Christopher Shevlin's Blog, page 2
July 27, 2013
How’s the book doing, Chris?
Sort of all right, thank you. Well, I’ll let you make your own mind up:
3,327 sales (by 10 November 2013)
#1 in Political Humour (UK)
#21 in Humorous Fiction (UK)
#14 in Kindle Political Humor (US)
(those are its highest rankings on Amazon)
UK – 4.2 stars (out of 5) from 46 reviews
US – 4.1 stars from 75 reviews
Lately I’ve been finding it a bit more difficult to maintain my habitual pessimism (about the book, at least). Sales started to increase in late April, after I changed my description and categories on Amazon. When it started to tail off in September, I put the Kindle price right down, and that helped a lot. But the most important thing is that I’ve had some really kind Amazon reviews and emails about it – all from generous people going out of their way to make me feel better. I’m very grateful to them.
Here are my press reviews:
“Not many books make me laugh out loud, but The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax is one of them” – Stylist magazine
“You can’t help being tickled” – The Guardian
“Shevlin was rightly picked up by the literary agency that represents the likes of David Nicholls” – Metro magazine
What I’m getting at is that you might like it. If you’d like to buy it, click one of these links:
Kindle ebook | Amazon UK (£1.99)
| Amazon US ($2.99)
Paperback | Amazon UK (£7.99)
| Amazon US ($9.45)
Or you can get it directly from me (£7.99, sent first class the same day) by using this form:
Where’s it going?
UK £7.99 GBPEurope £11.99 GBPOutside Europe £14.99 GBP
Do you have any requests?
If you’d like to review it, I’d be extremely grateful. Here are the links for that:
Anyway, thanks for visiting my website. You might want to scroll down the page for my blog, or look at one of the relatively popular posts on the right. Alternatively, click ‘read the whole thing’ below to see the blurb and some more of the things people have said about the book.
The blurb
When Jonathon Fairfax accidentally helps a murderer bump off Sarah Morecambe, the secretary of a senior politician, he sets off a chain of events that astonishes him. This isn’t surprising – Jonathon is astonished by pretty much everything – but he is particularly shocked when he finds himself caught up in a plot involving a conspiracy that goes to the very heart of government.
Teaming up with a suave private investigator, a glamorous grannie and the probable love of his life, Jonathon must confront his greatest fears – including talking to girls and balaclava-clad killers – and answer some very difficult questions. Who murdered Sarah Morecambe? What is the strange secret that unites the entire British government? And what exactly does it feel like to kiss a real-life woman?
With its naïve, reluctant hero and wry look at modern life, The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax is a must-read for fans of Douglas Adams, John O’Farrell and Jonathan Coe.
Some Amazon reviews
“I rarely find the need to adore anything but I ADORE this book. I’m in imminent risk of losing my job because of my addiction to this novel, surreptitiously sneaking a page here and a chapter there. It is so refreshing to read an original, witty, non-cookie cutter book and I fervently hope Shevlin writes another soon!”
“Really funny and pacy. Some of the writing is reminiscent of P G Wodehouse. Very witty and accurate descriptions of London mixed with complete fantasy.”
“A highly amusing confection of political intrigue, private detectives and geek love. In style mixes a dash of the verbal dexterity and high-power backstabbing of the ‘Thick of It’ with the implausible coincidences and whimsical humour of Douglas Adams ‘Dirk Gently’, set in a recognisable 80s London. A very funny read.”
“The last book that made me laugh out loud was John Irving’s “The Water-Method Man.” So it has been some time since I’ve read anything this delightfully funny. I described it on Facebook as a humor so dry it makes James Bond’s martini seem like Sangria with extra fruit and an umbrella. I loved this book and am truly sorry to see it end. There are brilliantly funny but sharply observant phrases and paragraphs, and heck, whole pages. You have to read this. Trust me, you’ll love it. I look forward to the next book, and will definitely read this again. And again.”
“If you like tight writing, a great pace, smart references and laughing, this book will be on your top five list! Never stops with the layering of self deprecation and hyperbole. Like reading an Arrested Development script!”
“When Christopher Shevlin sat down to write this book, the spirit of Douglas Adams sidled up next to him and said, ‘Here, let me help you.’ This book is probably – definitely – the funniest thing I have read since The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I seriously found myself rethinking whether or not I believed in reincarnation. I don’t mean to say that Shevlin’s work isn’t original – it is. I mean this as the highest compliment I can think of. Christopher Shevlin’s work is brilliant, snort-pop-out-the-nose funny, heart-warming and sweet, and I would need a thesaurus to keep describing it.
The main character, Jonathon Fairfax, brings a whole new meaning to the term ‘reluctant hero.’ I loved him. He is the only character that I have ever read that has about as much of a low self esteem as I do. Seriously. This guy, I loved, and I want more of him in more stories. The writing was superb, even if the story might have lagged in some points.
For some of my friends who are sensitive about such things, I will warn you that he does use some vulgar language (he manages to creatively use just about every bad word at least once, but not to the point of ‘too much’ – though it comes close.) There are a few places where it is a little gross too, so just beware of that if you sensitive to such things. For instance, Shevlin gave me words to describe my next headache: one character’s head hurt so bad that it made him feel like he wanted to ‘vomit (excrement) from his eyes.’ THAT perfectly describes what I feel like when I have a migraine. :-)But, If you love British humor, mystery stories, or just excellent, clever, writing you will love this book.
I absolutely love this book, I love it with great big pink puffy hearts of love. I will be looking forward to Shevlin’s next book.”
Some tweets
“The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax by @chrisshevlin. If you’re on my Xmas list you’re getting a copy. Thank me in the New Year.”
“just finished reading ‘perpetual astonishment…’ Really enjoyed it. To borrow a phrase from young people, I LOLled reading it”
“just finished The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathan Fairfax, compelling, hilarious, clever, insightful, and a bit bonkers”
“Just finished ‘Perpetual Astonishment’……really enjoyed it. Jonathan is a great character. Many thanks!!!”
“just finished TPAOJF. thank you! ritz melee had me snorting on the tube, and neighbours straining to see book’s cover!”
Some comments on the Guardian website
“The extract made me think of Steve Toltz and Jonathan Coe. Perhaps writing after they’ve been out for a pint with Carl Hiaasen. … Good to hear about an author for whom the adjective ‘self-published’ does not seem to be synonymous with ‘self-proclaimed’. And good for you, Guardian; good to see good self-published work being found and reviewed.”
Tattoos
I saw someone on the tube the other day with a penguin tattooed on her arm. It was quite well done, with shading and perspective. In fact, it could easily have been used as an illustration in a school textbook.
Seeing her made me surprised all over again at how popular tattoos are. They’re basically pen-and-ink drawings or little calligraphed mottoes that are embedded in your skin forever. What seems odd to me is that people aren’t generally all that keen on pen-and-ink drawings or little calligraphed mottoes in any other context. If you asked most people to choose a drawing by a competent but mediocre draughtsman and then display it on their living-room wall for the rest of their life, they’d refuse – especially if it was expensive and involved hours of pain. But if, instead of their living room, the drawing goes on their body, they’re really keen. I couldn’t imagine the penguin lady buying a print of the same drawing and putting it up on her wall.
There’s another kind of tattoo that I find much easier to understand. In a pub in Hackney the other day I saw a man in shorts with a huge lighthouse tattooed up each leg. He was in his twenties and the tattoos seemed to me to be a huge pre-emotive practical joke on his future self. He was basically saying, “You’d better continue to find this hilarious for the rest of your life or you’re fucked.” It was a way of making sure he doesn’t turn into the sort of person he dislikes: i.e. someone without huge lighthouses tattooed up both legs.
July 20, 2013
Thank you
I think one reason I don’t blog more is that I’m not sure how much I ought to reveal, especially about my emotions. I’m of that peculiarly British type who feels everything extremely sharply, but believes he shouldn’t: completely ineffective stoics, you might call us. Anyway, I hope it’s all right to admit that there have been a couple of times recently that people have made me cry by sending me gratuitously kind messages about my book. I can’t express how grateful I am for them.
Books are very personal things, whatever kind they are. Mine may not be, say, a sensitive evocation of a mother-daughter relationship set against the backdrop of India’s struggle for independence, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t emotionally important to me. For one thing, I would feel that I didn’t have permission to carry on writing fiction if I thought that no one liked this first book. Sales are some guide to how the book’s being received. But of course people buy the book before they’ve read it, so that’s far from being a perfect indication. And how do you interpret modest-but-better-than-expected sales anyway?
The only way I really find out what people think is when they contact me and tell me, or put up a review on Amazon. I’m still a bit amazed that people do this. Why would they put time into making a stranger feel better, for no possible personal reward? The unlikeliness of it is part of what makes it so moving. And then I’ve spent such a lot of time feeling that I’m being foolish, embarrassing and delusional in persisting with this book, it’s a huge relief to find that some people have received it exactly as I meant it.
Lots of people have diagnoses these days. Mine is recurrent depressive disorder, for which I stopped taking pills about a year ago. I’ve always turned to books for comfort, and when I’ve felt worst the right kind of funny book has often come along and helped me. There’s nothing I’d like more than to write that kind of book. And I’m starting to feel that, for some people at least, I’ve come somewhere close.
I know that there are plenty of people who don’t like the book. There are, for example, plenty of bad reviews on GoodReads, and I suppose they’re likely to be representative of the real spread of opinion, since so many people on GoodReads rate every book they read. On Amazon, I suspect that some people tend to withhold negative opinions because they could hurt someone’s livelihood. But this too seems touchingly kind. And as long as my book works for some people, I can now just about live with others not liking it.
I probably shouldn’t mention the kind people’s names, because of privacy and that sort of thing. I’ll make an exception for Avery Elizabeth Hurt though, partly because she has such a great name, and partly because she put up a review on her website, which also includes some really good articles, especially the one about the word “gifting”. Actually, maybe first names are all right. Thanks Keith, Jeanette and Bridget. And thanks for Geek Boy’s Amazon review in which he kindly but implausibly suggests that I may be the reincarnation of Douglas Adams. If only the maths* even remotely worked out.
(I wrote this a week or so ago and decided not to post it, but then I watched this TED talk and decided I would after all.)
* Or indeed physics.
July 16, 2013
My first interview
About a week ago, I did my first interview. It’s with Lee Strayer, who runs Atomic 27, a company that produces audiobooks, videos, ebooks and real books. Lee used to work in radio, and as well as running the company he’s now narrating audiobooks – the first of which is Prison Planet by Billie Sue Mosiman. Anyway, he’s starting a weekly podcast to promote the whole thing and he asked me to be in the first episode. Lee has one of those pleasing American voices that make you feel that everything’s going to be all right (except when he’s reading Prison Planet). Voices like that have always reminded me of the sound of biting into a crisp apple, which is odd, I know, but there it is.
I’m becoming increasingly like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire (in that I rely on the kindness of strangers – I’m not living with my sister after being forced to flee Auriol, Mississippi for having sex with a student and destroying my family’s plantation). Lee is one of those strangers and he’s really remarkably kind. As well as the interview, he’s offered to help me with an audiobook version of Perpetual Astonishment. I liked him massively and have put him in my mental file of “People I’d like to do a huge favour for, if it ever becomes remotely possible”.
Lee likes to look as though he’s painted on a wall
Lee lives in rural Indiana, which he tells me people in the US call “flyover country” or, more intriguingly, “Buttfuck, Egypt”. If anyone can explain this more satisfactorily than (i.e. even remotely satisfactorily) then please let me know. I’ve heard Americans in films say “Buttfuck” as an alternative to “the Boondocks” when they’re talking about little rustic places. That’s a bit weird when you come to think of it, but it’s the Egypt bit that’s really odd. Do they mean it’s so far away from anywhere that it might as well be in Egypt? If so, why? Surely there are more remote places than Egypt – Sudan, for example, or the Sandwich Islands. I was trying to think of the British equivalent and realised that we don’t really have one. We just have to say “somewhere in the countryside miles away from anywhere”. In this, as in much else, the Americans are both more inexplicable and much more efficient than us.
But I’ve strayed a bit from my original topic, which was the interview. Being interviewed shouldn’t be interesting, because you’re the one who’s meant to be talking, and you already know all the stuff you’re talking about. But it’s actually fascinating. It made me realise that I don’t really know my opinion on anything until I’ve heard myself say it. We talked about the strange way in which I wrote the book, about the ups and downs (and downs and downs and ups) since I self-published it, and about how writing it compares with my corporate work and live comedy. Afterwards we had a long conversation about this new world we find ourselves in, where Amazon and Audible make it possible for writers and narrators to make a living by reaching readers directly, and how that encourages people to work together.
Lee has diligently edited down the excruciatingly long pauses I leave between words, and the result is on Atomic 27′s website now.
June 23, 2013
Kindle giveaway
I should have mentioned it earlier, I suppose, but my book is free on Kindle today and tomorrow (Sunday 23 and Monday 24 June). I advertised it on Bookbub, and they’ve done a very good description of it. That’s probably why nearly 10,000 people have downloaded it in the US now, taking it to number 10 in the free book chart. I suppose fewer people read Bookbub in the UK – 219 people have downloaded it here, which has made it number 223 in the free chart.
I have no idea whether this will have any effect on sales. I suspect it will take them a quite a while to recover in Britain, and I have no idea whether the free copies will lead to any sales in the US – I hope so, since I’d only sold a total of about five copies there beforehand.
It keeps you guessing, this lark.
How’s the book doing, Chris?
Pretty well, thanks. Here are the figures:
1,371 sales
#1 in Political Humour
#32 in Humorous Fiction
(those are its highest positions)
4.6 stars (out of 5) average
16 reviews
In fact, lately I’ve been finding it a bit more difficult to maintain my habitual pessimism. Sales started to increase in late April, and for the last month it’s been selling about a hundred a week. I’ve had nice tweets, emails and messages about it too – all from generous people going out of their way to make me feel better. I’m very grateful to them.
I’ve also had some good press reviews:
“Not many books make me laugh out loud, but The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax is one of them” - Stylist magazine
“You can’t help being tickled” - The Guardian
“Shevlin was rightly picked up by the literary agency that represents the likes of David Nicholls“ - Metro magazine
What I’m getting at is that you might like it. If you’d like to buy it, click one of these links:
Kindle ebook | Amazon UK (£1.99) | Amazon US ($2.99)
Paperback | Amazon UK (£7.99) | Amazon US ($9.45)
Or you can get it directly from me (£7.99, sent first class the same day) by using this form:
Where’s it going?
UK £7.99 GBP
Europe £11.99 GBP
Outside Europe £14.99 GBP
Do you have any requests?
If you’d like to review it, I’d be extremely grateful. Here are the links for that:
Anyway, thanks for visiting my website. You might want to scroll down the page for my blog, or look at one of the relatively popular posts on the right. Alternatively, click ‘read the whole thing’ below to see the blurb and some more of the things people have said about the book.
The blurb
When Jonathon Fairfax accidentally helps a murderer bump off Sarah Morecambe, the secretary of a senior politician, he sets off a chain of events that astonishes him. This isn’t surprising – Jonathon is astonished by pretty much everything – but he is particularly shocked when he finds himself caught up in a plot involving a conspiracy that goes to the very heart of government.
Teaming up with a suave private investigator, a glamorous grannie and the probable love of his life, Jonathon must confront his greatest fears – including talking to girls and balaclava-clad killers – and answer some very difficult questions. Who murdered Sarah Morecambe? What is the strange secret that unites the entire British government? And what exactly does it feel like to kiss a real-life woman?
With its naïve, reluctant hero and wry look at modern life, The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax is a must-read for fans of Douglas Adams, John O’Farrell and Jonathan Coe.
Some Amazon reviews
“I rarely find the need to adore anything but I ADORE this book. I’m in imminent risk of losing my job because of my addiction to this novel, surreptitiously sneaking a page here and a chapter there. It is so refreshing to read an original, witty, non-cookie cutter book and I fervently hope Shevlin writes another soon!”
“Really funny and pacy. Some of the writing is reminiscent of P G Wodehouse. Very witty and accurate descriptions of London mixed with complete fantasy.”
“A highly amusing confection of political intrigue, private detectives and geek love. In style mixes a dash of the verbal dexterity and high-power backstabbing of the ‘Thick of It’ with the implausible coincidences and whimsical humour of Douglas Adams ‘Dirk Gently’, set in a recognisable 80s London. A very funny read.”
“Really enjoyed this one, great characters, funny and quirky. Would recommend this book to everybody. Can’t see how anyone would not find something to like and laugh at.”
Some tweets
“The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax by @chrisshevlin. If you’re on my Xmas list you’re getting a copy. Thank me in the New Year.”
“just finished reading ‘perpetual astonishment…’ Really enjoyed it. To borrow a phrase from young people, I LOLled reading it”
“just finished The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathan Fairfax, compelling, hilarious, clever, insightful, and a bit bonkers”
“Just finished ‘Perpetual Astonishment’……really enjoyed it. Jonathan is a great character. Many thanks!!!”
“just finished TPAOJF. thank you! ritz melee had me snorting on the tube, and neighbours straining to see book’s cover!”
Some comments on the Guardian website
“The extract made me think of Steve Toltz and Jonathan Coe. Perhaps writing after they’ve been out for a pint with Carl Hiaasen. … Good to hear about an author for whom the adjective ‘self-published’ does not seem to be synonymous with ‘self-proclaimed’. And good for you, Guardian; good to see good self-published work being found and reviewed.”
March 11, 2013
Happy Towel Day to you
I read in the paper that today is Towel Day – Douglas Adams’s birthday. He would have been 61. It’s called Towel Day because, as the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy teaches us, all a man (specifically an interstellar freebooter and stowaway) needs is a towel.
Douglas Adams has always meant a great deal to me. I was nine when I first read the Guide, and it changed my life.
It must have been in my first term at middle school. I had never really understood why nothing in Doncaster in the early 80s was the way it was on TV or in books. Everything confused me. I particularly didn’t understand school, which seemed to have been deliberately constructed to make me miserable. How else to explain swimming and maths? Then there was assembly and picking teams in PE. And the few friends I’d had in my first school seemed to have met new people and disappeared, leaving me alone.
Douglas Adams told me that I wasn’t alone. He said, with amused certainty, that the world – the Universe, in fact – is absurd and makes no sense at all. That was a deeply, deeply comforting thing for the nine-year-old me to hear. It might seem a bit of a bleak message, but it allowed me to feel that I might not be the problem. And it was conveyed in a tone of voice that instantly appealed to me.
I can’t for the moment find my copy of the Guide, but I can quote a bit from the opening pages from memory. Ford Prefect – the towel-carrying interstellar freebooter who takes boring dressing-gown-and-tea obsessive Arthur Dent under his wing – is convincing a man from the council’s planning department to lie in front of some bulldozers.
‘You want me to lie in front of these bulldozers?’ (Says the council planner.)
Ford nodded.
’In the mud?’
’In, as you say, the mud.’
There was something about that interjected ‘as you say’ that I loved. It was a bit like putting food in my mouth and finding that it stimulated a taste bud that I’d never previously known I had. And then there was a flight of fancy about the council planner being a direct male descendent of Genghis Khan, and this meaning that in times of stress he had the sudden uneasy feeling that a crowd of bearded men with spears were all shouting at him.
Pretty much all of Douglas Adams’s books contained things that pleased me just as much, and they have all stayed with me. Even today, when I have flying dreams they happen in the Adams way – I have to distract myself as I’m falling, so that I forget to hit the ground. When I re-read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency a couple of years ago, I was amazed at how familiar it all was – how thoroughly it had soaked in.
I can only say that Douglas Adams helped me considerably to deal with the world around me. Or perhaps he helped me to not deal with the world around me, but in a new and rather more satisfying way.
Whatever the case, I – and several million other lonely nine-year-olds – am very grateful to Douglas Adams. And I’m sad he is gone.
March 7, 2013
When is success?
Like many people, I tend to judge myself against those who have more than me. This practice – unfortunately but inevitably – means that I constantly feel like a failure, no matter how I am doing.
Clausewitz: victory depends on having “limited aims” – otherwise you exhaust yourself
When I decided to self-publish, I tried to avoid this trap by defining some milestones in advance. I decided it would be too difficult to define success, but that I could try to define stages of non-failure. At a point when no one had bought the book, I tried to imagine having sold various numbers of copies, and thought about whether I’d class each as success or failure.
The point at which I found it difficult to imagine being able to tell myself that the whole thing had been a failure came at 750 copies.
That was the magic number (or perhaps the not un-magic number would be more accurate), but there were some way-stations before that. I calculated that I wouldn’t sell fewer than 12 copies unless my mother and close friends turned against me. Thirty seemed the point at which sales purely out of politeness would stop. A hundred was an important marker because of the two zeros in it. Then I overheard a couple of authors at the London Library talking about a friend whose commercially published book had sold only 312 copies in a year, so overtaking that was important. Then there was my official break-even number of 476 (an underestimate), and then a long gap.
Finally, a week or so ago, I reached 750. I can report that, having set the number in advance, I feel less like a failure now. Of course I still slip sometimes. I know a few writers who have achieved out-and-out success, with award nominations, big advances from publishers and tens or hundreds of thousands of sales. But it is now a bit easier to let that go.
March 1, 2013
The number one rule of blogging
Upstairs Downton
The one thing everyone agrees on, if you have a blog, is that you should be completely consistent with it. You shouldn’t, for example, suddenly stop posting for three months. Nevertheless, that is what I have done. I am a maverick, tearing up the rule book with laxity and inertia.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve done since my last post, in case you should find yourself wondering. I ran my Guardian masterclass (which went very well because the people in it were lovely), succumbed a little to the winter blues, dashed off romantically to Hanoi, where I fell ill, then returned to London, where I’ve been living quietly ever since. This last month I’ve been writing a short story, doing unnecessarily elaborate financial planning, working on my writing training techniques, seeing friends and doing all the other usual background activities that make up a life.
I’ve also been doing more improv, which is generally quite a good blues-retarder. I’ve done workshops run by the excellent Cariad Lloyd, who teaches David Shore’s techniques, as well as performing in shows with my group – Upstairs Downton – the next of which is on Saturday at 7.30pm, as part of London ImproFest. It’s at the Lion and Unicorn in Kentish Town, in what is almost exactly midway between a small theatre and a room above a pub. Our show is basically an improvised spoof episode of a period TV drama like Upstairs Downstairs or Downton Abbey, and people have been very nice about it. There’s even talk of touring Texas with it, which seems unlikely – but then most things do.
February 27, 2013
Writing novels…
… is what self-involved people do instead of playing the lottery.
