Word is spreading

A quick progress update: my shiny new website is up and running – indeed, you may even have come to this blog from there. If you can think of a good reason to do so (or even if you can’t), please link to it from any site you run or contribute to. It all helps with the Google rankings, where I’m still all but invisible compared to David Williams’ book.

I’ve already had a couple of helping hands: David Eldridge has posted the cover (designed by his company) on the Two Associates blog, and those nice people at the London Writers Club included a picture and some kind words on their most recent email newsletter, which you can subscribe to from the website.

Ready for launch

Finally, after much prevarication and other delays too tedious to mention, I’ve fixed up a time and place for my book launch. It’ll take place on Wednesday, February 24th at Charlotte Street Blues in central London. More details nearer the time.

I went to another London Writers’ Club event last night. The speaker, Will Atkins, is head of Macmillan New Writing, which specialises in publishing previously unpublished novelists, and accepts submissions directly (rather than via agents). It all sounded great – until we established that they’d received around 12,000 submissions to date, and plan to publish eight books a year. You do the math, as they say in the States.

I may yet give it a go, but I won’t be holding my breath. In the meantime, self-publishing seems like an even better idea than it did before.

A site for sore eyes

Right, where were we?

Well, the big news is that my new website is finally starting to take shape. I got a first look at it at the weekend, and spent much of Sunday uploading the copy. It still needs a few tweaks (not least because formatting text in WordPress turned out not to be quite as straightforward as advertised), but the developer is working on it and I’m hoping to make it live in the next week or so.

In terms of marketing, the website is the biggest difference between my first and second forays into self-publishing. Back in 2002, I had a launch party for Grown-Up People, and I paid Xlibris for a selection of promotional materials (business cards, bookmarks and postcards) containing details of the book and how to order it, which I sent to anyone who I thought might be interested. I did the same via email, but the sum total of my efforts still came to fewer than 100 copies sold, and none to anyone I didn’t know personally.

Having a website to promote First Time I Met The Blues should, in theory, make it easier to market the book. For starters, I can send the link to anyone who I think might be interested – not just friends and acquaintances, but likely sources of publicity as well. Then there’s the possibility of people finding the site via a link from another site – assuming I can get anyone to create those links – or a search engine. (Type ‘first time i met the blues novel’ into Google and this blog comes up in second place on the listings, beaten only by my nemesis, David Williams.) And once they’re there, they can order the book and pay me using PayPal. Simples, as the meerkat says.

The website won’t just flog the book mercilessly, though: I am planning a couple of other features that readers, and potential readers, will hopefully enjoy. But more about that when it’s ready to unveil to the world.

It’s a book!

I’ve been referring to First Time I Met The Blues as a book for a while, but in truth, it was really just a collection of words in a file on my computer. But now it really is a book – 200 books, to be precise, sitting in boxes in my living room, delivered hot off the press this afternoon. (Well, not all that hot, given that the printers are based in Norfolk and I live in London.)

Nothing else to say right now - I’m just savouring the moment.

Parkes life

Last night I attended a meeting of the London Writers’ Club for the first time – my first attempt at novelist’s networking. The special guest was writer Nii Parkes, who read extracts from his novel Tail Of The Blue Bird and talked about his experiences with publishers, and how he’s gone about marketing his book.

He’s done so, in the main, off his own bat, even though the book is published by Random House. That fact, more than anything, rammed home the message that all writers (well, apart from JK Rowling and maybe a handful of others) have to do their own PR these days. That’s why I went along, to pick up tips, and I achieved that. (Not least from the splendidly-named Jonny Nexus, who I had a long chat with.)

I left the meeting simultaneously energised and deflated – the latter because it’s only now sinking in just how much I need to do in order to maximise my chances of gaining publicity and selling copies. I already have a lengthy to-do list, and every conversation I have about the project adds another couple of items.

The best question of the night came from a young woman who asked Nii how he balanced time spent marketing the book that was already published with time spent writing new material. Significantly, he didn’t really have an answer – and he’s a full-time writer.

Middle-aged men in pubs

A couple of weeks ago, after watching Watford beat Sheffield Wednesday 4-1, I passed the One Bell pub on the High Street on my way back to Watford Junction station. From inside came the unmistakeable sound of a 12-bar boogie, and looking through the window I saw a bunch of middle-aged men – guitar, bass, drums – playing to a small crowd of drinkers. If I hadn’t had a train to catch, I’d have gone inside to listen myself. Because, in an alternative universe, that group could well have been The Hornets – the fictional band in First Time I Met The Blues.

The phenomenon of middle-aged men playing blues in pubs was one of my key inspirations for the novel. In my twenties, I often found myself in pubs where a band was performing classics from the Chicago blues repertoire – Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James and the rest – and I couldn’t help noticing that the musicians were never in the first flush of youth. It was the hair that gave it away, mostly: either disappearing fast, or inappropriately long, and occasionally both at once.

So I started to wonder where these middle-aged blokes had come from. Had they always played the blues? Had they, perhaps, tasted success when they were younger? Was this what they expected to be doing in their forties and fifties?

From there, it was a relatively short step to inventing a fictional blues band and creating a back story for them; working all the way back to when they were teenagers falling in love with the music, then giving them a glimpse of success and seeing how they coped when things didn’t turn out the way they’d anticipated. After all, for every Eric Clapton or Mick Fleetwood, who used the British Blues Boom of the 1960s as a stepping stone to a life of limos and leggy blondes, there must have been dozens of blues musicians who didn’t become rich and famous. First Time I Met The Blues tells the story of three of them.

What’s in a name?

Like everyone else, I’ve occasionally used the enormous powers of the information superhighway to search for namesakes, famous or otherwise. Years ago, as a TV listings writer, I came across the actor Tim Turner, who appeared in a few films and was best known for playing the Invisible Man in a 1950s adaptation of HG Wells’s novel – a character whose face is never seen, swathed as it is in bandages throughout the series.

That’s as famous as my namesakes get, as it happens – unless you’re reading this in Washington State, where (to quote from www.timturnerband.com) “singer, songwriter, guitar player extraordinaire, Tim Turner has been plying his craft in the Seattle area for three decades”. So, when I rather belatedly turned my thoughts to the question of setting up a website to promote First Time I Met The Blues, I had my fingers crossed that I could snaffle the ideal address.

Unfortunately, I’ll have to think again, as a quick search revealed that www.timturner.co.uk has already been taken by a computer repairman in Bude who advertises himself as the ‘PC Doctor’. At least there isn’t much chance of us being confused, I suppose. But it does mean that I’ll have to choose something a little less slick, like ‘timturnerauthor.co.uk’ or ‘timturnerwriter.co.uk’. Not perfect, but better than nothing.