Steven Scaffardi's Blog, page 6

#LadLitSunday: Lad Lit authors support the occupiers of Carnegie Library & Rob Radcliffe tops the charts

Lad lit superstars Nick Hornby and David Nicholls have thrown their support behind the occupiers of Carnegie Library by signing an open letter of support to condemn the proposed changes to the Lambeth library service.

Forty protestors have occupied the building in Herne Hill, London, since March 31 to campaign against council plans to close the library and transform it into a healthy living centre. More than 220 writers signed the letter within 24 hours of being asked to do so.

Good news this week for lad lit author Rob Radcliffe as he celebrated his novel Meat Market going straight to number one in the free download charts on Amazon in the humour category. Radcliffe was full of thanks on Twitter for the readers who shot him to the top of the charts.

I am delighted to announce that the Lad Lit Blog Tour has announced another eight dates taking the grand total to 39. Starting at Boon's Book Case on April 19, the tour will the travel all across the UK taking in 26 stops, with eight in the US, two in The Netherlands and two more in Australia. You can follow the tour on Twitter at the #LadLitBlogTour hashtag.

Quick bits
 Author Nick Spalding will be at the London Book Fair (April 12-14) this week at Olympia, London on Thursday morning. Go see him at the Amazon KDP standI will be interviewing Ben Hatch (author of The P45 Diaries) in the next week or two as part of my Author Interview seriesTweet of the week
Great banter from Danny Wallace this week as always...

So disappointed in El Chapo. How does he keep getting wound up in these things??! pic.twitter.com/BWmPzIhZKO— Danny Wallace (@dannywallace) April 7, 2016

UK Garage Horse Racing might just be the most brilliant thing I've ever seen!

Any group of lads involved in a WhatsApp group know that you are going to be guaranteed three things: discussions about the next boys night out, footy banter on a weekend, and the links to some pretty funny shit on the internet.

The latter happened to me a couple of days ago when one of my mates introduced me to UK Garage Horse Racing by comedians Ross & Josh - hosts of The Not So Late Show.

This my friends, is genius...


I think it might just be worth keeping an eye out for these two tallywhackers from Leeds...

#LadLitSunday: Matt Dunn donates the dedication in his next book to charity

Another week, another #LadLitSunday and this week there is no other place to start other than the awesome initiative Matt Dunn has set-up to raise money for the charity Streetwise.

The author of Home and The Ex-Boyfriend's Handbook will dedicate his next novel to one lucky winner to donates just £2 on his JustGiving page to help the homeless. Matt has been busy promoting the unique opportunity this week on Twitter by Tweeting: "Win a WHOLE BOOK DEDICATED TO YOU (or someone you love/fancy/want to embarrass) for just £2." The dedication will appear in every single copy sold, not just the copy the winner receives.

It's a brilliant idea and I have already made my donation - you can make your donation here.

Elsewhere, Esquire magazine published the article 50 Novels All Men Should Read. Some of the books included in the list: The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and Hearts In Atlantis by Stephen King. Sam Parker who wrote the article writes: "Forget coming-of-age fiction or impenetrable 'classics' – these are the books all grown men should be ticking off. Why? Because they're as entertaining as they are wise."

In other news, I interviewed lad lit author Ben Adams this week and he revealed he was busy working on his third book with the working title Trouble in the Staffroom. You can read the full interview here.

Quick bits
I announced this week that my Lad Lit Blog Tour will start on April 19 and run until May 19. Follow the hashtag #LadLitBlogTour for more announcementsThe Real Men, Real Style website put together their 10 Books All Men Should Own list. You can see it here.Tweet of the week
Great quote picked out from author Jon Rance. It's got to be up there with Rod Stewart's "I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger." :) 

"The tragedy of life isn't that we get older, it's that we forget how to be young." #quoteoftheday— Jon Rance (@JRance75) March 28, 2016

Book Giveaway! Download The Drought eBook at Amazon for free from April 28 - May 2

To celebrate the upcoming Lad Lit Blog Tour I am delighted to announce that I will be offering Sex, Love & Dating Disasters: The Drought for free for five days straight in the build-up to the Bank Holiday on May 2.

You will be able to download the Kindle version of the lad lit comedy novel between April 28 and May 2. If you do download the book, please Tweet about it using the #LadLitBlogTour hashtag and then leave a review at Amazon so I know what you think of it.

But I don't have a Kindle
Not a problem! You can download the Kindle app to your smartphone or tablet absolutely free and then take advantage of this fantastic giveaway! Simply click one of the links below to get started.


And finally all you have to do is to get yourself over to Amazon on April 28 and download the eBook. And if you can't wait that long then you can always treat yourself to a copy for just 99p! I'm almost giving it away right now!


So now you have no excuses! Make sure you download The Drought during the #LadLitBlogTour, leave a review at Amazon and keep checking back for more lad lit news!

Author Interview: Ben Adams

Hi Ben, thanks for taking the time out to chat to me today. I'm guessing you must be very busy promoting your new book Six Lies which came out at the end of last year. Tell me a bit about that book and how it has been doing so far.
Steve, it’s a pleasure to be invited on to your blog. Yes, the last few months have been busy. Six Lies came out in December, the idea being that it could fill a stocking far more effectively than your average socks, ties and cheap aftershave. The book did reach No.1 in some obscure category on Amazon for a while (books written on a Tuesday by a bloke called Ben), but the absolute top of the charts was dominated by a bunch of barely literate sportspeople with bugger all to say.

The story is in some ways classic lad lit. There’s a band stuck in the 1980s, a wife running off with a librarian and a fair bit of drunken banter. But there’s more. Our protagonist, Dave Fazackerley, discovers the day after her funeral that his mother wasn’t his mother after all. Six Lies follows Dave as he tries to make sense of his life. Will he discover the truth about his mother? Will he ever discover that there’s life beyond U2? More importantly, will he win his wife back from the clutches of the book dork?

Six Lies is your second novel following Six Months to Get a Life about a man coming to terms with the break-up of his marriage. You have openly talked about your own divorce inspiring you to write a novel so how much of your own experiences translates on to the pages of your book?
I remember staring into my fridge one lunchtime. It was Good Friday. I was in a pretty low place. My kids were off having fun with my ex, my house was oppressively quiet and all my mates were with their own perfect families. Should I open a can of lager and drift blissfully into a drunken stupor? It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time.

Somehow I found the will to kick myself up the arse, to stop feeling sorry for myself. It was time to get a grip. In a moment of inspiration, I decided to write Six Months to Get a Life.

Although it was a story about a man coming to terms with his divorce, it was never my story. I couldn’t write about my life. Aside from the fact that no one in their right mind would want to read my story, I had no right to write about my kids or my ex. So instead I took great pleasure in inventing a new ex, in inventing more interesting mates and, without giving much away, inventing a new love interest. Six Months to Get a Life is purely a work of fiction but it is certainly true to say that the emotions that Graham Hope, the divorced dad, feels are those that I felt at one time or another whilst going through my own crap time.

You also took part in a BBC documentary which aired in January called The Age of Loneliness. What made you decide to take part and how difficult was it to make the decision to speak in front of the cameras?
The documentary-makers approached me on the back of a blog I published bemoaning the havoc that my marriage break-up had reaped on my social life. ‘Will you speak openly on camera about your loneliness?’ The producer asked me. ‘No.’ I replied, and a year later, there I was, pouring my heart out on BBC1.


To this day I don’t really know why I agreed to take part in the project. Being filmed playing football with my boys, barbecuing sausages, writing my next book and then sitting on the BBC Breakfast sofa talking about the film were certainly a break from the routine. Being on the telly helped my book sales too, but I like to think that the reason I said yes was that I wanted other people who are going through what I went through to know that they aren’t the only ones feeling the way they do.

You've decided to tackle a genre of books dominated by female writers. How difficult is it for a lad lit author to make an impact when the audience you are going for are already committed to chick lit?
Most of my readers are women. I pitched Six Months to Get a Life to a few chick lit websites when it first came out. They gave the book great reviews but that doesn’t mean I am yet rivaling Sophie Kinsella and Helen Fielding for top spot in the bestsellers list. I have got a fair way to go before I can really say that I’ve made an impact.

In your opinion, what are the main differences between lad lit and chick lit?
Beer as opposed to wine? Penis size as opposed to weight loss? Moody strops rather than neurotic hang-ups? And maybe more lust, less love.

Seriously, I’m not sure there is a clear difference. Lad lit doesn’t always follow the same formula, and neither does chick lit. I might try and write a book with a neurotic, weight-conscious, wine-swilling protagonist one day.

Who are your favourite authors/books and why?
I love anyone who writes witty character-based stories. Without wishing to be clichéd, I have been a big Nick Hornby fan for more than twenty years. He writes about people you wouldn’t be surprised if you met down your local. Lisa Jewell’s ‘Ralph’s Party’ is also a story that has stuck in my mind. But I probably have to confess that Adrian Mole, or should I say Sue Townsend, probably convinced me that I wanted to write. Adrian and I are the same age. Obviously Adrian’s penis is shorter than mine, but other than that, the two of us had a lot in common. I started writing a diary once I had read his, and the rest, as they say, is history…

You are doing lots of self-promotion. What is the best advice you can give to an indie author from what you have learned promoting your first two books?
Don’t give your money to the multitude of websites that claim to have millions of readers clamoring to hear about your books. Instead, get active on social media. Blog more often than I do, tweet, be nice to other authors and doors will open for you.

From the two books you have written, which character is your favourite and why?
All of my characters have their personality faults but I love each and every one of them. They have all occupied a place in my heart for months at a time. If I had to pick a few out, I would say that I enjoyed writing Dave’s dad’s dialogue in ‘Six Lies’. He’s a cantankerous old sod. And Graham Hope’s children gave me some fun in ‘Six Months to Get a Life’. Children say things that adults might think but wouldn’t dream of saying.

I read one of your blog posts where you said writing is better than sex. Care to explain?!
No, my girlfriend has only just started talking to me again. If you really want to hear the argument, you can have a look here.

And finally, what can we expect next from Ben Adams?
More of the same I’m afraid. My third book, provisionally called ‘Trouble in the Staffroom’, is clogging up my laptop at the moment. I am thoroughly enjoying writing it. Hopefully it will be out later this year.

Great stuff, thanks Ben! Good luck with the new book.

The Lad Lit Blog to go on tour!

I am delighted to announce that next month I will be taking the Lad Lit Blog on tour! Following my recent guest posts on By The Letter Book Reviews and Linda's Book Bag, I have decided to spread the word about lad lit as part of my promo drive for the release of The Flood.

This will be my first ever Blog Tour and starting on April 19 I will (hopefully) be visiting 30 different book blogs around the world before finishing with a round-up back here at The Lad Lit Blog on May 19 - the same day The Flood is published in paperback on Amazon.

So far I have 10 confirmed blogs including Boon's Book Case, Bookaholic Confessions, Linda's Book Bag, Chick Lit Goddess, Rachel's Random Reads, Chick Lit Plus, 23 Review Street, Chick Lit Central, By The Letter Book Reviews and lad lit author Chris Hill's blog. I am hoping to confirm the full schedule within the next week so watch this space!

Press Release London, UK (28th March 2016)
Author Steven Scaffardi is on a mission to raise awareness of the lad lit genre by embarking on a one-month blog tour.

Starting on April 19, Steven is going to combine his efforts of promoting his second comedy novel Sex, Love & Dating Disasters: The Flood alongside a campaign to get more people reading lad lit.

“After publishing my first novel, The Drought , I soon realised that lad lit was not very well known, despite the success of authors like Nick Hornby,” Steven explained. “So with my second novel I wanted to not only promote my book, but the genre as a whole.”

Steven – who started the #LadLitSunday hashtag recently to get more people on social media talking about lad lit – is hoping to sign up 30 blogs to the tour, with the final blog post coming on May 19 on his own Lad Lit Blog to round-up his experience and the results of the tour. You can follow the journey on Twitter using the #LadLitBlogTour hashtag.

“It’s an ambitious number,” Steven said, “but with a combination of author interviews, book reviews, guest blogs, character Q&A’s and perhaps the odd surprise or two, I’m hopeful it can be done! I’ll also be offering a free download of my first novel The Drought on Amazon on April 28-29 to give readers a taste of lad lit if they have not read it before.”

The Flood will be available as an eBook for 99p from Amazon on April 30 with the paperback version published on May 19 for £8.99. 

The Lad Lit Blog Tour FAQ

What is lad lit? 
Lad lit is best known as the male equivalent of chick-lit, primarily written by men exploring relationships, emotions and day-to-day life experiences from the perspective of a male protagonist. Often told with humour, charm and wit, lad lit leaves many readers laughing out loud at the scenarios men get into.

Who writes lad lit? 
There are a cluster of best-selling authors in the UK writing lad lit including Mike Gayle, Danny Wallace, Nick Spalding, Matt Dunn, Tony Parsons, Jon Rance and the undisputed king of lad lit – Nick Hornby. A Bafta winner and two-time Oscar nominee no less!

So why haven’t I heard of it before? 
Lad lit has been living in the shadow of it’s older and much more successful sibling, chick lit, for quite some time now. Plus there is a common perception that women read more than men, so sometimes it is not obvious where the fan base would come from.

Is lad lit just for men then? 
No, not at all. It’s certainly a genre that men can relate to with great hilarity, but at the same time it offers an alternative to chick lit and opens up the door to a man’s mind leaving women to worry if that’s what men really think with a nervous laugh!

For more definitions on lad lit, check out these links:

Talking Lad Lit (Linda's Book Bag)
Lad Lit Explained (By The Letter Book Reviews)
Chick Lit For Men (The Lad Lit Blog)

If you are interested in taking part in The Lad Lit Blog Tour, please email Steven Scaffardi at steven.scaffardi@gmail.com.

#LadLitSunday: Lad Lit explained, Chris Hill interview, and Bourbon Kid rejection letters!

Happy Easter everyone! It's been a fairly quiet week on the Lad Lit news front. From a personal point of view it's been a really busy week. At the start of the week I was invited to write a guest post on By The Letter Book Reviews about lad lit.

And then earlier on today I was talking lad lit on Linda's Book Bag. Click on either of the links to read the full articles or check out this blog post.

Lad lit stalwart Mike Gayle took to the airwaves on Friday night on Brum Radio alongside book obsessive Blake Woodham. Their book for March is the bestseller A The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett - a story about small changes making big differences for two people.

I interviewed Chris Hill yesterday, author of The Pick-Up Artist and asked him about his story of A Lad Lit Rom Com about Dating in the Digital Age. You can see the full interview here.

And I started with a bit of news about myself and I'll finish with a little bit more news (like I said, it's been a slow week in the lad lit world...). I was delighted and extremely grateful to book blog My Book File for reviewing both The Drought and The Flood.

Quick Bits
Nick Spalding has a special Easter offer for his novella Buzzing Easter Bunnies - offering the laugh out loud comedy for just 99p this weekend.Next week I am interviewing Ben Adams, author of Six Lies and Six Months To Get A Life.Tweet of the Week

Following on from JK Rowling publishing some of her rejection letters this week, the anonymous author of the best selling Bourbon Kid series posted this amazing rejection letter. Should these rejection letters give indie authors hope or make us seriously worry about the judgement of some publishers and agents?!

Seeing as how JK Rowling is sharing her rejection letters, here is my favourite rejection of The Book With No Name - pic.twitter.com/LUQqPbQdaL— Bourbon Kid (@BourbonKid) March 25, 2016

Lad Lit explained on Linda's Book Bag and By The Letter Book Reviews

This week I was delighted to be able to guest blog on two wonderful sites I was introduced to via the Facebook group Book Connectors.

I kicked the week off on By The Letter Book Reviews, attempting to explain to Sarah Hardy why some people might be put off by the genre. However, I think I did a good job of debating the merits of lad lit. Here is a snippet:

If lad lit was a Hollywood movie genre, surely it would be a comedic triumph. Just take a look at some of the recent loveable rogues who fit that lad lit description: Stifler from American Pie, Phil from The Hangover, Seth from Superbad, Jay from The Inbetweeners. They all arguably steal the show in those respected films. They are not characters we love to hate, they are quite simply characters we love.

And then it was off to Linda's Book Bag to talk lad lit with Linda Hill. Once again I was set the challenge to paint lad lit in a good light and to explain why it deserved to sit alongside its older sibling, chick lit. A quick sample:

Even Wikipedia, that bastion of internet information, seems to be so upset that if you type ‘lad lit’ into their search box, it can’t even bring itself to refer to it by its rightful name in the first line of its description of the genre.

A huge thank to both Sarah and Linda for letting me blog on their sites. Make sure you click on both links to check out the blog posts and continue to support #LadLitSunday to fight the cause for great lad lit!

Author Interview: Chris Hill

Hey Chris, welcome to the Lad Lit Blog. So tell me what's going on in your world right now?
Hi Steve, many thanks for inviting me along today. It’s a real pleasure. What I’m up to is the usual double life authors have of writing on the one side and the real world on the other. So I’ve got my day job, working as communications officer for the children’s charity WellChild, my family - teenagers, dog, the whole works. Then on the writing side I’m still promoting The Pick-Up Artist which has been out for about 12 months now with Magic Oxygen Publishing, plus I’ve started on another book.

You published The Pick-Up Artistlast year. Tell me a bit about that book and how it has been received so far?
It’s essentially a romantic comedy, it’s about a shy young man’s attempts to find love, or sex at least, with the help of a peculiar online community called the Pick-Up Artists who claim to be able to use psychological techniques to attract women. It’s not giving much away to say it doesn’t go as smoothly for him as he might have hoped. But it’s also about the women he meets who are my favourite characters in the book I would say, they’re rude and funny and don’t take any prisoners. I’d say it’s done maybe a bit better in terms of sales than my last book which was literary fiction, but they are both with smaller publishers and that kind of puts a cap on what they are likely to sell as you don’t have the marketing machine and distribution network that the big publishing houses do. They’ve done okay though, I’m very grateful they are out at all and that I found publishers who wanted them.

It is described as 'A lad lit romcom about dating in the digital age.' Have you got any experience of dating in the digital age and how much of this novel was based on true life experiences?
No experience personally, I’ve been happily married for about a thousand years. Luckily, the beauty with fiction is that you get to make things up, or use stuff you have observed in others, I spent lots of years as a journalist which you could describe as being a professional observer, so I’m quite good at people watching. The lad lit description came from my publishers. They decided that was the way to market the book and I deferred to them on the subject as it’s their area. I was a little uneasy about it at first - the majority of my readers are women, both for my first book and for this one. I didn’t want to do anything to put them off or make them think this book wasn’t for them. Luckily I needn’t have worried, most of the readers who have contacted me about PUA are women and most of the reviews have been from women, and thankfully they seem to like it.

What is the best pick-up line you have ever used? And more importantly, what is the worst?!
I didn’t used to use pick up lines - maybe that’s where I was going wrong. The PUA people in my book are a real movement who believe you can attract women through supposed psychological techniques. A lot of their ideas sound barking mad, others sound like they have a grain of truth in them, many of them are described in the book. Do they work? I don’t know, I’ve not tried them. I’m uneasy about the whole idea really as it sounds like a recipe for using people and trying to bend them to your will. I suppose if The Pick-Up Artist has a moral position then it’s that, though it is basically a comedy.

Do you think the lad lit genre gets the praise it deserves?
If I’m honest, until the publisher told me I’d written a lad-lit novel I didn’t know I had done, or really that it was a genre. What I do believe is that the best writers, and the best books, in any given genre transcend that genre and are just appreciated as great writing.

Who is your favourite lad lit author/book and why?
I’m no expert on the genre I’m afraid. What I did with this book was try to pitch it around the area inhabited by say Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, or The Rachel Papers, which was Martin Amis’s first book. I think maybe it has a little taste of Nick Hornby, that kind of thing. But I was also influenced by the more romantic literary fiction books out there such as Love in the Time of Cholera and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. I read a lot and it all gets into the mix - I find it easier to see what has influenced me with a book when I have finished it.

You are a winner of the Bridport Prize. What can you tell me about that award?
It was years ago I won it but it still follows me around, in a good way. It’s one of the bigger short story prizes in the UK and is considered reasonably prestigious. On the one hand, winning something like that doesn’t mean very much to you as a writer, it’s not like I had agents and publishers banging my door down because of it, but on the other hand it did give me a boost of confidence and made me think I was perhaps on the right track, which was great. It’s also something which pops back up again from time to time, publishers like sticking it on blurbs and websites, and I even get the odd gig off the back of it. I’ll be at Evesham Festival of Words on July 1st giving a talk on ’Winning the Bridport Prize’ (and hopefully flogging some books) so, be there or be unfashionable.

Your first book, Song of the Sea God, is not exactly what you would call lad lit. What made you make such a jump from one genre to the other?
I basically write the books I feel compelled to write and then try to find a publisher who loves them enough to put them out. So my first book is nothing much like my second and the one I’m working on now will be different again. Wiser authors than me will say I’m doing it all wrong and that I should write in the same style every time to build up a readership, but I think what the hell? I’d rather write what I’m inspired to write and see how that goes - that’s the fun of it surely. There’s not much money in this so I might as well enjoy it. Song of the Sea God, published by Skylight Press, is a literary novel set on a small island of the coast of England where a strange figure washes up and tries to convince the local people he is a god. It’s like a kind of creepy fairytale. Some people really seemed to like it - they wrote all kinds of essays about various aspects of it, what it secretly meant and so on. PUA is a lot more straightforward but I like to think it’s just as worthwhile in its own way.

What advice would you give to an author just starting out?
Practice - nobody gets good at this straight out of the box. It’s a funny thing that people wouldn’t expect to pick up a guitar and know how to play it without having learned, or paint a great picture the first time they pick up a brush. But, perhaps because everyone can write there’s this belief that everyone is automatically a writer. Put in the work and eventually you will get good.

And finally, what is next in the pipeline for Chris Hill. Any more lad lit?
My next book will be different from either of the others but I’m not quite sure yet what it will be. It takes me two years to write a book, soup to nuts, a year for a first draft and another for rewrites, at the moment I’m right at the start of that process which is quite an exciting place to be but also quite daunting, who knows where I will end up?

Thanks Chris and good luck with that third book!

Chris Hill is an author from Gloucester in the UK whose new novel The Pick-Up Artist is published by Magic Oxygen Publishing. You can find it on Amazon here.

Chris is a social media addict with 25,000 followers on Twitter @ChilledCh he is on Facebook here, and has a popular blog where he talks about reading, writing and more at http://www.chrishillauthor.co.uk/.

That awkward moment a Newcastle fan ruined Aleksandar Mitrović's goal celebration!

Your team is staring possible relegation in the face. You are losing to your bitter rivals in the race for the drop. But then you score with only eight minutes left on the clock. What do you do? What do you do?

Well if you are this Newcastle fan, you run onto the pitch and completely ruin Aleksandar Mitrović's special moment as he celebrates being the Toon hero by grabbing a vital late goal in the Tyne-Wear Derby. Howay the lads!