Jonathan Fryer's Blog

Interview with MumstheWord Blog

Many thanks to Tracey and Lis for this new interview about my childhood memoir Eccles Cakes:

https://www.mumsthewordblog.com/2017/...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Eccles-Cakes...

Writers in Parliament

Yesterday the UK House of Commons terrace hosted the Winter Reception of the All Party Writers Group, sponsored by the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), on whose Board I sit. These events seem to grow each year, which is a good reflection of a growing awareness in both the Commons and the Lords about the challenges facing writers today. The creative industries contribute at least £70 billion a year to the UK economy and writers are a vital part of that production, yet writers’ incomes have in general fallen drastically in recent years. The J. K. Rowlings of this world are the exception, as the average professional writer these days earns only about £12,000 a year, which is barely enough to subsist on. Moreover, tough challenges are coming down the line, not least Brexit and the advance of the digital age. This means a lot of uncertainty lies ahead, which is why it is so important that writers have allies in Parliament to intervene as appropriate when relevant legislation is being discussed, from the digital economy bill to EU copyright directives. In recent months a new body, UKWriters, on whose steering group I sit, has been coordinating some of the lobbying work and priority-setting by writers’ organisations, including ALCS and the Society of Authors.

Several of the MPs and peers present at yesterday’s receptions are authors themselves (and therefore beneficiaries of secondary royalties from ALCS, as well as Public Lending Right (PLR). It was good to see, among others, Tim Clement-Jones, Valerie Amos and Richard Balfe. However, the peer most in people’s minds was the late Ruth Rendell, in whose name an award was created, to recognise the work of someone who has promoted literacy brilliantly. I was honoured to be the ALCS representative on the judging panel and delighted that the first winner was Andy McNab whose back-story as a writer and brave exploits in “unsafe spaces” for literature (such as factories and prisons) richly merited the accolade. He was alas unable to be present to accept the award from Ruth Rendell’s son, the psychiatric social worker, Simon, as he was yomping somewhere far-flung. But Simon had come over from Colorado, where he lives, and Andy McNab was represented by a witty and impressive recorded message redolent of the sort of originality and quirkiness that makes him so special.

Self-publishing: Pros and Cons

As I had 14 books published by a variety of “traditional” publishers, I was quite surprised when my literary agent suggested that I should self-publish my latest book, the childhood memoir Eccles Cakes. It was so different from anything that I had written before that it did not sit neatly with my back catalogue (six of which books had in 2014 been reissued as paperbacks and ebooks by Thistle). He wasn’t sure there was a ready market for the memoir, but added cheerily that I would have complete control of the content and the cover, if I wished to go down the self-publishing route — and would earn proportionately more money if the book took off. It is worth pointing out that the days of generous publishers’ advances are over, unless one happens to be the latest hot new thing (preferably a young and attractive, and therefore promotable, female novelist). And as one gets 10% royalties at best on mainstream books, writing really does not make one rich, unless one is extremely lucky. In fact, according to a survey of writers’ earnings published last year by the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), on whose Board I sit, average writers’ earnings have fallen sharply in recent years to a measly £11,000 a year. That’s nearly 30% down on a decade earlier. Moreover, publishers’ and media contracts are getting more and more tricky, often asking writers to surrender all their rights for a pittance — or even for nothing at all.

Eccles Cakes cover 1So, is self-publishing the answer? Like many people, I had been wary of the so-called Vanity presses, which charge authors thousands of pounds for producing a set number of copies of a book which may be nicely bound and printed on glossy paper, but won’t have been edited, and may well for the most part sit in boxes in the writer’s garage until he or she leaves this life. But, I was assured, as I made enquiries, things aren’t like that anymore. And indeed they are not. Of course, there are still some shady operators out there who are ready to fleece a lot of money off poor sods who are desperate to see their thoughts in print. But these days there are other, less expensive and more attractive options. As I am not confident in my technological skills I decided to plump for a company in England, PublishNation, that, for a set fee of £235 would format Eccles Cakes from a Word document and design a cover using a photo that I supplied. In a surprisingly short period of time I had a proof copy to correct, from the printer Lulu (who physically produce a lot of self-published books), and once I had OK’d some small changes (mainly typos; we all make them), I was then able to order as many or few copies of the paperback as I wish — and can continue to do so. The orders are fulfilled in a matter of days, with delivery to my door. The cost ensures that I get a respectable margin when I sell copies personally to readers. Others can buy online from Amazon, which also did a kindle version of the book (all part of the original PublishNation package). The kindle version is particularly attractive to authors as one gets 70% royalties as long as the book is priced over a certain limit (mine is, at £3.99). The biggest surprise of all, though, was that these royalties start straight away, on a monthly basis, as people buy one’s book. So although I only “published” in mid-July, I got my first payment direct into my bank account from Amazon at the end of August and another one just now.

eccles-cakes-book-signingDoes this all sound too good to be true? Well, of course there are certain disadvantages. One needs to be a competent editor and proof-reader, or else be ready to employ someone to do that, otherwise your book is likely to be full of errors (though these can be corrected in all future copies). The biggest problem, though, is distribution and marketing. Mainstream publishers often still have reps, who tour the bookshops, promoting their wares. As a self-published author one has to do that oneself. Be brave, is what I say; I was delighted when I approached one bookshop that had stocked some of my earlier books when they came out and they agreed on the spot to take six copies. But particularly with memoirs, one needs to target people who know you or know about you. In my case, that meant Liberal Democrat activists (I did a signing at the Brighton autumn conference last month) and both my old school and university college, as well as my freshly-located birth family and close friends. A couple of reviews have appeared in linked publications, as well as diary items. Significantly, good reviews have appeared on Amazon and Goodreads; authors are well-advised to join and engage with the latter; the more such reviews you get, the better your book is likely to do. But the real challenge is to master social media: to let people out there know your book is available — and why they might be interested to read it. I mention it quite frequently on twitter (with a link to the Amazon order page) and I have created a dedicated Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/eccles.cakes.... (which has a shopping button). It’s still early days, but even if I have not yet made a fortune from self-publishing, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive to date, and I did have total control of both cover and content.

Eccles Cakes Facebook Page

There is now a dedicated Facebook page for my childhood memoir Eccles Cakes, where I will be posting reviews, events and so on. All welcome!
www.facebook.com/eccles.cakes.2016
Eccles Cakes: An Odd Tale of Survival

A Closed or Open Brexit?

Since the British EU Referendum in June there has been a lot of talk about “Hard Brexit” versus “Soft Brexit”, with Prime Minister Theresa May giving the impression that she favours the former, i.e. sacrificing access to the European single market in order to “get back control” of immigration. Remainers like myself not surprisingly think that is utter madness. But last night, at the British Council headquarters off Trafalgar Square, the Council’s CEO, Sir Ciaran Devane, asked an invited audience to think instead of the alternative between a “Closed Brexit” (with a more isolated Britain) or an “Open Brexit”, in which Britain would remain outward-looking and open not just for business but also for cultural interchange. Sir Ciaran was giving the Edmund Burke Lecture, sponsored by the venerable publication Annual Register and ProQuest, and made no secret of his own preference for Britain’s remaining in the EU, but if Brexit is going ahead then it is important that it proceeds in the most positive way possible. The British Council of course does have global reach, being active in around 150 countries and does far more than just promote British culture and values. Through its Young Arab Voices programme, for example, it is giving young people in the Middle East and North Africa skills that will help them express themselves. Other projects have a clearly developmental element of empowerment. Sir Ciaran lamented the fact that once Britain is out of the EU Ministers and officials will no longer be part of the regular meetings with our current 27 partners discussing all sorts of issues that impact on the creative industries. So it will be important to find other ways of exchanging information and views to prevent Britain becoming further isolated.

Grilling Frederick Forsyth

“I have no respect of admiration for the Establishment,” novelist and occasional MI6 collaborator Frederick Forsyth declared yesterday at a gathering of the London Grill Club, an informal lunch club for journalists and other professionals who give a prominent public figure a grilling once a month. Forsyth campaigned for Brexit long before this summer’s EU Referendum campaign, but he was as scathing about British politicians as he was about Brussels bureaucrats. David Cameron’s resignation from Parliament obviously figured large in the conversation, but the novelist felt the now departed Prime Minister only had himself to blame: he should have been neutral in the referendum debate, as Harold Wilson was in 1975, rather than being the “chief prosecutor” for Remain. Tony Blair also came in for criticism; although Freddie supported the Iraq War, he was appalled by what he saw as Blair’s lying to Parliament, and he backed Reg Keys, father of one of the Iraq casualties, when Mr Keys stood against Blair in Sedgfield at the 2005 general election. Forsyth at 78 is a more mellow personality than even five years ago, but he still has some robust opinions. “Political correctness has replaced Christianity as a religion in Britain,” he pronounced at one point. He does not intend to write any more books; his autobiography The Outsider “is my swan song”. But that does not mean that he will abandon campaigning when there is an issue he feels strongly about, his current hobby-horse being to expose what he sees as “a stitch-up” involving a Royal Marine convicted of shooting a wounded Taliban fighter in Helmand province in Afghanistan in 2011.Frederick Forsyth

Why I Wrote "Eccles Cakes"

This week, my childhood memoir, Eccles Cakes: An Odd Tale of Survival, was published and a number of people have asked me why I waited so long to write it. After all, I had produced 14 volumes of biography, history and other non-fiction since 1975, so why wait until I was in my mid-sixties? The simple answer is that I just wasn’t ready, emotionally, but of course, as Oscar Wilde famously said, the truth is rarely pure and never simple. The fact is that I could not have written the book until two important things happened (not that I realised that in advance). First was that, following a recurrence a few years ago of the panic attacks and blackouts that I had experienced as a child, along with depression and total lethargy, I was referred to a psychologist who rightly diagnosed the problem as being that I had not processed the period of sexual abuse I had suffered between the ages of about seven and 12. I had shut memories of this away in the deepest recesses of my mind, hidden behind a wall of metaphorical cotton wool, but now they had escaped and were starting to bite me. As a result of the daignosis, I underwent six months of counselling, culminating in several sessions of recovered-memory therapy. No drugs or hypnosis were used, but I was transported back to my childhood self and relived in graphic detail, technicolour and with smells and sounds, the episodes in which my adoptive father had sexually interfered with me, leaving me feeling confused, unhappy and eventually guilty. I then, through therapy, as an adult revisited my childhood self, and tried to come to terms with what had happened. As part of the therapy, I had to write short passages after the sessions, including a letter to my abuser and his wife.

However, I knew I would only get any meaningful level of closure if I extended these scraps of writing into a full-length book. The therapy sessions had retrieved all sorts of memories in graphic detail, and I still had copies of the diaries that I wrote from the age of 18 onwards. It took me 18 months of quite intense and often emotionally stressful work to produce a manuscript I was happy with. Yet I doubt if that would have been possible without the second, unexpected, factor, which was being reunited with my birth family, or at least two sisters and a variety of nieces and nephews. This happened two years ago following a letter out of the blue from my older birth sister after the younger one had tracked me down through a Google search. This reunification was the subject of a sensitively-produced documentary in the BBC series, Family Finders. Now they had become part of my life after a separation of more than half a century I had found some missing pieces of the jigsaw that completed the picture for Eccles Cakes. That memoir only goes up to shortly past my 19th birthday, but in it my unseen birth mother is a real presence, as she was in my mind as a child. The incidents recounted in the book where she watched over me, without my knowledge, are based on fact, as is, naturally,m everything else. So now it is out there, and I am indeed now able to achieve a form of closure.

Childhood Memoir Published

My childhood memoir, Eccles Cakes: An Odd Tale of Survival, was in many ways the most difficult book I have ever had to write as much had to come from memory (some retrieved with counselling) before my teenage diaries kicked in. The book describes my being like a fish out of water in my adopted childhood home of Eccles, Greater Manchester, and the sexual abuse I endured before later escaping -- heading off to the Vietnam War as a cub reporter at age 18 and travelling right across Asia.

https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&...

Eccles Cakes is beautifully written, poignantly touching, disarmingly frank.
Michael Bloch

Ruth Rendell Award

I am delighted to have been appointed one of the judges of the new ALCS-sponsored Ruth Rendell Award to acknowledge the author who has done most to champion Literacy. My fellow judges are Jonathan Douglas (Director, National Literacy Trust), Sue Wilkinson (CEO, The Reading Agency) and Ginny Lunn, (CEO Beanstalk). The Award will be presented by Ruth Rendell's son, Simon, at an All Party Parliamentary Writers Group reception in the House of Commons in early December.

For more details, see: http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/about...

Time for a Novel?

Having recently finished a childhood memoir, which I hope will see the light of day later this Spring, the inevitable question I now face is: what next? The big difference betwen writers and would-be writers is that whereas the latter can’t start, the former can’t stop. Of course, writing blog posts, tweets and Facebook entries is a useful way of dissipating creative energy, but for anyone who has actually had a book published — or in my case, a dozen — the compulsion to get cracking on something more susbtantial is irresistible.

Isherwood coverI had a complete break over Easter, while getting a couple of dental implants done, but I am now chomping at the bit, in more ways than one. As my childhood memoir ends with me just turned 19, in Karbala in Iraq, it might seem logicial to pick the story up from there. But I know that that is not what my impulses are telling me. Instead, I shall fast forward to the mid-1970s when I was in Brussels, initially wotking for Reuters news agency, subsequently freelance. The exact location of the action and the main characters are all so clear in my head, but this will be a novel, not a memoir, even if it is inspired by a lot of personal experience (rather like Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories, though I would be lucky to achieve anything like as good an end-product as his novels). I wrote a biography of Isherwood,.which involved two summers in California, interviewing him, while I was still based in Btussels and I remember him saying that having started his writing life as a novelist, he had ended up as a biographer and memoir-writer. My trajectory hopefully will be in the opposite direction, but here goes.