months. All I’ll do now is tap my nose and whisper ‘Keep your eye on www.vavasorology.com.’

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First Review for DIP FLASH – and Welcome to the Lit Fart

There is of course only one thing worse than being talked about and that’s not being talked about, and this applies to writers as much as anyone else. So I was very pleased to find out this morning that Judy Darley had posted the first ever review of DIP FLASH on her Skylight Rain blog. I was even more pleased to find out that she seems to have really enjoyed it. Take a look here and see what you think.

In other news, I’ve decided to do a bit more about reviewing myself, my setting up a Booktube channel. I’ve been dithering about whether or not to do this for some time now – a couple of years, if the truth were to be told, but I’ve finally taken the plunge.

I’ve had a few comments to the effect that it looks as if I’m reading a script here, to which I can only respond that yes, I am. I wanted to make sure I said all the things I meant to say in the introductory video, but I promise I’ll be a bit more spontaneous when I actually get round to reviewing stuff. Which will be soon, I promise.

Oh yes, it’s got a silly name. But then you expected something like that, didn’t you?

Here it is, anyway:

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