0 Book Fair Nightmares - Clémentine Beauvais

The Paris Book Fair has just ended and, on the French closed Facebook group for authors that I'm a part of, there's been some nostalgic recollections of cult moments from book fairs.

By 'cult moments', I mean those moments when you'd really like to... not be at the book fair.

Because, of course, book-signing is HUGE FUN, especially the French way (2 days on end, for 3 to 5 hours at a time with a lunch break)... You know that time when you're behind your table and you've been signing for hours and your hand hurts like hell? No? Me neither. 

A Book Fair

Here are the 'classics', that everyone's had to endure:

- 'Hi!'
[You, hopeful]: 'Hi!'
'Where's the toilet?'

- 'Hi!'
[You, still hopeful]: 'Hi!'
'Do you know if [famous author] is coming?'

- 'Can you sign this book for my son?'
'I can't, it's not mine, it's Harry Potter.'
'Oh, it doesn't matter, just sign it, will you?'
(alternative version: 'Oh, don't worry, J.K. Rowling will never know!')

- 'Can you draw a little something?'
'I can't, I'm a writer.'
'Can't you try?'

Book fairs are stressful and awkward. You're there with your piles of books, and people drift by, and conspicuously avoid looking at you in the eye when they pick up your book and decide that they DEFINITELY do NOT want it. Or, that they do NOT want their child to have it.

'Put that down!!! Can't you tell it's a girls' book?'

I could have killed that woman, but I only had books and books make terrible weapons.

Sometimes they say, 'I'll have a look around and come back'.
--> HA no you won't.

Sometimes you manage to talk to them a bit and try to handsell your own book (epitome of cringe):

'So it's about three teenage girls, it's a road trip but kind of a maturity tale too [dammit, in which pocket of my brain did I put my elevator pitch?]'
The Parent: 'Hmm. Do you have something a bit like Cherub? My daughter only reads things like Cherub. Do you have a saga? Your books aren't very big. She only likes big books.'

Life is just great right then.

Oh and that:

'NOOOOO I don't want the lady to sign the book!!!' 'But my darling, it's the only reason we bought it!'

There's also those book fairs when you're sitting next to Big Name Author so you kind of become the crowd control person for their line. Don't push! Sir, you're skipping the queue. It's that way. Yes, he's here until ten past. No, he's run out of that picturebook, but there's this one too, which is great too.  Wait, why am I promoting his picturebooks? He hasn't even talked to me!

ZOMG Big Name Author is talking to me!
'Hey, Capucine... Clémence... Célestine... whatever your name is, do you have another Sharpie?'

Then there's the times when you're sitting next to a sleazeball of an author in mid-life crisis who spends most of the very empty afternoon giving outfit suggestions.

'You see, Clementine, this morning I was looking at girls in the harbour and I realised I really like nude back tops. Wouldn't you wear a nude back top?'

How many more hours of this again?

The kids who want you to sign their school diary. Their pencil-cases. Their hands. A Post-it note. Because they are 100% cute, you do it, dying a little bit inside. 'Don't you want to buy the book?' you ask feebly. So feebly that they don't hear you at all and go spend their book voucher on a Frozen book of stickers.

'things we sign'

That woman who stared at me for ten seconds. Ten seconds is a long time to be stared at. And then:
'How old are you?'
(With 'tu', not 'vous'. T'as quel âge, toi? Written language can't convey the disdain.)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But then there's...

Those book fairs which are right by Lake Geneva or the Atlantic ocean.

Those book fairs when kids come back to meet you because they've read the books and studied them in class and you went to their school for a visit.

bonus point if their face is actually an emoticon

 

 

 

 

 

Authors you meet and who are NOT huge sleazeballs and who make these long afternoons and mornings seem very short.

Insa Sané

Zad et Didier

And who are talented illustrators, and play the ukulele, and are actually Keith Richards.

François Place

Nathalie Tual

Keith Richards. Maybe.

And people who bring you pastries or coffee purely out of sympathy GOD I LOVE THESE PEOPLE THANK YOU 

There's always an 'end-of-summer-camp' atmosphere when book fairs are over. We say goodbye, thank you for the good times, I still owe you a drink, really nice to have met you, finally, really nice to see you again, looking forward to when that book you were telling me about comes out. See you soon at another book fair, maybe! No doubt. But probably in a year or two. You'll have had that baby by then... yes, hopefully! Will the next book fair be as disastrous? I never want to do another book fair. Will the next book fair be as amazing? I don't want to go home! How many books did you sell? ... Ha, me neither.

It's exhausting, hilarious, terrifying and nightmarish. The next one for me is in less than two weeks' time. Can't wait.

_____________________________________

Clementine Beauvais writes in French and English. She blogs here about children's literature and academia.

Detail: Book Fair Nightmares - Clémentine Beauvais

0 Thank You to the Bloggers - Eve Ainsworth

On Saturday I had the pleasure of attending the first ever UKYA Blogger awards. I was so exited to be going, not just because it was an excuse to drink wine and mingle with fellow book lovers, but also because it gave me a chance to thank some of the fantastic people that have been supporting and championing my book this year.

It can be so difficult being an author, never mind a debut one. You start to doubt whether people will enjoy your book, let alone talk about it. You worry that once published, it will disappear into the ether, never to be seen again.

And then wonderful things happen. A blogger will tweet that they've read it. They will talk about your cover. Share your reviews. Add you to their TBR list.

As time passed, I began to realise just what a supportive team the UKYA blogging community is. These guys love books and they love championing them.They are the foundations of what is a very happy and vibrant scene.

Saturday was a fantastic opportunity for me and others to thank these guys for their commitments and passion. There was a great collection of people there - authors such as James Dawson, Jonathan Stroud, Lisa Williamson, Abi Elphinstone and Keris Stainton, Publishers were also there, presenting and sponsoring awards - and of of course, so many bloggers were there - enthusiastic and welcoming as ever. I have to add that this whole event was arranged by the wonderful Andy Robb, who deserves congratulations on bringing this all together.

                                                        And the winners are,,,,,



Lots of awards were presented and each was greatly deserved. Winners included YA Yeah Yeah, Pewter Wolf, Dark Readers, Winged Reviews, Mile Long Bookshelf, Sister Spooky, Queen of Contemporary, Serendipity Reviews, Wondrous reviews and Tales of Yesterday.

But the best thing about the evening was having the opportunity to thank each blogger in person, because I had lots to thank them for.

I hope this night is the first of many more to come.

Detail: Thank You to the Bloggers - Eve Ainsworth

0 Child Poets - Clementine Beauvais

‘The ink was in the baby, he was bound to write a tale

So he wrote the first of stories with his little fingernail’

Nathalia Crane was nine years old when, in 1924, she wrote ‘The First Story’ and many other poems, published in a collection called The Janitor’s Boy. She was one of many child poets in the 1920s, which saw a spate of precocious poetry and prose in the UK and the US. In the 19th century already, a cult of poetic precocity in children had erupted with the rediscovered works of Marjory (/Marjorie) Fleming, a little Scottish girl who wrote everyday from the age of six and conveniently died before she was nine, in 1811 - embodying forever the vision of glorious, pure and doomed childhood genius for the Victorians (this is a great article on the subject). 

a rather haunting sketch of Marjorie Fleming by (?)Isa Keith

I’m currently looking at those works by child poets and at the adult discourse which developed around them, and it’s fascinating to see the extent to which such works were simply not allowed to be on their own: they were relentlessly explained, explored, excused, by the adults who read, published and critiqued them (another great article).

We get, of course, the usual amount of ‘how cute they are!’, and the associated Romantic claims that they were ‘close to nature’, ‘close to God’, ‘close to universal truth’. Not coincidentally, references to classics of children’s literature recur when critics analyse those poems: they talk of Alice in Wonderland and Rudyard Kipling, and James Matthew Barrie prefaced a novel by nine-year-old Daisy Ashford. This was around the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of children’s literature, at a time when children and childhood already had cult status; the verbal abilities of the precocious poets gave hope that their word might be interpreted, and ‘teach’ adults about the beyondness to which childhood supposedly had access.

But those poets were also thought of as dramatically unstructured and lacking technical skill. In 1926, an academic reviews ‘some child poets’ and gives Marjorie Fleming the kind of review anyone would cringe to see written about oneself:

‘An affectionate little soul, with a real joy in nature, and a strangely precocious taste for books, she found her surroundings prosy, though her heart expressed itself in bursts of pitifully inadequate song.’

He goes on to expose Marjorie Fleming’s ‘limitations’ by indicating that she often invents words to make up for a lack of rime (heaven forbid!) and:

‘Another shift which she found useful was the introduction of a purely irrelevant line:

At supper when his brother sat

I have not got a rhyme for that.’

Purely irrelevant indeed. Thankfully, George Shelton Hubbell reassures us that young Shelley was also a ‘juvenile blunderer’ in matters of poetry.

A strong concern of much of the general audience at the time was whether the children were actually writing those poems, or if adults were sneakily doing so. A passionate correspondence developed in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1919, concerning little Hilda Conkling, who dictated poems to her mother:

‘Dear Poetry: Could you not give your readers more explicit information as to just how those poems of Hilda Conkling’s are done: To what extent does her mother select, rearrange and give form? Is it all actually improvised as given?… What a delightful little genius!… (E. Sapir.)’

‘I do not change words in Hilda’s poems,’ replied her mother, ‘nor alter her word-order; I write down the lines as rhythm dictates. She has made many poems which I have had to lose because I could not be certain of accurate transcription.’

The ‘accurate transcription’ of childly thoughts, the ‘authenticity’ of the child’s poetry needed to be ascertained at all costs, to the extent that Nathalia Crane, perhaps the most controversial of all child poets, was asked to produce a poem in the same room as a journalist. 

Nathalia Crane was quite unique in that her poetry got published in a newspaper without the editor’s knowledge that it was a child’s. The editor, Edmund Leamy, wrote an afterword to her collection, in 1924, in which he talked about his astonishment when he discovered the ‘imposture’:

My surprise is excusable. So many times I had received “poems” from youngsters who were careful to give their ages in addition to their names; so often I had received visits from doting parents or relatives requesting publication of verses by their children or sisters or cousins that I never dreamed any child would ever submit any work from his or her pen without adding the words “Aged — years”. But little Nathalia was the exception — and there was nothing in her poems that I received to indicate her age. The poems bought were accepted on their merits and on their merits alone.

‘On their merits alone’, with no ‘child-loving’ bias (to quote Kincaid’s famous study); this was, therefore, proper poetry. Yet it made adults feel relentlessly uncomfortable. Her poetry was more structured, more sexualised and more aware of the constraints of the adult world than other child poets, and adults didn’t know how to tackle it. Louis Untermeyer, in 1936, prefacing Crane’s new collection ‘Swear by the night’ (she was 22 by then), talks about the uncanny feeling he had when the poet was a little girl: 

‘She was ten and a half years old and she puzzled me. She puzzled me as a person even before she puzzled me as a poet. … There was even then a queerness about her, an almost too pronounced childishness coupled with a curious vocabulary.’

The blending of categories is always troublesome, the difficulty to draw lines between adulthood and childhood always a problem. Adults then, but still now, find it difficult to make sense of moments when the presence to the world of children is felt literally, fully, rather than wrapped in layers of symbols.

Nathalia Crane died in 1998 and I’ll leave you with one of her early poems, because it’s fair, after contributing myself to obscuring the works of those child poets with my own, to let her have the last words. I think the work might still be under copyright, so I'll only put the first stanza here; click to redirect to her collection on the Internet Archive.

LOVE

Now Marjory is seven years

And I am nine and more

We went a-strolling after cream

Into a Flatbush store. ...

_____________________________________

Clementine Beauvais writes in French and English. She blogs here about children's literature and academia.

Detail: Child Poets - Clementine Beauvais

0 Judging a Book....Eve Ainsworth

I have always been a bit fussy when it comes to books. It goes without saying that I have to love the concept and in a lot of cases I'm swayed by recommendations. But what can often make me decide to pick up a book in the first place is the cover. If it is striking, if it grabs my attention - I very often want it, or at least want to know more about it.


So it goes without saying that I was delighted when Scholastic sent me the design for Seven Days. I immediately loved its bright, bold statement and the fact that words, spiteful words from my text, were plastered across it. It represents bullying so well for me. It's a big, bold statement. I was confident that this cover could have impact.

I guess I'd worried a lot about the cover. I really wanted to love it, so it was such a relief to see it. I just wanted to hug the designer behind it (in fact I did at the Scholastic party...!)

It got me thinking just how important cover design can be, and how authors could be blessed or cursed with a cover that they do not like, or do not feel reflects their story.

With this in mind, I spoke to a few authors about their favourite covers and asked what it was about them that made them stand out.

What were their cover stories?

Helen Grant - Urban Legends (Random House)

" I was very pleased this cover because it shows a female (dead?) body but in such a way that it appears almost abstract; you can only see one eye and the line of the face runs diagonally across the cover. I thought that was quite stylish."

    Keren David selected Salvage (Atom Books)

  " I love both the published versions of Salvage. They are very different, but still have lots of impact."

Hilary Freeman selected The Camden Town Tales (Piccadilly Press)

"I love all my Camden Town Tales covers. I think that they appeal to the readership because they are pretty and perfectly targeted."  

Emma Haughton  selected Now You See Me (Usbourne)

'I love this cover because it's so simple, and yet so striking, And that gorgeous zingy green!'

Sheena Wilkinson selected Still Falling (Little Island)

"What I loved was the feel of the cover. I couldn't in a million years have said what I wanted but when I saw what the designer had done I just thought, yeah, that's it. I wanted the book to have a sexy grown up feel which I think it does. My last books all featured horses and I really wanted this one to feel like a departure which it does. "

Caroline Green  selected Hold Your Breath (Piccadilly Press)

"I loved the metallic look that gave it an underwater feel. And the colours are gorgeous."

It's fascinating looking at different front covers and wondering what the author felt about each one. I guess when an area such as design is taken out of their hands, it's even more important that it works, that they connect to it.

What front covers do you especially like? Have you ever picked up a book initially because of the design?

I know I have...

Eve x

Detail: Judging a Book....Eve Ainsworth

0 Invisible boundaries and social media - C.J. Busby

A few weeks ago, a young American first-time author, Kathleen Hale, unleashed a bit of a social media storm by publishing a piece in The Guardian about the increasingly vexed online relationship between authors and bloggers. The article (here) which ran in the Saturday magazine, detailed how she became obsessed by one of her online critics, a blogger called Blythe Harris. When Hale engaged with Blythe's criticism's of her book (despite the many, many warnings she received that authors should not answer back to bad reviews), Blythe and many of her fellow bloggers apparently turned on her and Hale found herself labelled a BBA - a badly behaved author. For Hale (and I should emphasise that we only get Hale's perspective on what happened here), Blythe was wilfully malicious, ruining the reception of her book, and using her clique of friends and fellow bloggers to trash Hale's reputation. In return, Hale details her own increasing obsession with Blythe - an obsession which rapidly moved from what she termed 'light stalking' (gathering any and every detail she could from Blythe's online presence) to what by any standards is just plain stalking - using subterfuge to gain access to Blythe's real-life identity, workplace address and home address.

It's a sorry tale, and I'm not going to rehash the Hale case here, but it did make me think about the business of social media, writers, bloggers and boundaries. Authors, as Hale notes, are encouraged to get online and have a social media presence, but their natural audience, book bloggers and fans, seem quite often to resent authors turning up on their turf and, as they see it, throwing their weight around. A while ago, as a bit of a newbie author, I brushed up against a similar controversy when I noticed an online discussion on a book blogger's site about one of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series.

I'm a bit of a fan of this series, and was interested to see that the author had stopped by and commented, explaining where some of the features the blogger was discussing had come from in the writing process. It was (I thought) a perfectly polite contribution, and not in the least critical of her analysis, simply adding a bit of background information. But it caused an immediate storm, in which I was very slightly caught up, having added a comment of my own about the strange ways the writing process worked. For some of the following commentators, writers were simply not welcome on a book blogging site - they were guilty of abusing the power they had as authors to dominate a space that was not for them. Book blogs and fan sites should be considered a space for fans and book lovers to freely express themselves and not somewhere authors should feel free to gatecrash.

It was all resolved fairly amicably - Ben Aaronovitch backed down with a bit of grumbling, and I apologised profusely for being new to all this and not understanding the rules of the game. But the Hale article did bring this experience back to me.

What both examples make clear, I think, is that engaging in discussion with other people on social media is now the easiest thing in the world to do, but that it's also potentially perilous - what seems to be a simple opening gambit in a conversation can quickly become a reason for several people you've never met to decide they hate you. And thinking about why this is, made me realise that it's partly about the lack of social clues we have online.

Picture this: an author walks into a cafe, orders a coffee, and then realises that at the table next to him are six women, clearly friends, all discussing why they don't really like his new book. He would have to be completely mad or utterly self-obsessed to lean across and say, "Excuse me, ladies, that point you've just made is very interesting, but as the author, I'd have to say you've misunderstood my intention...." More likely, he'd hide behind a newspaper, or slink out. It's not his place to push into a group which is clearly bounded by longstanding interactions and mutual exchange of opinions. On the web, though, it's hard to see those boundaries, easier to think this is a discussion open to anyone who happens to wander past.

We've probably all had the experience of adding comments on a forum discussion, only to have what we've said utterly ignored as the next commentator simply replies to the one before you, and the next one carries on as if you never said anything. It feels like a snub (it is a snub) - but if this were real life, the group discussing this burning issue would be that bunch of students who always occupy the table in the corner of the canteen, looking daggers at anyone who even thinks about sitting next to them - and we wouldn't be in the least surprised if they ignored our comment. (We'd almost certainly never make it in the first place.)

Would you interrupt the conversation?

As social animals, we have built up over generations the ability to detect the smallest social clues about other people and groups around us. The kinds of interaction we engage in with other people are largely determined by our previous interactions with them, their status as friends or family or work colleagues. Even with total strangers we can use visible clues like dress, body language, expression, context, to judge what is or isn't appropriate. All these help us to 'see' the boundaries that we would be transgressing and the trouble we could be causing if we were to be, for example, inappropriately intimate or aggressive or opinionated.

The trouble with social media is these clues are just not there. We've only had access to this multitude of potential conversations with strangers  for a very short time, and people appear on it as little more than speech. Speech which is devoid of accents, of voice, of clues about who this person is. It's like wandering in a dark fog, listening to many voices all talking at random - but the people behind the voices are invisible. So we have to make guesses about what kinds of people they are, and whether we are gatecrashing through an invisible boundary, or striking up a conversation with someone genuinely interested in talking to us.

Those speaking to each other on a forum, a blog, on Goodreads, can appear as simply a bunch of individuals interested in the same topic, a bunch of reasonable, open individuals who would welcome a newcomer to their midst. Sometimes that is exactly what they are. But sometimes, the invisible boundaries are as fierce as barbed wire, and we cross them at our peril.

The way invisible boundaries are so difficult to negotiate sometimes makes me want to give up on all forms of online interaction. Like Liz Kessler, who posted recently about social media on ABBA (here), I have considered just ditching all of it in favour of interactions in real life only. But, in the end, I don't, because so far I've managed to negotiate those boundaries more or less unscathed, and in the process I've 'met' some really brilliant people (some of whom I've gone on to really meet).

The fact is, most people on social media ARE open, engaged, reasonable and friendly, and, if you transgress an invisible boundary, they are usually polite enough to just inform you gently that you're in the wrong place. But I do think it's important to be aware that just because those boundaries are invisible, doesn't mean they are not there - and when you find a clear notice that says "Authors (or whoever) are Not Welcome Beyond this Point", it probably pays to respect it.

C.J. Busby writes funny, fast-paced fantasy for children aged 7-12. Her latest books, Dragon Amber, is published by Templar.

www.cjbusby.co.uk

@ceciliabusby

Detail: Invisible boundaries and social media - C.J. Busby