More than a year ago, Sam and her co-author sent in a manuscript for assessment. It showed promise, but needed some changes before we felt it would be ready to show to a publisher. Life and work took over and the book was put on hold – after all, there was no rush. Then, on Monday 12th October 2009 at 7.28pm, Sam was told it was more than likely the lump in her left breast was cancer. Just over two weeks later she went into hospital and her left breast was removed. This is her story.

We wish you all the luck in the world.

That Work, Life, Writing, Balance Thing

I have always enjoyed writing from a young age: keeping diaries (well, at least for the first two weeks of every year); venting my teenage anger through poetry (then ripping it up); researching holiday projects set by school; and even completing lengthy coursework at university.

I particularly loved the projects set for us at primary school every May bank holiday and I was disciplined. I wouls sit at the small fold-away table for a couple of hours every day in the prefab holiday chalet on the Essex coast and I would write, draw, cut, stick, anotate, edit and so on. Every now and then I would be distracted by my younger sisters and brother as they ran past the rotting double-glazed doors to the front of our tiny holiday home, flinging buckets and spades down on the grass in exchange for tennis rackets and balls. But I was quite happy where I was, simply writing at the table.

So why then has it taken me nearly two years to write 65,000 words of a first draft of a novel that may never be published? Why am I not as disciplined now as I was when I was a child, devoted to my school projects? Have I become lazy as an adult? Am I so busy I just can’t find the time? The answer is deadlines. I can’t work without them.

I started off really well. The book began during a conversation and a glass of wine or two with a friend and neighbour. Together we shared anecdotes on our parenting skills (or lack of) and I went away and started to write. We got into a good routine of meeting, drinking wine, and note-taking.

For the first couple of months I took the laptop to bed every night, a time when I could not be distracted. The ideas flowed, and the characters became alive. I had not planned how they would behave or respond to each other; they decided for themsleves as they went about their daily lives. Together we were having a ball. Every day I set myself a goal: “By next week I will have another five thousand words. In three weeks I will have completed the first hundred.” And I more or less stuck to it.

But, as my work as a headteacher became more intense, I left earlier in the morning and arrived home past seven most nights. I went to my office on a Saturday and worked through every school holiday. We were also so busy as a family! I don’t know how I managed to find time for watching my favourite television programmes, going out for a glass of wine with friends and googling fantasy holidays, but somehow I did. Time for the book was reduced to Sunday afternoons and family holidays. I was no longer scheduling time. I lost the momentum.

There were times when weeks would lapse before I re-connected with the laptop and my characters. The advice is right. If you do not write every day, if only for five minutes, it does take time to coax your book back to life.

When I did turn my laptop on I actually felt disloyal to my characters. I was embarrassed to have treated them with such neglect. I often left them facing a crucial decision for far longer than was acceptable. I was not completing their story, not giving them closure on a crisis they had been left facing. How they did not abandon me for good I do not know!

Then, just recently my whole world was turned upside down. On Monday 12th October at 7.28pm I was told it was more than likely the lump in my left breast was cancer. I sat in the chair next to my husband and stared back at my consultant in absolute horror. I was not old enough to have the disease! I was so busy with my new job and home life there just really wasn’t time for this - I was not ready to die.

Mortality hits you, it hits you hard. When you find yourself discussing timescales for living in earnest with your consultant, and your chances of surviving for at least ten years, you look back on how you have spent your time. You question your own behaviour over the years and wonder what the point of life is, if this is how scared death makes you feel. To even contemplate sitting down and picking up the computer and writing now was laughable… I was bloody angry.

On Thursday 29th October I walked in to hospital. I could not speak to my husband, I could not look at the nurses without loathing and I wanted to punch the kind consultant, as he held my hand and promised me he would not let anything go wrong. I cried over the left breast I was about to lose.

I woke up six hours later after lengthy surgery. I threw up twice, I did not remove the oxygen tube clipped to my nose, I let the tubes connected to my arm pits drain the fluids in to bottles either side of my bed and with morphine surging through my veins, I slipped in and out of conciousness, grateful for being alive.

It was as I lay there, television on in the background and people talking around me I decided I was not going to waste another minute of my life. What did I want to achieve for myself? I asked my husband to bring my laptop in. He frowned and reminded me of the consultants plea for me to rest and forget about work. But I didn’t want to work, I wanted to write. I really missed it.

On Saturday, two days after receiving a boob job of teenage proportions I propped myself up on the pillows, I switched on, clicked open the folder and read the last fifty pages. I was tired, the morphine was still being controlled by a pump I could press every five minutes. I did nothing else. The computer sat on the trolly quietly humming to itself. I am not sure who switched it off. It sat in silence keeping vigil by my bed all night.

On Sunday morning I switched on again, I corrected some of the many typos I had made over the last fifty pages. But the relationship between the characters and I was still in the early stages of getting to know each other again. I laughed at some of the situations they had got themselves in to- they were there, still alive, eager to brighten up my day- but I couldn’t think of anything new, exciting, or funny for them. I wanted them more than I did my family and friends. After an hour I stopped.

On Monday I couldn’t write, I didn’t want to. I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow. I was toxic with morphine and doubled up with stomach cramps from the anti-inflammatory drugs. I slept all day and late that night I cried with anger. It was all about me again. Book forgotten.

On Tuesday afternoon I opened up my laptop again. How to get started? I didn’t know where to start. I thought about how I encourage children at school to plan a story.
In a SATs exam my poor year sixes had ten minutes to plan a piece of creative writing on a topic, not of their choice, before completing a polished piece of work in half an hour, with no opportunity for re-writes.

I decide to bullet-point random ideas about the characters. I could not write the next sentence to where I had put my last full stop so many weeks ago. I managed a couple of hours of brainstorming between the disruption of medical observations, phone calls to work, a lunchtime visit from my wonderful son and more sleep.

Before shutting down for the day I wrote a schedule, I needed the discipline back. What did I want to achieve over the coming weeks? I included time to write every day, at least half an hour of quality time with my beloved characters. I set myself small goals. I spent the evening mulling over the ideas I had collated and started to imagine what my characters might do. I planned the next steps in order of ideas that engaged me, not necessarily in the right order of the story, but starters in writing that would get the juices flowing again!

By Wednesday morning my characters had forgiven me and I wrote. Their behaviour made me laugh for hours. Interruptions were tolerated! A nurse would pop in now and again and I would keep their antics safe and close down the file. (I did not know how she would react to my googling ‘types of female waxing’ and I did not have the time or energy to share my writing with anyone else!)

Today is Thursday, one week since the operation. I am feeling positive, I am ready to embrace the future and my writing, for now, is back on track.

I know, a dramatic way of being kicked into touch and getting back to doing what I enjoy… but I guess what I am trying to say is if you love writing, do not give up on it, even if you miss a few days, a couple of weeks or in my case a couple of months! But at the same time ditch the excuses- you either intend to sit down and write that day or you don’t. Make it your ‘me time’, your ‘down time’, your release from the daily grind. As I have said time and time again to my family and friends since being diagnosed with cancer. I need time for me, to do what I want to do. Forget the trivia, it will always be trivia.

When I do kick the bucket, I do not want everyone standing around my eco-friendly coffin saying “Do you remember how neat and tidy Sam’s house was?” I want them to say: “What a girl – she had such a zest for life, she was always doing something interesting”, and just maybe, “wasn’t her novel a great read.”

We have all been rather gloomy of late about the prospects for new writers in these difficult times, but Carolyn Jess-Cooke has proved that a first novel can make it big. After an auction between four major publishers, Piatkus signed a two-book deal with a début novelist.

The first, The Guardian Angel’s Journal, is being pitched as a “super-lead” for 2011.

Emma Beswetherick, Piatkus’s senior editor, bought UK and Commonwealth rights to two novels by Jess-Cooke, for a ‘very significant five-figure sum’.

The novel, described by the publisher as “a stunning work of genre-bending fiction”, is about a 42-year-old woman who dies and then returns as her own guardian angel.

You can read the author’s blog at http://www.therisktakersguide.com/

Quote of the day:

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia - E.L. Doctorow

How to set up a blog - a case history

By Joselyn Morton

I am probably the last person in the world to give advice on how to set up a blog as any slim computer skills I have, are self-taught and pretty shaky. I am not a natural techo. In fact my husband thinks I have too much electricity and this is why some machines react oddly if I get too close to them.
I was persuaded by two well-meaning friends that I should start a blog. This was early June. At this point I had never read a blog. These friends knew our precarious financial situation and were convinced that in no time I would be picking up publishing and film-rights cheques a la ‘Wife in the North’.
One of these two friends emailed the info on blogspot.com and with a huge amount of input from Roger my husband my blog was set up http://allextremelyprecarious.blogspot.com/
I had no desire to reveal the innermost workings of our daily doings in a diary-form blog besides which I knew that the most interesting thing about our lives was our rather incredible friends. I wanted to set up a newsblog. I emailed various friends and suggested things for them to write. I was aware of the audacity of this because once upon a time, people got paid to write and have their photographs used.
I decided that the first of August would be an auspicious day to publish the blog. The look of the blog evolved quite quickly. I decided on a strong rich green for the background. Somehow it seemed a comforting caring colour. The typeface and fonts were decided on and the ‘look’ of the blog was beginning to evolve.
Roger and I have been going through his many years worth of photographs and so I had no trouble finding the first cover shot (bikini-clad girls lying on a beach surrounded by Israeli soldiers).
One friend is working in Kabul and promised to send me pics and words; another has just retired from UN working with refugees, another is a department head at the BBC and another has a precarious life and a great sense of humour.
I didn’t linger on the big picture – how long will friends want to keep sending me stuff. I concentrated on getting the first posting on the blog published on the due date, setting it out properly, rereading for typos. This particular blog template has drawbacks – you can’t lay it out in readiness, once it is laid-out so to speak, it is published. I got incredibly frustrated because the order cannot be changed (or if it can, I have not yet discovered how). I wanted the piece on Iran to appear first and this meant it had to be the piece that goes on last.
My initial friend washed his hands of me – I was being too ambitious. Other blogs only had one person writing them, not numerous contributors. I was breaking all the rules. (in fact I discovered he was wrong. There were other blogs that had lots of contributors).
So far I have been lucky to have interesting material to publish. I have had very good feed-back from friends whose opinions I value. I have had a great feeling of achievement.
I decided to ‘publish’ once a week – deadline Friday midnight so that people can browse through it over the weekend. Since then, every Friday has been choc-a-bloc with other things that could not be put off and so I have found myself in the daft position of being up till 4am determined not to go to bed until I’ve finished it.
I haven’t gone into great detail regarding the actual intricacies of setting up the blog because as Roger succinctly put it, ‘the technical aspects have to be learnt not taught.” Fine by me, gov.
I did have a glancing encounter with wordpressblog. This really tested the friendship with the well-meaning friend. He wanted me to move onto that, even though he was the one who suggested blogspot in the first place. I resisted. He went ahead and moved all my stuff from my first posting onto it, without consulting me. I was aghast because I found wordpress too clinical, too Ikea-clean-lines smart. Also it had his blogname on it which somewhat did my head in..
He was furious when I asked him to dismantle it. It evidently took hours and when I do a google search it still bloody comes up.
I didn’t want a blog that people had to click on a heading before they saw something to read. I wanted people to see something – words, pictures, images and be drawn into reading about it. This happens to me. I get attracted to the written word; to the look of a piece – so to his disgust (my friend’s) I stuck with the bogroll blog. I think it’s ok. When people are scrolling down and eventually get to the piece that they read last week, they stop. Simple.
I have only 3 main gripes
1) how to find out or keep a tally of how many hits I’ve had.
2) how to make the comment writing easier to access (less like having to take travel insurance when booking with ryanair).
3) how to arrange the photos better.

From the BOOKSELLER

The Sun is claiming that bookshops may boycott Katie Price’s forthcoming memoir, because it will be the fourth in five years.

According to today’s issue, a source reportedly from Price’s long-term publisher Random House said: “Bookshop managers are really worried. They fear this latest book could do more harm than good for business and are seriously considering shunning it altogether.

“Booksellers do not want to annoy their customers by putting out yet another autobiography from the same person who has already had three printed.”

Academic bookseller Blackwell told the paper that branches would not be stocking Jordan’s latest effort unless managers specifically requested copies. A spokesman said: “She has done three already. This is not a book we would say to our readers, ‘You must buy’.”

A spokesperson for Waterstone’s added the book would be stocked “if we thought it was the right thing to do… We would give it consideration but I have not heard of any plans to do it yet.”

The book, Standing Out, is not published until 22nd October.

Here at The Oxford Editors we are great fans of Quercus Publishing, so this article in the Bookseller is distressing. However, we are sure that Quercus is going to survive and go from strength to strength.

The article reads:

Quercus Publishing saw its revenue grow by 27% in 2008, but the business plunged to a loss after a sales shortfall with interest payments also doubling over the year, according to results released today (5th June).

As reported in The Bookseller two weeks ago, the company has also confirmed that it has set up a short term working capital facility with its investor the Pentland Group, with £460k already used. This is in addition to the £1.75m it raised from a share issue at the end of 2008. The company also revealed that it had spent £473,866 with literary agency Capel and Land, co-owned by Georgina Capel the wife of its former chairman Anthony Cheetham.

Turnover rose from £8.6m to £10.9m, while operating profit fell to £28,914. However, after interest payments of £314,484 the company made a pretax loss of £280,683. Last year the company made a pretax profit of £154,100, which itself was half what it made in 2006.

Mark Smith, chief executive, said: “The directors are by no means satisfied with these results and have implemented both cost-saving and revenue-generating measures for 2009 to ensure the business is managed in the most effective manner during what could be another challenging year.”

Smith said the loss had come as a direct result of a disruption in the UK marketplace that contributed to a shortfall in its trade revenues. The company had been expecting growth of 40%, with sales passing £12m. The shortfall in sales was exacerbated by foreign exchange losses of £0.21m arising from the volatility of the US dollar; this resulted in a loss for the year of £0.24m.

Of the increased debt and higher interest charge, Smith said it was about “how we are choosing to fund the business, before this it was more equity than debt, but now it is about equal”. Smith declined to reveal how much was available as part of the new funding but said it was “very significant”. He added: “I am now very happy abut the cash situation.”

Under the heading “related party transactions”, the company revealed that it had spent £473,866 with literary agency Capel and Land, up from £388,737 a year earlier. It added: “This supplier is a related party as Georgina Capel, one of the co-owners of the agency is the wife of Anthony Cheetham.” Cheetham was executive chairman of Quercus until November 2008, and abruptly left entirely in February 2009 citing strategic differences. When questioned as to why the information had been provided this year but not in 2008, Smith said that its auditors had decided that the numbers had become “material”. In total, Quercus has paid £1,011,986 to Capel and Land to date. Smith refused to say whether this was an unusual amount for a literary agency to earn from one company.

When questioned about trading in 2009, Smith said: “What I’d say is look at the NielsenBookScan figures so far his year, we are 50% up on the same period last year.”

Smith added: “The economic environment remains volatile, presenting an element of risk and uncertainty for the business in 2009 that the directors are closely managing. That said, we are pleased to report that trading for the first five months of 2009 has met the directors’ expectations, with sales and margins holding up, costs under control and year to date profit on target. We are confident of achieving better results in 2009, but remain watchful and prudent in the current climate.”

Quercus said Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a “standout success”, with the second book in the trilogy published in early 2009, and providing the company with its first number one. The paperback of The Girl who Played with Fire is published in July 2009 and the final instalment hits the stores in October. “We look forward to having all three titles in the marketplace and hope to replicate the success that the Millennium Trilogy has experienced throughout Europe,” Smith commented.

From The Bookseller

Jade title reaches Number One

07.04.09 Philip Stone

Jade Goody’s Jade: Fighting to the End has climbed to the summit of the bestseller lists. With a sale of 33,912 copies through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market last week, it becomes John Blake’s first Official UK Number One since Katie Price’s Being Jordan achieved the feat almost five years ago.

Goody’s re-titled memoir fought off strong competition from high-charting new entries. Wilbur Smith’s Assegai (Macmillan), the fifth book in his third sequence of Courtney thrillers, joins the list in second position, having clocked up 26,051 unit sales last week. Meanwhile, Lee Child’s 12th Jack Reacher thriller, Nothing to Lose (Bantam), joins in fourth, one place behind Marian Keyes’ This Charming Man (Penguin).

During the seven days to 4th April, £29m was spent through BookScan’s TCM, down 0.7% week-on-week but up slightly (0.3%) on the same week last year.

Breakdown

In Original Fiction, Assegai takes top spot from James Patterson’s 8th Confession, while the trade paperback editions of P D James’ The Private Patient (Faber), Maeve Binchy’s Heart and Soul (Orion) and Donna Leon’s About Face (Macmillan) all début in the top 10. Jack Higgins’ A Darker Place (HarperCollins) and Lisa Jewell’s The Truth About Melody Brown (Century) also join the chart for the first time, in 12th and 13th place respectively.

In Mass-market Fiction, This Charming Man climbs back into top spot after a week’s hiatus while Nothing to Lose débuts in third position. Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Penguin) leads another five new entries in the bottom half of the chart.

In Heatseeker Fiction, Tom Knox’ The Genesis Secret (HarperCollins) holds pole position for a second week, with Linda Grants’ The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago) joining the list in second position.

The Hardback Non-fiction chart welcomes six new entries this week, led by Rowland White’s Phoenix Squadron (Bantam Press). The follow-up to the bestselling Vulcan 607 charts one place ahead of former World Wrestling Entertainment champion, Bret Hart’s memoir, The Hitman (Ebury). Narrowly missing out on the Top 20, the latest edition of the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack sold 816 copies last week, but it should have sold zero. Numerous retailes broke the strict embargo, listed as 6th April on The Bookseller Association’s online Embargo Title List.

In Paperback Non-fiction, Jade: Fighting to the End holds top spot for a second week while Australian self-published smash hit, 4 Ingredients, by Kim McCokser and Rachael Bermingham, débuts in 12th place.

Meanwhile, in children’s, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight titles lock out the top four positions for Atom. This week’s only new entry, The Pokémon Spring Activity Annual (Pedigree) makes its début in 20th position.

Friday Project to share profits with authors

The publishing world is at the brink of a revolution and nothing will ever be the same. I have always believed that readers will always prefer a paper book in their hands rather than on some gadget. But, the way we choose these books and how we find them is becoming increasingly internet driven. More interesting still is the way publishers find their authors and the ways they pay them are is changing as this article from The Bookseller shows.

28.01.09 Graeme Neill

The Friday Project has become the first UK publisher to offer all contracts as profit share agreements between it and the author.

The move is similar to a business model followed by Harper’s US imprint HarperStudio. The boutique imprint offers writers a profit sharing model with advances limited to $100,000 (£70,000). However, while not ruling out advances, The Friday Project is planning to avoid paying for the majority of its new titles. Profits will be split between author and publisher once overheads have been covered.

The imprint will also make the majority of its books free to read online as part of a range of new digital initiatives to target new readers. Scott Pack, publisher of The Friday Project, said: “Our profit share contracts will give authors a bigger stake in the success of their books and by making much of our list available for free online we will have direct access to readers, enabling us to generate that all important word of mouth before, during and after publication.”

John Bond, managing director of Press Books, said: “We always intended our investment in The Friday Project to create a laboratory for experimenting with new models for publishing and marketing books in the digital age and I look forward to this coming to fruition in 2009.”

The Friday Project was established in 2004 with the primary aim of finding material on the internet and turning it into books. The publisher went into liquidation in February last year and HarperCollins bought the assets from the administrator

From YouTube to book deal.

I cried when I saw it. And the buzz on the internet that saw 44 million other people click on to see a two-minute clip on YouTube of the reunion between a lion and the men who raised it has translated into a massive publishing revival.

Random House Children’s Books has signed a two-book deal for adaptations of A Lion Called Christian after a clip on YouTube showing the moving reunion of two men and their lion, Christian, after he had been released into the wild, created massive world-wide interest.

The book, A Lion Called Christian, by Anthony Bourke and John Rendall, was published 35 years ago and is long out of print. Due to overwhelming response to the story of Christian, Anthony Bourke and John Rendall have updated the book.

Random House will be publishing a photographic book for young readers, as well as a re-written version of the adult book for children aged 7-11, having acquired world language rights.

Yearling will publish the young fiction edition next April and the colour picture book by Doubleday is due in the Spring of 2010. Transworld have the world rights to the adult version, to be published by Bantam Press in March 2009.

It’s just amazing the new power of people to influence the decisions made by publishers, with the Internet fast turning into the new frontier.

See the story yourself on YouTube - bet you’ll cry too.

I recently asked the CEO of a major publisher how his editors go about choosing books to publish; the reply was as they say ‘like the curate’s egg’ good in parts. Of course celebrity books are top of the list, but ‘only good ones’, he told me. Guess that depends on the ghostwriter. But I was surprised to hear that this publisher and an increasingly growing number of top players are looking to the Internet for their new titles, and it doesn’t matter if the book has been published online in full already.

“If it is getting a lot of hits and the reputable bloggers are talking about it, then we are interested in buying and publishing it,” he assured me.

Now Harper Collins has gone that extra mile and set up its own site where writers can post their books and HC claim the most popular get to avoid the ‘slush pile’ blues and get in front of a HarperCollins editor.

HC heralds authonomy as a new community for writers, readers and publishers where you can “Get Read. Get Noticed. Get Published.’

The website says “authonomyTM is a brand new community site for writers, readers and publishers, conceived and developed by book editors at HarperCollins. We want to flush out the brightest, freshest new literature around - we’re glad you stopped by.

If you’re a writer, authonomy is the place to show your face – and show off your work on the web. Whether you’re unpublished, self-published or just getting started, all you need is a few chapters to start building your profile online, and start connecting with the authonomy community.

And if you’re a reader, blogger publisher or agent, authonomy is for you too. The book world is kept alive by those who search out, digest and spread the word about the best new books – authonomy invites you to join our community, champion the best new writing and build a personal profile that really reflects your tastes, opinions and talent-spotting skills.

The publishing world is changing. One thing’s for sure: whether you’re a reader, writer, agent or publisher, this is an exciting time for books. In our corner of HarperCollins we’ve been given a chance to do something a little different.’

Change indeed, but will we really start seeing bright new talent emerging? We hope so.

The Oxford Editors Literary Agency

We are delighted to announce that we have taken on a number of experienced authors to be represented directly by us and are talking to a limited number of others.
The Oxford Editors will still operate as a scout for agents throughout the UK and the USA, but will also represent a selected number of authors as their agent.
Authors we represent need not have used any of our other services.

However, if we receive unsolicited manuscripts we will charge a reading fee of £150, and cannot guarantee that we will accept anyone who approaches us in this way as a client.
Authors we represent:

William Alliss

Mariam Davanlou

Taylor Richardson