H.R. Moore's Blog, page 3

Cordelia's Kitchen - guest post from the wonderful Philippa Rees

Ok, so I have an apology and a confession to make; first of all, an apology to H R Moore that this has taken me forever. I promise that I did actually start this on 28th January but shockingly I have only just completed this. So I am sorry, I have no excuses, I'm just useless.

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to spend Monday(27th January) in the company of the wonderful H R Moore, best friend and author of yours truly. It was a wonderful tea and conversation filled day. It would seem that I have an infinite capacity for both. But it wasn't all fun and games. Work was involved as well you know.

Now as you are all aware, I am amateur baker extraordinaire (in my mind at least) and H R Moore is a brilliant author who has written an amazing book, that I urge you all to read, called Legacy of the Mind. The idea of collaborating to create some of the food from Legacy of the Mind was first suggested back in the Autumn of 2013 when I spent a day feeling progressively more hungover as time wore on, on H R Moore's sofa in her Maida Vale flat, discussing the state of my life, pinning on Pinterest (a favourite past time of mine) and of course the book. It was when we were on Pinterest, looking largely at pictures of cake and pointing out whenever we came across something that we thought Cordelia would make or something that would be eaten at one of the lavish parties, that we decided it would be fun for us to cook some of the things from the book.

So there we were on Monday, H R Moore with a day off from her 9-5 (if there is such a thing) job and me in my current status as freelancer, ready to bake like Cordelia. Those of you who haven't read Legacy of the Mind won't have a clue what I'm talking about when I say ready to bake like Cordelia so let me do my best to explain who Cordelia is and what I think it would be like to be in her house. (Obviously you'll have to read the book to see if you agree with me or not!).

Cordelia is the grandmother and guardian of the book's heroine Anita. For me, Cordelia's house is a wonderfully homely place where you instantly feel at ease and welcome. There is always something either baking in the oven or cooling on the side when you are there. It's one of the ways that Cordelia shows that she cares about you, by always producing a pot of tea and a delicious cake right on queue because there aren't many situations that can't be improved with tea and cake.

Now I got thoroughly carried away during the concept phase and H R Moore had to rein me in slightly ("Of course we can bake seven different things in a day!") and the decision was taken to make three different cakes, two of which are specifically mentioned in the book: chocolate and beetroot cake, toasted oat and coconut muffins and pumpkin cake with nutmeg icing. I've always been keen to try a chocolate and beetroot cake and the only pumpkin cake I'd had previously was one made by my mother which was absolutely delicious so I was delighted with the decision.

The great thing about these recipes was that two of them (ok technically all three having never actually put beetroot in a cake before) gave me the opportunity to use two new ingredients - coconut oil and tinned pumpkin puree.

We started by making the chocolate and beetroot cake which is lovely loaf cake. Now we've learned our lesson so that you don't have to; the recipe only actually calls for one good-sized beetroot, no more, no less. It's hard to be sure but there may have been a slight beetroot surplus... It was a really quick and easy recipe from the BBC Good Food website, and much like a carrot cake, it doesn't contain any butter but uses vegetable oil instead. In fact, I would say that it is exactly like making a carrot cake. Ours took quite a lot longer than an hour to cook, probably closer to an hour and 20 minutes and I would recommend that you remove the cake from the oven when a skewer comes out with a little bit of mixture on it (not much though) to ensure that the result is a delicious and moist chocolate cake.

I really enjoyed the flavour of the cake, and you would never know that it contained beetroot but I would definitely remove it from the oven earlier than we did. And what's the best way to serve it? With a nice big spoonful of creme fraiche on the side. Delicious.

So that was one cake down leading us on to oatmeal and coconut muffins. H R Moore found this recipe on a blog called Nothing but Delicious and I liked this recipe because it gave me the opportunity to do some things that I had never done before. I toasted oats without burning them which took a surprisingly long time but if you persevere then you will reach the point where they smell like popcorn. I also used coconut oil which I never used before. I can only really describe it as looking like a jar of candle wax and it is a bit tricky to measure out accurately but we seemed to manage as our muffins were neither wet nor dry. Again, it's a really simple recipe but it is more time consuming from a preparation point of view than the beetroot cake. The oats take quite a long time to toast, maybe 10 minutes or so, and then you have to leave the muffin mix to rest for 20 minutes before it go into the oven and then cook them in batches (depending on how many muffin tins you have) so they can take a little while to make.

The really lovely thing about this recipe is that you can personalise it by choosing your own add-ins. We went for three different add-ins to create three slightly different varieties; pumpkin seed and walnut, dried mango, and shredded coconut. This was I discovered a love of dried mango, it's a miracle that there was any left to go into the muffins! You can also get creative by putting different sprinkles on the top of the muffins although I personally thought pumpkin seeds and chopped walnuts looked really good. I think the following would also work well as additions for these muffins: dried/crystallised pineapple pieces for a really tropical feel, plain chocolate if you're feeling a bit naughty or banana if you've got some slightly overripe bananas lying around that you don't know what to do with.

And then third but not least, we made my personal favourite on the day, the pumpkin and walnut cake. As it is my favourite I have included the recipe for it below. It also, as mentioned previously, presented me with the opportunity to use yet another ingredient that I hadn't previously used but had often seen and been intrigued by, a tin of pumpkin puree. It's quite readily available and I was able to pick up a tin from the little Waitrose in Parsons Green and it can only really be described as baby mush but it does make for a wonderful cake.

As with the chocolate and beetroot cake, this is another cake recipe that uses oil instead of butter (although there's plenty of butter in the icing!), and the combination of the vegetables with the oil made for another very more-ish and soft cake. It's quite a sweet sponge but the walnuts keep it grounded by giving it an earthiness and the nutmeg in the icing took the edge off the sweetness of the icing itself. All in all, it was an extremely well balanced cake and I think it might have become my new favourite, not least of all because you can kid yourself that it's healthy!

It was an extremely satisfying day of tea and cake and I think that Cordelia would have been proud of us both. I would definitely want to have tea at her house, especially if she had just made a pumpkin and walnut cake!

Pumpkin cake with nutmeg icing, recipe from: www.thesouthernladycooks.com


Sponge ingredients:

3 eggs 1 tin of 100% pumpkin 3/4 cup of vegetable oil 1 1/2 cups of caster sugar 1 tsp vanilla extract 2 cups of plain flour 1/2 tsp salt 2 tsps baking powder 2 tsps ground cinnamon 1 cup walnut pieces

Icing ingredients

8oz cream cheese (do not use a low fat cream cheese or the icing will be too runny) 1 stick softened butter 2 cups of icing sugar 1 tsp grated nutmeg 1 tsp vanilla extract

Method:

Cream eggs, pumpkin, oil, sugar and vanilla together with a mixer.

In a separate bowl, sieve together the flour, salt, baking powder and cinnamon and then add to the pumpkin mixture and mix well.

Fold in the walnuts.

Grease a 9" x 13" baking dish and pour in the cake mixture. Bake for 35-40 minutes until the cake is done, springy to the touch and a skewer comes out clean.

While you wait for the cake to cool, make the icing.

To make the icing, beat together the icing ingredients until smooth and the spread on top of the cooled sponge.

Dispicable dispositions

Call me what you will, but I HATE Halloween. Always have, always will. Not only does the very notion of fancy dress fill me with dread, but the concept of children parading in their witches hats and fairy wings from one poor unsuspecting household to the next demanding sweets and screaming ‘trick or treat’ as they go, is just plain wrong. I’m sorry, but it is. However, Halloween, now thoroughly done and finished with for another year (thank goodness), and all the associated trappings, made me think about the great villains of contemporary literature (well the likes of Voldemort, The Joker and Cruella de Vil anyway) and what makes them so terrifying. For me, it comes down to a few key things:

The Unknown

From just who and what exactly Voldemort is, to what Mrs Coulter’s (from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy) motives are, to how The Joker got his smile, the best villains have something of the unknown about them. There is always something hidden from the reader, and snippets about them and their pasts are often revealed along the way. Voldemort’s whole back story is pieced together over the course of Rowling’s seven books to help us understand how a boy called Tom Riddle ends up as ‘the one who must not be named’.

They seem to be unstoppable

Villains always seem to have some kind of powerful aura that is intimidating to and unattainable for the hero or heroine (at least up until the point when they topple them). Voldemort was a powerful wizard with an army of deadly and influential followers; President Snow in The Hunger Games ruled Panem with an iron fist, and controlled an army to keep the world running to his tune; and The White Witch (from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe) wielded potent magic and could turn people to stone. Villains not only have some manner of upper hand, but they usually have a kind of momentum that makes them feel unstoppable; their following is growing, they’ve caught another key member of the underground movement, or they’re moving further and further over to the dark side, and this worsening of circumstances not only legitimises the initiation of the hero’s journey, but also makes it more compelling.

They’re unrelenting in their ideological zeal

The truly terrifying villain is pretty much the same as a mad man; they simply won’t listen to reason and they keep going at all costs. Any normal person can see that turning people to stone, separating children from their deamons, or skinning 101 Dalmatians shouldn’t be allowed, however a villain doesn’t adhere to conventional standards and will stop at nothing to get their way. In stories such as The Hunger Games, The Legacy Trilogy, and A Discovery of Witches, where the system is the enemy (even though there may be a handful of individuals who represent its face), keeping society stable is all that matters and this often leads to extreme exhibitions of power (like The Hunger Games) in order to instil fear, signify dominance, and maintain the status quo.

I think the best villains are those who are human too, people who you could almost back if the story had only been written from their point of view. This is something George R.R. Martin does so exceptionally well in A Game of Thrones; nobody is really all good or evil (apart from maybe Walder Frey), but instead, everyone’s actions are understandable and explainable as a means of enhancing their or their family’s position or wellbeing. Some even have a delicious, illicit allure, romanticising bad behaviour, and making you almost dream of throwing in your lot with the despicable villains too…

The contemptible thigh gap

I recently read an article about the infamous thigh gap, and seeing as I’m in the market for a little weight loss and toning myself at the moment, it peaked my interest. So instead of doing what I’d normally do, which is to say, read the article, think it’s all a bit silly, and move on, I typed ‘thigh gap’ into Pinterest to see what all the fuss was about. It was an education, I can say that much at least. For example, I hadn’t realised that the test for a thigh gap is ‘feet together, thighs apart’ (all the way down), or that the look desired is that of a toneless, little girl. The images mean I now understand why people are so uppity about the topic; ‘thigh gap’ may as well be dubbed ‘anorexic legs’, at least for anyone past puberty whose bone composition and fat distribution does not support this naturally.

The fashion industry has been widely blamed as the instigator of the deterioration of women’s self-esteem and I’m not inclined to disagree. Fashion houses still insist on sending women who have the same properties as clothes hangers down the catwalk, and then, just to add insult to injury, they place them in glossy magazine adverts, and hold their awkward, scrawny, pre-pubescent look up as some crazy form of beauty. I think in reality this is a great deal like the Emperor’s new clothes. Somebody, somewhere is having a large and very well paid laugh at the expense of the rest of us, as they collude to put increasingly disturbing face shapes, eyebrows, and sticking out bones in front of us. I can only imagine how smug they feel as women diet and exercise themselves into the ground, feelings of self-worth evaporating a little more with every new image placed before them.

Partly because of the fashion industry, being thin is wrapped up with notions of success and glamour; the idea that your life will be wonderful if you become thin (and indeed if you spend enough on potions to make yourself more beautiful) has been successfully propagated, however, as most people never reach the level of skinniness depicted, they never get to find out for themselves that it’s all a horrible lie. Instead, they find themselves embroiled in a cycle of self-loathing and dissatisfaction as a result of failing to achieve the thigh gap, or equivalent. Of course, the cruel irony is that a large number of the images women aspire to resemble are total fiction; creations of designers in Photoshop and unattainable even for the women in the images themselves.

However much we hate to admit it, it is still, today, in the year 2013, important to most women that they are able to attract a man, get married, and have children. Whether they want to be a high flying career women, save the world, or climb Everest in addition, is neither here nor there, although the expectation that women should want to do this (especially on those who don’t), only serves to add to the mountain of stress we are under. To further compound the problem, women have a much more limited timeframe than men if they do want to have children, and we end up measuring ourselves against every other woman out there to check we are on the right track, and console (or condemn) ourselves with the result. This creates an environment where it would be a wonder if women were not vulnerable to messages about body image and susceptible to unhealthy views on the way we should look, especially as these messages are being perpetuated at every turn, in the fashion industry, the media, by celebrities, in TV shows, films, and by other people we know; every outlet, right down to Disney stories pedals the fiction that women should be thin, and the thigh gap is just the latest, ridiculous manifestation of this.

In Legacy, I subconsciously created characters with a broad spectrum of body types, probably because this best reflects reality. Anita is a Body, and therefore has a toned, hard, sculpted physique, whereas Cleo, a Mind, doesn’t do any exercise at all, is naturally thin, has no real tone to speak of, and if you asked her to run a mile, she probably wouldn’t be able to do it. If you asked me who I would cast in each of these roles, someone who looks like Jessica Ennis would be Anita, however someone like Naya Rivera would play Cleo; different women with very different lifestyles and therefore very different bodies. What do I want to look like? Neither of these two, because I LOVE food and couldn’t stick the crazy training schedule. I’d rather look something like Jennifer Lawrence, who for me has the perfect, feminine figure, someone who, outrageously, is considered ‘fat’ in Hollywood. You’d have to pay me to look like most of the models out there - stripping off to nothing and displaying stick-like legs and jutting out collar bones is not sexy; it’s weird, narcissistic, and orchestrated by predominantly gay men.

The fact is that women come in all shapes and sizes, different men are attracted to different body shapes, and so should women be. The problem is that as soon as anyone says anything along these lines, it either sounds like an excuse, or like something your mother would say, which means it immediately loses all credibility to the gain of the glitzy, glamorous world of the stick insects; which would you rather your life to resemble, a Dove advert or a Channel one?! However, it’s distracting that such an unhealthy ideal is revered in our society; it leads to dreadful attitudes, deepened insecurities, and appalling behaviours. When a superb, thin, actress like Jennifer Lawrence is considered ‘fat’ because she is being compared to people who starve themselves, something’s got to be wrong. But if we want to make any headway here at all, there needs to be a mass paradigm shift in the attitudes of those who have the power to influence, to change the aspiration from stick thin to something healthier, and for god’s sake move away from idiotic measures like the contemptible thigh gap.

The classic love triangle

If you’re anything like me, then a book’s just not the same without a fairly significant portion being devoted to the love interest(s). I think I’m safe in saying I’m not alone, given how wildly successful novels such as Twilight, The Hunger Games, and A Discovery of Witches have been; the brooding romantic intensity is just such a winner.

It’s such a winner in fact, that many authors (myself included) have chosen to include not one, but two male leads, with, in some cases, a third thrown in on the side-lines for good measure. Why? Because it forces the heroine to make a choice. No man is ever going to provide everything a girl could ever want (apart from Charming, but I’ve already made my thoughts known on that topic), so it’s more in line with reality for the heroine to weigh up what they want and to have to choose. Importantly, this means there are things she will not get that she really wants, and this leads to intrigue, tension and loss; so much more three dimensional a saga than when there is only one male lead.

Twilight is probably the best current example of the love triangle. First there was a baseline; the good looking guy from school; cute, desirable, wanted by the popular girl, but let’s face it, normal, horribly predictable, and he never stood a chance when lined up against the competition. It’s not his fault, the competition was a vampire, who, not only had super hearing, super speed, super strength, and could hear peoples’ thoughts, but sparkled in the sun for goodness sake.

However, as seen in Shadow of Night (the second book in Harkness’ All Souls trilogy), once we’ve got over the initial excitement and intrigue created by the first love-conquers-all relationship (with a spectacular, ancient, rich, volatile, over-protective, full of secrets, vampire), it gets a bit romantically boring; it’s incredibly difficult to sustain the tension. This is where the love triangle comes into its own and when Meyer cues her third and final contender; the werewolf. Jacob is the underdog (sorry, couldn’t resist), who, not only has his own unique and highly desirable charms (not least a spectacular six pack and the ability to keep you warm at night), but also serves to spice things up in the love department, and provide uncertainty for the reader.

But Meyer is far from the only author to have utilised the love triangle; Collins also employs this tactic in The Hunger Games, pitting the rugged, powerful, self-sufficient, hunter-gatherer, Gale, against the more effeminate, but none-the-less skilled with a paintbrush, Peeta. It never quite got to the dizzy heights of the team Jacob / team Edward frenzy (team Jacob all the way), but it was an absorbing love triangle all the same. The will they, won't they, who will she kiss next excitement is sustained right to the end and certainly kept me turning the pages.

In Legacy, I created a similar choice for Anita, and even went as far as to throw in the third potential love interest, Bas. Anita has to choose between the fun, frivolous, exciting Marcus, and the grounded, powerful, responsible, Alexander. In the real world, I think Bas is probably the most sensible choice; he’s intelligent, good looking, from a Council family, provides stability and certainty, doesn’t attract unwanted attention, and is the pick of Empire. But what girl has ever made the ‘sensible’ choice when presented with that kind of line up (or indeed even when they’re not)?!

The best friend, or unfortunate lack there of

Everybody knows the power of their best friends; the people who are there when you’re in tears and need a shoulder to cry on, or when you’re bursting to overexcitedly share some news, when you can’t wait to gossip deliciously about some mutual acquaintance, or when all you want to do is sit and eat Ben & Jerry’s, watching a film in your pyjamas, last night’s makeup smudged under your eyes. So I’m always surprised that so many amazing books, with spectacular heroes and heroines, totally forget about this vital support in every person’s life. The Hunger Games, Twilight, The Bone Season, and A Discovery of Witches all pretty much entirely abandon the concept of a true best friend, Twilight coming the closest with Alice and Rosalie, Edward’s ‘sisters’ providing Bella with non-romantic, non-parental support. This is especially interesting as it portrays Bella’s relationships with her school friends as inconsequential and shallow, enhancing the point that the new world she’s stepping into is a far richer, more substantial, and all-encompassing experience.

The Hunger Games at least has the concept of someone who Katniss can be herself with, spend time with and talk to, however he (Gale) quickly turns into a love interest, moving him firmly out of the friend zone (if indeed he was ever truly here in the first place). Katniss’s little sister, Prim, moves towards the best friend slot towards the end of the trilogy, however, she’s never portrayed as Katniss’s equal. Prim is always very much the little, dependent sister, who, along with their mother, loads Katniss up with emotional baggage rather than helping to lighten the load.

The Bone Season and A Discovery of Witches don’t even pay homage to the concept of a best friend; the heroines have a group of colleagues and two aunts respectively to form their support networks. They lack those (non-romantic) people with whom they can totally let down their defences and be vulnerable with, which for me really jars with reality. I get that the whole point of some heroes and heroines is that they are social outcasts, people at the margins who do not fit with the status quo, however, to make this stick, the main character needs to be genuinely depicted in this light, something most authors just can’t bear to do. Certainly none of the heroines mentioned above fit this bill, whereas someone like Lisbeth Salander in Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy absolutely does.

So it was really important for me to have a distinct best friend (Cleo) in Legacy, who Anita could turn to in her hours of both need and elation. Cleo provides a frivolous point of difference from Anita, a total, necessary, contrast to my heroine and a much needed point of stability in a tumultuous world. This is something JK Rowling does so wonderfully well in Harry Potter. Harry simply cannot thrive on his own; he needs his best friends, Ron and Hermione, to help guide, ground and even rescue him during the course of the series. They have skills that he does not, and importantly, their skills are attributed equal respect and weight, even though we’re all in absolutely no doubt as to whose story it is. This, for me, explains in large part why Rowling’s books are so wonderful; they recognise that to be a hero, it’s rare to be able to do this on your own. You need true, loyal, diverse, equal, occasionally stubborn best friends to help ground and protect you along the way.

'Does Prince Charming exist?' Asked the question.

This week I wrote some interview answers for an online blog and two of the questions stuck in my mind. Firstly, ‘Does Prince Charming exist?’ My answer – ‘Absolutely not. This is why we turn to books’. Second question ‘What are your pet peeves?’ My answer – ‘When my husband doesn’t hang up the bath mat’. Aside from feeling a little guilty about airing my husband’s imperfections in public, I came to thinking, whilst putting away the washing, that the two answers are inextricably linked. Of course Prince Charming doesn’t exist, because he doesn’t have to concern himself with the subtle complexities of the modern domestic dwelling, meaning he doesn’t have the opportunity (although of course neither would he have the inclination) to do any of those things that rile us about the common man.

He has servants at the Fairy Castle to hang up the bathmat that was probably hand stitched from some kind of rare cotton, to take the rubbish out, probably in rustic wicker baskets (they clearly don’t have plastic bin bags in Fairly Land, or any other kind of plastic packaging come to think of it) to a picturesque compost heap on the edge of a kitchen garden with beautiful raised beds and enchanting glass houses. And heaven forbid he should have to put the loo seat down himself - although come to think of it, I’m not sure Prince Charmings have to take comfort breaks at all, or if they do, you certainly should never speak of such things, a bit like the Queen, well, they’re almost from the same family, so I suppose that’s only right.

Anyway, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of wonderful men out there who have a number of the characteristics one would associate with a Prince Charming, however, unfortunately, the reality of real life is that it has a horrible tendency to blot perfection. So for all those girls out there, especially the ones in their late teens who are still clinging on to the blissful dream, where some rich, good looking, privately educated, preferably royal, successful, sporty, dance ready, polite, considerate man, who is besotted with you, is one day just going to waltz into your life, clad you in silks and tiaras and whisk you down the aisle, just keep reading the books. And whatever you do, at all costs, avoid Clapham High Street after about 11 o'clock on a Saturday night.

Chapter 14 - Building momentum

Since publishing Legacy, I’ve had a steady trickle of sales, mainly through family and friends (as is the case to begin with for most self-published authors) and I’ve also been building up my Twitter and Facebook following, writing to bloggers asking them to review Legacy, and seeking out other promotion opportunities.

The more I do, the bolder and more confident I get. I’m far more comfortable with putting stuff out there now and have added Instagram and Pinterest to the list of social sites I use (although I still need to learn to be better at seizing photo ops!).

I’ve also had really positive reviews from those who have read Legacy and am trying to encourage as many as possible to leave reviews on Amazon, Smashwords and Goodreads. It’s been wonderful to have conversations with readers about the world, the concepts of Mind, Body and Spirit and the characters (predominantly whether Alexander, Marcus or Bas is the hottest), and fascinating to see the things different people read into certain happenings! The best moment to date though was last week, when an independent book blogger gave me an overwhelmingly fabulous review - friends have to be nice, but to get amazing feedback from someone with no connection to me whatsoever was a spectacular thrill.

Now it’s all about building a following and building momentum, trying out new promotion methods, trying out new versions of the book blurb, encouraging readers to leave reviews, getting down to writing the second book, and especially trying to be patient (as we know, not my strength). I’m not yet living the dream, but fingers tightly crossed it’s only a matter of time…

Chapter 13 - Into the abyss

There are those for whom self-promotion is as natural as breathing. If you are one of those people who post endless self-photos on Facebook and Instagram, then you fall into this category. If you are one of those people and you happen to be an author, then you are already one significant step ahead of most of the competition, because for lots of us, the whole concept of promoting ourselves gives us nightmares, cold sweats and makes us slightly nauseous all in one go. Unfortunately, for any writer who aspires to be able to do just that day in, day out, this is a painful yet necessary step out of one’s comfort zone, towards the dream. (Other options considered include marrying a superbly wealthy man (that ship has sailed), robbing a bank, and winning the lottery; all rejected as the self-promotion option, although challenging, seemed like the more realistic of the four).

Thus, once the (relatively) easy writing, editing, formatting and uploading part was done, the hard work had to start. I read a statistic the other day that said 170,000 books are published each year in the UK alone, and as an author you have to try to make your book stand out from this exceptionally large crowd. Most self-published authors don’t sell copies to many more people than their immediate family and friends and a lot of this is down to the inordinate amount of work required to generate some momentum behind book sales. Regardless of how good the book is, this doesn’t happen overnight and requires some serious dedication to the cause.

Furthermore, as more and more indie authors seek out and use the methods of other successful authors, these ideas become harder and harder to utilise. For example, Amanda Hocking (an extremely successful, young, self-published author) found that with her books, book bloggers picked them up and started to spread the word for her, apparently without very much effort on her part at all. Unfortunately, every indie author out there now seeks reviews from book bloggers and as a result, they have formal submission processes, are inundated with book review requests, and funnily enough fulfil a similar role to the one agents do in the traditional publishing world.

Alongside writing to bloggers to request reviews, successful authors are generally on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Pinterest, Google+, they write blogs, attend events, offer interviews, and they do this ALL THE TIME. There are so many opportunities, especially through the internet, but the problem is it’s a full time job finding and exploiting them and authors are generally filled with more passion about the prospect of writing books and less passion about promoting them. The good thing is that once you’ve generated enough of a following, you get to start having conversations about the things you are passionate about - the world and characters you’ve created. However, sadly, for a large number of authors, they simply never gain sufficient momentum to ever reach this stage; shameless self-promotion is, for many, just too challenging a process.

Chapter 12 - Sending Legacy out into the world

Chapter 12 - Sending Legacy out into the world

2013-09-29

Once my platform was established and the book was finally edited, all I had left to do prior to publishing was the cover, the blurb and formatting the manuscript for upload.

I didn’t want to go down the route of having people on the cover and as a ball of energy felt like a good image to represent the book, I went with this. However, the good thing about self-publishing is that the cover can be easily changed and I may well try a few different options to see what best gets across what the book is about. I always ask people for feedback on this, as let’s face it, it’s how people initially judge your work, however finding people who are willing to provide real constructive views is easier said than done! My gut feel is that my current cover is too masculine and too 'sci-fi' at the moment, so we’re working on ideas to make it more genre-appropriate - if anyone has any ideas then feel free to email me at the address at info@hrmoore.com!

After the cover was done, I wrote the blurb for the back of the book. To do justice to the concepts of energy, Mind, Body and Spirit, the political landscape, the main characters and the story line all in a couple of short paragraphs is something I find virtually impossible, so this is definitely something I will revisit over the coming months. In the end I tried to apply the lessons from a great Ted Talk by Simon Sinek called ‘How great leaders inspire action’ (http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_...). In his presentation he recommends talking about ‘the why’ not the what. The idea is essentially to connect on a more emotional level with your audience, making your message intriguing and exciting, however I doubt I’ve fully achieved this on the first go, so the blurb will certainly evolve over time.

Formatting I found to be the easy bit, as there is no creativity required at all! You simply follow the excellent guidelines provided by Smashwords to the letter and hey presto, you have a brilliantly formatted ebook. I’d recommend using the Smashwords guidelines first and then tweaking with Amazon’s requirements, as the Smashwords guide is far more comprehensive and easy to follow.

When all that was done, all that was left to do was fill in the upload sections on Amazon and Smashwords, press submit, hope I’d done everything I was supposed to correctly, then wait a few hours for Legacy to appear.

Chapter 11 - Preparing for shameless self promotion

One thing that was crystal clear during my research into publishing was that regardless of the channel through which my book would go to market, the onus of promotion would be on me. Publishers have very limited promotion budgets, especially for new authors, so if you want your book to do well, you need to tweet, blog and talk about your work to get it out there. Knowing this, I started to build a platform from which to promote Legacy, alongside the editing process.

I started with a website and blog as this seemed like a good centre point for the campaign. I looked around other authors’ websites for inspiration, however it’s surprising how bad some exceptionally successful authors’ websites are; I guess when your books are that successful a good website is neither here nor there. Anyway, I trawled all manner of sites and jotted down a few ideas before designing my own, trying to keep it as clean, simple, visual and as easy to navigate as possible. Luckily my husband can code, so he set up the initial style sheets and taught me some basic html (I’m pretty handy with divs these days) and then I set about building my pages as I wanted them. This took quite a while by the time I’d created the design, images, copy, etc and I still had to rely on Mr Moore for the more tricky Java script and PHP / MySQL elements.

Alongside setting up the website, I set up a Twitter account. I had no idea how to use Twitter (I know, shameful for a then 25 year old), but luckily I had my little sister to guide me. It felt very strange tweeting out to the world - I used to barely even put up Facebook status updates - but I’m getting used to it and it’s forcing me to be more up to date with what’s going on, so that can’t be a bad thing!

Once my website was finished, I set up a Facebook page. This in itself was very simple and not at all time consuming, but telling all my friends I’d written a book and asking them to like my page was exceptionally daunting (for all the same reasons outlined in Chapter 8), what if they thought the whole thing was ridiculous?! On the other hand, once the likes started appearing, along with a load of supportive messages, it was great - so exciting for the book to be out there and for people to be talking about it.

Next I set up a Google+ profile, chiefly so I could use Google Author (I read a blog post about authors not owning their content unless Google says they do and also liked the idea of my photo appearing next to my search results - more likely that people will click on something with a face), but I didn’t do much more than duplicate some content on there to start with (and still don’t really), as Facebook, Twitter and my blog are time consuming enough!