Predicting viral content - how likely is it you're writing a bestseller? by Lu Hersey

What's the first question most people ask when you tell them you're a children's writer? 

'Oh, like JK Rowling?' 

Smile. Be nice. Definitely don't growl. 

As it happens, my entire family (including me) loved JK’s books and were caught up in the zeitgeist, buying them and reading them as soon as they were published. Likewise Suzanne Collins. Her books might be brutal, but they’re also really good.

You're probably thinking, so what? My books are brilliant too – what made theirs so blooming successful? It’s not always about quality of writing. I find some of the 100 top selling writers (not mentioning names... *coughs* Dan Brown) almost unreadable, but millions of people obviously disagree.

But what actually makes a bestseller? There are lots of books on how to write one, but do they tell you anything useful? A quick look at what really hooks in the public can be very interesting. 

My eldest daughter worked for a (now defunct) train travel company, where part of the remit of her job was to make their social media communications go viral and save the company money on advertising.

A thankless task. Middle aged men, earning far more than she was, telling her to make the business an overnight sensation by creating viral tweets and videos. Of course none of the management had a clue how she was supposed to achieve this, and she tried to explain, time and time again – it's just not possible.

You can’t predict what’s going to get carried on a social media wave and what isn’t, because it seems to be totally random. I’ve had two tweets go viral (getting thousands of retweets) in all the time I’ve been on twitter, and it was a complete surprise both times. The first one was a really stupid dinosaur joke. The second was a tweet about the Oxford Comma. And basically if I was intent on marketing my brand, neither of those tweets was likely to encourage people to buy my book.

Of course there’s a whole world of social media stars out there who have millions of followers on Instagram and YouTube and are marketing their chosen brand really effectively. Simple things like how to put on makeup, diet, exercise or wear clothes (probably specific clothes, and none of them to be found in my wardrobe) can get you way more followers and much more money than most of us ever earn from writing books. But they represent a tiny minority of all the people trying to become social media stars - who knows what singles them out?

And I'd never even heard of him until now... 

There are similar success stories in the book world, where out of the blue, books have gone stratospheric. A look at the top 100 bestselling books OF ALL TIME in the UK makes for a very interesting read.  Just sometimes, a writer catches the public imagination and something strange happens – EVERYONE buys their book.

Interestingly, this isn't just about publisher spend. Celebrity authors get far more of the publicity and marketing budget than other writers, and you see their books stacking tables and shelves in every supermarket and bookshop. But (perhaps strangely on this basis), David Walliams isn’t on the best selling authors of all time list, unlike Stephanie Meyer, a Mormon from Utah who self-published those vampire stories before she got a publisher. Not sure it’s appropriate to mention EL James in a post about children’s books, but again, a self published author who hit a zeitgeist. 

Mean...but who cares about writing style if you're in the top 100 all time best sellers?

And there’s always the possibility your book will go viral in another territory. Take the interesting case of Claire McFall, a Scottish children’s writer who isn't that well known in the UK (despite having won the Scottish Book Award twice), yet she’s a superstar in China. The Independent once described her in an article as The Most Influential Writer You've Never Heard Of, after her (translated) Ferryman trilogy went viral, each book hitting the Chinese top 10 and collectively selling several million copies, making her a top selling author throughout China for the last three years running. She has a film deal in place and everything – the stuff a writer's dreams are made of.

Claire McFall at a book signing in China

So what’s my point? I don’t have one really. There are thousands of writers and a few make it big. A massive publicity budget from your publisher might help, but sometimes the public just like something. Like the Gruffalo, His Dark Materials, or the Very Hungry Caterpillar. Or Ferryman. The good news is a very high percentage of top selling authors write children’s books.

Incidentally, it's not all about fiction. Eats, Shoots and Leaves is up in the 100 best sellers of all time too. So maybe, like the Oxford comma, punctuation is the way to go…

Lu Hersey

t: @LuWrites

www.luhersey.com

Apostrophes. Dontcha just love ’em? By Rowena House

Having spent every spare minute this week glued to Twitter - enthralled and appalled by the Brexit mayhem - I’ve been reminded just how many people seem to think the plural of MP is MP’s.

Now it might be that technology bears its share of the blame. Certainly, my phone has taken to autocorrecting “its” into “it’s” every time.

Particularly irksome is a short, sneaky delay before Samsung’s gremlin imposes its will on my punctuation. The error slips past, and my social media feed is forever befouled. The solution: proof read every tweet, post & comment.

Which brings me to a story.

The story of The Wizards’ Rabbits’ Apostrophes.

First off, let me acknowledge unconditionally and absolutely that this story was inspired by proof-reading expert, Catriona Tippin, whose advice on every aspect of this topic in SCBWI’s Words and Pictures has been invaluable for years. In particular, I relied on her superb article, here:

https://www.wordsandpics.org/2015/09/proofreading-tips-apostrophes.html

Catriona, thank you very much.

I also acknowledge the late, great Sir Terry Pratchett as my inspiration for the setting and style of the wizards’ rabbits’ tale - and hope that in law such fan fiction/blatant plagiarism is OK given it’s done purely for educational purposes.

You see, I wrote the story for colleagues faced with the daunting prospect of umpteen thousand words of academic assignments to proof read.

It’s meant to be a fun way to make the point that every apostrophe in every assignment ought to be double checked because they’re devious little devils, slithering either side of an “s”, running away for “its” and hiding in contractions like “it’s” which aren’t allowed in academic writing.

I’ll do the correction exercise alongside them to test myself, and also to demonstrate that even though I’ve been a professional wordsmith for decades, and set the bloomin’ task, Murphy’s Law suggests that I’m bound to misplace at least one or two of the buggers.

[Typing this post, several “apostrophe’s” have appeared as if by magic, and I’m starting to wonder if my tech is Hubris, given a past tendency to sneer about other people’s errors: ‘Oh, look who got that wrong. Tut, tut.’ Hopefully, that’s a thing of the past now; life is way too stressful the sweat the small stuff.]

Anyhow, here is the story - with all the apostrophes removed. It’s not a sparking story. It’s not meant for kids, either. But if anyone fancies having a go at correcting it, I’ll post what I think is the right version in the comments section in a couple of days.

Please let me know if I make mistakes. Like I say, Murphy’s Law and all that…

  

THE WIZARDS RABBITS APOSTROPHES

Tuesday last, the wizards of Untold University held an open day to which their young male relatives were invited, females being banned from its hallowed precincts. Among the exhibits were rabbits, kept by the wizards in lieu of lawnmowers, but which the denizens of Lank-Moorpuck endlessly asked to see being magicked out of the wizards hats whenever one of them was spotted sidling along The Lashup in search of refreshment in its seedier establishments.

Knowing that these performances were demanded to annoy the wizards, rather than from any fondness for magic, Untold Universitys finest had determined to distribute their rabbits among their nephews in order to prevent any further interruptions to the serious business of drinking.

On the appointed day the Master of Impossible Feats, Silas Graves, wasted no time. The moment his nephew, Nigel, stepped over the threshold, Silas thrust two white rabbits into the boys reluctant hands, and then scuttled out of the building. The two bemused creatures were now the magicians nephews pets.

Seeing Silas striding towards The Goblin Arms, with a bag of dwarfs gold dangling from his belt, identical twin wizards Cornelius and Corinthian Trump stuffed their shared rabbit into the trouser pocket of their sisters son, Humphry, then hurried after Silas. The wizards nephews rabbit looked nervous.

On the far side of the quad, Obadiah Ringworm was livid: the Trump brothers reputation for boozing was legendary, and Lashup Old Peculiar in dangerously short supply due to the brewerys draymens strike. Obadiah grabbed both his nephews by their ears, forced them under threat of being turned into skunks into selecting a rabbit each, then he snatched up his hat and staff and ran full pelt into town. Ringworms nephews rabbits looked at each other - and winked.

Now, over the years, the wizards, being careless, had spilt a great many spells in the universitys halls, and in the quad and on its lawns. The wizards nephews rabbits had, in consequence, dined on magical grass since birth, growing both in intelligence and guile. They had no intention whatsoever of being handed over willy-nilly to a bunch of spotty-faced, indolent, catapult-wielding urchins, thereby forfeiting the pleasures of The Lashup, whose byways and back gardens housed far fairer fluffy tails than the booze-sodden wizards could ever have imagined in their misogynistic lives. To a rabbit, they bared their teeth, bit the nephews down to the bone and legged it.

@HouseRowena on Twitter

Website: rowenahouse.com

 

IMAGINATION – WHERE DOES IT COME FROM? by Lynne Benton

This blog follows on neatly from yesterday’s Blog by Sheena Wilkinson, though when I wrote this I had no idea what hers would be about! 

I’ve just been going through a pile of my mother’s old exercise books, dating from the late thirties.  After she died I brought them back with me when we emptied her flat, but I’ve only just got round to looking at them. I was particularly keen to read her English books, to see what sort of work children at the top end of primary schools were expected to do back then.  We hear so much that those were “the good old days” that I was prepared to be impressed.

This is what I found:

As far as neatness was concerned, full marks.

As far as grammar, spelling and punctuation was concerned, full marks.

There were also several famous poems copied out faithfully.

But as far as writing anything creative was concerned, very few marks!

In four English exercise books I found only two pieces of genuinely creative work (ie stories – in those days nobody seemed to consider that children might try to write their own poetry!).  Only two stories which gave rein to the imagination.  I know my mother once said she didn’t have any imagination – maybe it was because she’d been given no chance to develop one.  All the other pieces of work were obviously exercises, probably copied down from the board, or from a book, or factual essays - beautiful to look at, but with no encouragement to be creative. 

I had thought that since we are, theoretically, so much more enlightened today, children would have far more opportunities to produce original creative work.  When I was at school in the sixties, although we were expected to use correct grammar, spelling and punctuation, we were also allowed the freedom to write stories about whatever interested us..  And when I was teaching in the late sixties and seventies there was plenty of emphasis on creative work of one sort or another.  Nowadays, however, with all the current emphasis on strange expressions like “fronted adverbials” being apparently essential for passing SATS tests, what space is left for creative work?  Clearly the technical aspects of grammar and spelling now take precedence over everything else.  Of course they are important, but they should help with creative work, not replace it.  This seems to me to be taking a backwards step, rather than looking forward.

My teachers, like Sheena's in her post yesterday, loved their subject and inspired me – but then they weren’t expected to teach to the tests all the time.  Okay, we did have the dreaded 11 plus in my day, but that was all – no SATS tests from age 5 upwards. 

I can’t help remembering a talk I heard once given by a famous children’s writer (I’d better not name her for reasons that will become obvious.)  She said that when she was at primary school her teacher used to come in every Monday morning with a hangover (now you see why I’d better not mention any names!) and said, “Sit down and write a story.”  So every Monday morning the whole class did just that – and she, as a budding writer, absolutely loved it!  (Was it in fact this opportunity that made her into a writer?) Of course one shouldn’t recommend such a way of teaching, and my teachers were way too responsible to behave that way, but I know I’d have loved to spend a whole morning writing a story! 

Of course we can't blame it all on the schools, or on our unbeloved ex-Education Secretary.  There should be time and opportunity for creativity at home, too - and in many cases they do.  But as comedian Jenny Éclair once said, all children should by law have a chance to be bored, because it was out of boredom that inspiration, imagination and creativity came – and I do agree.  How good it would be if after school and during their holidays children no longer had to worry about homework and tests, but instead had time and space to come up with new and creative ideas for amusing themselves.  This would surely be more useful for life, and would give their imaginations a chance to flourish.