Here’s a sneak preview of a fictional pub sign that might accompany something in the next Swan Supping — nifty use of my limited Photoshopping skills.
Charlie’s Artwork
How to Get Published — Just Get Your Own TV Show
- Bestsellers
This autumn, more than any I can remember before, the book market seems to be dominated by television spin offs. This photo shows the promotional titles at W.H.Smith in High Wycombe. Look very carefully (the photo is compressed) and you’ll see a few novels — Dan Brown, Stig Larsson, Patricia Cornwell. However, virtually everything else is promoting a TV programme or personality: Jamie Oliver, Delia, Peter Kay, Ozzy Osborne, Jack Dee, Ant and Dec, Chris Evans, John Barrowman, Hairy Bikers, Leona Lewis, Al Murray, Harry Hill, Gordon Ramsay, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond — AND James May has a book out. It’s a relief to get one by a sports personality whose TV connection is almost incidental — the legendary Freddie Flintoff. I couldn’t begudge Jo Brand’s place on the shelf with her book having the title — ‘Look Back in Hunger’ — much wittier than Dawn French’s ‘Dear Fatty’.
So the advice in terms of getting a book published is obvious — just get yourself a hit TV series first. That might be slightly preferable to the route favoured by the highly naturally talented author of Standing Out , which will no doubt be a huge blockbuster this year.
Horny Goat Weed: All Human Life Under the Sun?
I’ve just started a creative writing course at City University, slap bang between New Labour trendy Islington and genuinely trendy Clerkenwell. It promises to be a very good course. We were told of the illustrious achievements of previous students, who have novels in various stages of publication and many of whom have agents. There are 14 students on the course and they seem a fantastically varied and friendly bunch. One of the many things the tutor encouraged us to do was keep an eye on the ‘News in Brief’ stories in the papers as sources of inspiration. This put me in mind of this bizarre story that I found on the Sun’s website (via Google News I hasten to add). I quite liked this as it lends credibility to an idea I’d had before for one of the climatic scenes in the plot of my putative novel. (I don’t think I’d stretch the reader’s credulity to say that the character was a poet who’d previously eulogised the husband in question. But truth is stranger than fiction.