This afternoon I received a request from the Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries for five copies of Speak Its Name – one each for the Bodleian Library, the Cambridge University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales and Trinity College Dublin. I have duly ordered these and asked for them to be sent straight to said agency.
I’ve already sent a copy to the British Library. I walk through the forecourt of the actual British Library building in London on my way to work every day, but sadly I couldn’t just drop a copy through the letterbox as I passed; I had to post it to Yorkshire.
It doesn’t feel quite as much of a milestone as getting the ISBNs did, but it does contribute to the general sense of having written a real book. The Bod et al are very welcome to their copies.
Book… Nook… Kobo… Messing around with words at King’s Cross station
Speak Its Name is now available on Kobo and on the Nook. And that, so far as I know, is the lot. I’ve updated the page for the book with links to the purchase pages on all channels that I’m aware of.
If you have read the book and feel like leaving a review on any of those pages you feel would be appropriate, I would be delighted. The same goes for Goodreads, LibraryThing, BookCrossing or anything else of that ilk.
This is not a Bristol VR. This is a photo of two interesting buses taken from the back of another interesting bus – but then I would say that…
I feel slightly guilty about Peter. In the blurb he’s described as a ‘bells-and-smells bus-spotter’, but because I lost a lot of his point of view in the great Lydia take-over, he hasn’t ended up with very much bus-spotting.
So here he is, with Georgia and Olly, preparing to graduate and leave Stancester for ever, and getting distracted by what’s coming round the corner…
‘I can’t believe,’ Georgia said, ‘that this is the last time we’re going to the Black Swan. Together, I mean. I’ll probably go to it quite a lot next year, but it won’t be with you guys.’
‘Yes, well, to all times there is a season and -‘ Peter broke off abruptly. ‘… Oh, for God’s sake, will you look at that?’
Georgia and Olly followed the direction of his glare, and saw nothing out of the ordinary.
‘Look at what?’ Georgia asked.
‘Over there – just coming round the corner of Dorchester Road.’
Olly ventured, ‘It’s a bus?’
‘Yup,’ Peter said.
Olly raised his sunglasses to see better. ‘And? It’s just a bus.’
‘My point entirely. It is a thoroughly boring bus. It is a Bristol VR; it was probably in service up until five years ago; and some idiot is taking it to a historic vehicle rally. What is the bloody point of that?’
‘I don’t wish to encourage you,’ Olly said, ‘but how on earth can you tell?’
‘Well, you can tell by the name on the side that it comes from the other side of the country. Also, it has what I think is its life history blu-tacked to the window. Also, there is something much more interesting following it through the traffic lights there.’
‘That’s another bus,’ Georgia told him.
‘Yes, but it’s about forty years older.’
Georgia and Olly looked at each other. ‘How,’ Georgia asked, ‘have we been harbouring a bus-spotter in our midst for three long years, and not known about it?’
Olly shrugged. ‘I believe it’s an occupational requirement for a vicar to have a morbid obsession with some form of public transport. He’s probably been mugging up on it so he can get through the bishop assessment thing. Did you never see The Titfield Thunderbolt?’
Georgia laughed. ‘Oh – yes. Yes, it all makes sense now. I bet there’s a test. But buses?’
‘Trains are more usual, I will grant you. When I was at school the Dean – the current Dean, not the one who left in disgrace – no, I’ll stop there, or we’ll never get off the topic. But I think buses are allowed.’
‘Actually,’ Peter said, with sorely wounded dignity, ‘my granddad was a bus conductor. On the Routemasters.’
‘Not the granddad who was a vicar?’ Georgia said, suspiciously.
‘No. The other one.’
‘Did the one who was a vicar like trains?’
‘I don’t know,’ Peter said. ‘Bit of a pity if he did, because I think his parish got Beechinged in the sixties.’
‘Oh, well,’ Georgia said, ‘Routemasters are cool, I guess.’
‘Thank you,’ Peter said graciously.
‘Can we get some lunch now?’ Olly asked.
‘I was waiting for you,’ Peter said. ‘And there doesn’t appear to be anything else interesting coming, so I’m perfectly happy with the idea.’
This is another question that I get asked a lot and, now that there is an option to get it on Kindle, it feels reasonable to answer it.
In terms of how much money each option brings in, I get the most from somebody buying the ebook from Lulu (£3.40), and the least from someone buying the paperback from Amazon (about 50p). Everything else hovers around the middle, with a range from £1.73 to £2.70.
However, it’s all more complicated than that. Sales on Amazon make me less money, but they move me up Amazon’s ranks. (Whether that makes any appreciable difference in the real world I don’t know, but I quite like watching the numbers.) I don’t much like buying stuff from Amazon myself, but I know that it’s very convenient.
I make more from an ebook than I do from a paperback – but the existence of the paperback means that it’s far more likely that someone will pick the book up, like the look of it and order one for themselves. If somebody found it in a charity shop I’d be delighted. I am not one of those authors who gets upset by the idea that more than one person might read the same copy of the same book.
My only answer, then, is going to be ‘whatever works best for you’. What I lose on the swings I make on the roundabouts, and anyway, writing isn’t my day job, and probably won’t ever be. I’m already making more per copy than a conventionally published author (the pay-off, of course, being that I’m selling fewer of them). Buy the book in whatever way is least hassle for you, read it in whatever fashion is easiest for you, and pass it on to whomsoever you like – unless the terms and conditions attached to your ebook reader exclude that possibility, of course.
Speak Its Name is now available on Kindle. My apologies for the delay. Some people, I know, have already given up and run the .epub through a converter. Lulu’s support team say that this delay is par for the course; given this, I may consider taking future books straight to Kindle, though it would be an extra layer of hassle that I don’t particularly want to deal with.
I’ve also set up an author page on Amazon. There isn’t – and won’t be – much there that you can’t find on this blog, but if you’re using your Amazon account to follow authors that’s where I am.
I’d like to apologise for the continued non-appearance of the book on Kindle and Kobo. I’ve emailed Lulu Support this morning in the hopes that they’ll be able to unstick whatever’s got stuck. I’ll keep you updated.
Still, a month isn’t so long to wait, compared to some things. It’s my cousin’s sixth birthday today. He was born in 1992.
If I had a page of Frequently Asked Questions (I might some day – who knows?) this one would be at the top of it. And I always umm and ahh a bit when I answer it.
There are two answers, really.
In the autumn of 2007 I was writing about six people whose lives are affected by a political complication in which they are passively and tangentially involved. The point of view was passed around the six of them. They had their own views. They expounded upon their own views at great length.
That was about as interesting as it sounds, and I picked it up and put it down several times over the next few years. I restarted it completely in 2011. It got to about 95,000 words of scenes that worked reasonably well on their own, but lacked any coherency or interest when stitched together. Several times I decided that it was boring and gave up with it. I wrote down scenes when they occurred to me, and after a while they stopped occurring to me. By 2012 I had abandoned it.
Then Synod happened. Synod happened, and I learned how it felt to be comprehensively screwed over by a Church that I loved, that I had no intention of leaving, but which had made it very plain that it didn’t want me. It hurt. It hurt a lot.
I wrote a blog post but, like the Very Hungry Caterpillar, I was still hungry. No, not hungry. The other one. Angry. And I had a character sitting around in my head. She was the love interest of one of the original six. I didn’t have anything written from her point of view. But she was a character who’d been comprehensively screwed over by the Church she loved. So, having written what I felt like, I wrote what she felt like.
I was still angry into the new year. I ranted about it to anyone who would listen. I even used the story of Synod in a training exercise at work, where we were asked to give a brief verbal presentation on something we felt strongly about, because, my God, I felt strongly about that. And I kept writing.
Ninety-five per cent of what is now Speak Its Name was written after that Synod vote. (The remaining five per cent is mostly chapter headings and background infodumps, with the odd scene in which it was easy to flip the point of view.)
Now that I’d started writing Lydia from her own point of view, it became obvious that this was her story. I remembered a truism from somewhere: the hero of a story is the person who changes the most over the course of it. That was definitely Lydia.
Over the next two years, she took over the book. The six original viewpoints became three, and Lydia was one of them. From Georgia, Peter, Olly, Colette, Will and Becky, the focus shrank to Colette, Peter and Lydia.
Eventually I realised that Lydia had to be the sole voice, that the whole book had to be written from her point of view. This was not a welcome realisation. In early versions, her sexuality was the big reveal at the half-way point. It was meant to be a huge surprise to the reader and to all the rest of the cast. I had no idea how to write a character who wouldn’t even come out to herself until half-way through the plot.
I had another problem. The political plot was tedious. Too many committee meetings; too much talking; too many petty differences that took too much explaining.
Fortunately, moving everything that wasn’t from Lydia’s point of view into a separate document clarified things considerably. It cut out most of the committee meetings, not to mention a sub-plot about a pregnancy scare and a rant about Bristol VRs (buses, if you’re wondering). I read through what was left and worked out what was missing. I found that I could rework existing scenes to fill some of the gaps. Some of them had to be written from scratch.
After that, all I had to do was sort out the first half of the book. Go back to act 1 and place the gun on the mantelpiece so that when we get to act 3 nobody’s surprised when it gets fired. Scatter a few bullets around the place. Rewrite pretty much everything, because I hadn’t been letting anybody see inside Lydia’s head, and so there were huge chunks missing. After all, I’d had to take huge chunks out.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting some of the deleted scenes on here. If you’re wondering how Will came to live in such a dangerously liberal household as 27 Alma Road, what Becky told the Equalities Officer, or what Peter actually thinks about Bristol VRs, well, you’ll find out…
I am giving away one of these books. Scroll to the bottom of the post for details of how to enter.
A novel about being queer and Christian at university – about faith, love, doubt and integrity. Read more here, or scroll to the bottom of the post for the giveaway.
Self-publishing in the nineties was grim. I know because both my parents did it. ‘Nobody’ wants to read about queer Christians now, and ‘nobody’ wanted to read about the physiological aspect of childbirth, or look at pictures of buses with passers-by getting in the way of the fleet number then. Doing It Yourself runs in the family. The kitchen table was perpetually shrouded in pencilled layouts for the next coffee table bus book, or hand-drawn diagrams of the hormone process in childbirth.
There was a corridor you couldn’t get through because of the huge bale of bubble wrap. There was a stack of corrugated cardboard that was taller than I was.
And there were books. There were books in the shed; there were books under the stairs. I’m pretty sure there were books in my brother’s bedroom.
There are still books. My parents have moved house four times between them since the last self-published book came out, and I have tripped over cardboard boxes of The Girl In The Street or shrink-wrapped bales of Childbirth Unmasked in every one of those houses.
The lovely thing about Lulu is not having to bother with all that. So far as I’m concerned, everything involved in the publishing process has happened within a square metre footprint. There’s me, and there’s my computer. If someone wants a book, they order it from Lulu (or, as of this lunchtime, Amazon) and someone who isn’t me gets it printed and posts it. It doesn’t go anywhere near me, and I have no boxes to deal with.
(The writing is a different matter, happening as it quite often does at seventy miles an hour, or in a park, or, for one blissful week, in a huge dormitory that I had all to myself. But the exercise books and the archaic Asus Eee on which I actually do the writing take up a lot less space.)
Having said all that, I discovered today that possessing a modest stack of books with my name on is a very good feeling. A lot of the books in the picture have been posted to the people named on the acknowledgements page, and the British Library, and other worthies. But not all of them. For a start, one of them is destined for one of you blog readers.
Leave a comment on this post to enter the giveaway. On 19 February I will use a random number generator to select one of the comments, and I will send a paperback copy of Speak Its Name to the person who left it. No matter where they are in the world.
Kathleen Jowitt 