Talking to the Author by Lynne Benton

 Recently I attended various sessions in the annual two-week Bath Literary Festival.  I always enjoy choosing which sessions to go to, particularly as the festival often includes some of my favourite authors – those whose books I most enjoy reading.

This year I went to hear seven authors talk about their books, which was great.   I was also able to buy copies of their latest books and queue up to talk to them and ask them to sign my copy.  It is always interesting, and in some cases a real joy, to have a chance to actually speak to a favourite author and tell them how much you enjoy their books.  Some of those I met, I found, were very happy to chat to me too, which was even nicer, and I came away on a high.

I hope they were pleased to find so many people keen to buy their latest book.  As a writer myself, I know how good it feels when someone tells me how much they’ve enjoyed one of my books.  Especially if it’s someone I don’t know.

Of course, this is why School visits are so important if you write for children.  When I was a child, way back in the fifties, I don’t remember ever meeting a writer face to face, though as an avid reader I would have been in seventh heaven if one had come to my school.  Maybe it didn’t occur to anyone in those distant days that this might be an option – or that children needed encouragement to read!  (I certainly didn’t!)  I suppose at that time the one writer who would have guaranteed to set all hearts racing would have been Enid Blyton, before the powers-that-be decided her books might corrupt young minds.  (Not that children agreed!  Whenever I went to the library as a child there were always several children waiting by the B section for the Enid Blytons to be returned so they could take them out.)  So I can just imagine the reaction of the entire school if the great lady had actually come to visit our school and talk to us!

And how wonderful it would have been if your parents had been able to afford to buy one of her books!  That would mean you might actually get to speak to her and ask her to sign it for you!  I’m afraid the cost of a new book would have been beyond most of our parents at the time, so I bore this in mind when I did my last school visit a few years ago.  Before going I had a load of bookmarks printed (with pictures of my books on), which I gave out to all the children.  This meant that as well as signing any books they bought, I could also sign bookmarks, so that every child would have a chance to come and speak to me if they wanted to, if only to tell me their name. They all seemed happy to queue for that too, which was lovely.  Clearly there’s nothing like the personal contact!

These days I suppose the only author who would guarantee the sort of hero-worship Blyton received back then would be JK Rowling, though children nowadays are much more used to reading lots of different books by different authors, and to having them visit their school.  Though I suspect that many of us who do, or have done, author visits to schools will probably have been asked if we know JK Rowling.  Children also, of course, accept that we must be very rich: at that same school visit one child asked me in awed tones, “Are you a multi-millionaire?”  Because of course, as everyone knows, all children’s authors are multi-millionaires, aren’t they? 

However, although that is, unsurprisingly, far from the case, I appreciate that these days when I go to a Literary Festival I can buy a book from a favourite author, and meet her (or him) face to face.  And talk to them.  It is still a great joy.

website: lynnebenton.com

Writing is good for the brain! by Lynne Benton

 New writers are often advised to “write what you know”.  This is all very well, as far as it goes, but when you start thinking about it you realise that if writers ONLY wrote about what they knew, books would rapidly become rather dull and samey, and some would never be written at all.  For example, there would be few, if any, crime novels, (especially those written from the point of view of the murderer!) historical novels, fantasy novels, time-slip novels, etc. etc. etc. 

Did Lewis Carroll ever fall down a rabbit hole into Wonderland?

Did JK Rowling ever go to a school for Wizards?

Did Mary Shelley ever regenerate a monster?

I think not.  Okay, so some writers have a very knowledgeable background in, say, potholing, ballroom dancing, horse-riding, amateur dramatics, police work and so on.  And of course we have all experienced being a child, and some of being a brother or sister and/or a parent.  Some writers have lived in other parts of the world and can call on their experience to set their books there.  Any or all of these valid experiences give their books the flavour of authenticity.

However, not all writers come from exciting backgrounds, and many spend much of their time shut in their studies, writing books using principally their imagination – most notably in the fields of fantasy, historical fiction, crime etc.  But whichever genre you write in, you will sometimes find you need to know stuff that you hadn’t been aware you were going to need.  And that’s where research comes in.

Many writers find research the most interesting part of their job.  Some, apparently, get so wrapped up in it that they put off writing the book for which they are doing the research.  I can’t say the same, though I do enjoy the research.  There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you discover something that links perfectly with something else in your book.  It’s like solving a crossword puzzle!  In most of books I’ve written, I’ve had to find out something I didn’t know.  Over the past few years I’ve had to research such diverse subjects as How to Fly a Hot Air Balloon,

The Price of a Train ticket in 1940

How Roman baths were drained

How Roman women transported their babies from place to place before prams were invented, 

How much a television cost in 1953, 

How guide dogs are trained, and so on.  

The information I gleaned was important to the plot of whichever book I was working on at the time, and even though the books are now finished and published, the information is still there, somewhere, in the back of my mind, just in case it’s ever needed again. 

Brain experts are always telling us that we need to keep making new neural pathways in our brains, and doing research for your books certainly does that.

So, as I said at the start, writing is good for the brain!

 website: lynnebenton.com

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When idols topple - by Lu Hersey

It's been a month of toppling idols. Some, most of us were delighted to see go - like Edward Colston, slave trader, whose statue in Bristol Centre was brought down in a peaceful demonstration and dumped in the very harbour his slaver boats sailed from. There's justice in that (though actually he's since been pulled out again to go in the museum, complete with his new graffiti). It was a symbolic moment, part of a far greater movement following the murder of George Floyd in America, to get white people to fully understand what lay behind the whole Black Lives Matter campaign. Teaching all white people (even those who don't consider themselves racist) to shut up and listen to people of colour who've been treated as second class citizens for generations. To understand what treating one group of people as though they're inferior simply because of their skin colour feels like to those who've had to endure it.

An historic moment. Photo by Dr Shawn Sobers (@shawnsobers)

It's led to a rise in sales of own voice books as people realise things need to change, that everyone needs to have a voice and be represented fairly in literature and publishing. It's also led to a kind of battle over statues, coming to a head when rival groups of demonstrators clash. Both Gandhi and Winston Churchill were given police protection in recent London demonstrations - and strangely, a far right group felt the statue of George Eliot needed guarding at an event in Nuneaton. You'd think George Eliot an unlikely target for anyone...

(Stolen from a tweet by Helen Macdonald)

...but maybe not. Idols come in many forms, and these days most aren't made of bronze. Who could have predicted there would be a day when JK Rowling fell out of favour? Her views on trans women caused anger and grief far beyond the vulnerable trans community, upsetting much of her fanbase too. For my youngest daughter, to have her childhood idol coming out with what she considers TERF thinking, really broke her heart. All her life, at times of stress, her go-to safe place has been re-reading Harry Potter. For her, and many of the Hogwarts generation, JK's stance has effectively destroyed that safety net.

Probably the most important lesson to take from this is to be very careful what you say on social media, especially if you're famous (unless you're like Trump or Katie Hopkins and enjoy that kind of attention). Fame brings power, and shouldn't be abused.

Despite all the conflict, hopefully some positive things will come out of this time. We're all talking a lot more about very important issues, and thinking about the way we perceive others. Many of us are reading more widely to understand different viewpoints because we want to hear from those that haven't been given a proper voice. In an ideal world, after all the ranting and mud slinging is done, it might lead us to find more empathy, kindness and compassion as fellow human beings.

Meanwhile, hopefully I'm not famous enough to be trolled for writing this...

by Lu Hersey
Twitter: @LuWrites
Web: Lu Hersey

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