I have long known that there is a market out there for signed (but not dedicated!) first editions of my novels. Indeed, there are dealers who rush to buy the hardbacks as they come out and for whom I am more than happy to sign and write onto each title page a unique to them special line, such as "Meet Simon Fonthill," or "Charge the Guns."
On those rare occasions when I am suffering from Writer's Block (I am lucky that these really are rare moments - more than compensated, however, by my ever-present bad back and creaky knees), I go on-line and browse through Abebooks, the second hand book site, to see what my first editions are fetching on the market on that day.
At the moment, for instance, I see that PM Books, of St Clair Shores, MI, USA, is offering a signed first edition of my first novel "The Horns of the Buffalo" for £856.87. For an incomplete collection of my works, James N.Beal, of Toronto, Canada, is asking £951.87. This is all as thrilling, of course, as vicarious sex, in that I don't get a penny from these sales.
I am not, however, complaining about the existence of this strange and rather parasitic under-market. It is, after all, grist to the mill and hopefully does extend one's readership. But it has set me thinking about the new wave of electronic books and the lively debate about whether the Kindles will eventually lead to the demise of books as we know them.
I am left with one conclusion. These handy little readers must surely bring about the end of the signed, first edition trade. How can you sign a Kindle?
Sunday, 20 March 2011
Tuesday, 8 March 2011
FAT OR WHAT?
Just back from a brief holiday in the USA - it's most southern bit, Key West, which sticks out into the Carribean, or Gulf of Mexico, or the Atlantic Ocean, depending on which way you face. I've returned with a jumble of impressions, as I always do when I come home across the Atlantic: the high standard of living (well, I was on holiday....), the warmth and friendliness of most Americans, the banality of the television programmes, the fact that their cars are now just the same size as ours, and so on.
This time, however, the most abiding impression was of size. Everyone seemed so fat! Bottoms overhung bar stools like bags of wheat, middle age paunches seemed to start with college school kids and seven out of ten women seemed to have legs of mutton for upper arms. Hotel beds only came in two sizes: king and queen. It seems you were expected to be fat.
The reason was easy to find. Food served in restaurants comes in gigantic proportions, or so it seemed to these two pick-at-it--and-move-it-around-the-plate Limeys. And, of course, convenience food was the easy option everywhere. Just like...well, just like Britain, really.
Indulgence, however, is a well-engrained American habit. This was brought home to me in the pretentious over-priced hotel we stayed in on Miami Beach (designed by a Brit, I'm afraid). What do you think of this for a room service dish: "Beef with sweet potatoes and cranberries; or wild caught salmon with sweet potatoes and blueberries; or chicken with carrots, peas and apples; to go with beefy brown ale or Green Planet bottled water?"
Unexceptional I hear you cry. But for dogs.....?
Ah well. I guess we should bite our lips and remember The Marshall Plan.
This time, however, the most abiding impression was of size. Everyone seemed so fat! Bottoms overhung bar stools like bags of wheat, middle age paunches seemed to start with college school kids and seven out of ten women seemed to have legs of mutton for upper arms. Hotel beds only came in two sizes: king and queen. It seems you were expected to be fat.
The reason was easy to find. Food served in restaurants comes in gigantic proportions, or so it seemed to these two pick-at-it--and-move-it-around-the-plate Limeys. And, of course, convenience food was the easy option everywhere. Just like...well, just like Britain, really.
Indulgence, however, is a well-engrained American habit. This was brought home to me in the pretentious over-priced hotel we stayed in on Miami Beach (designed by a Brit, I'm afraid). What do you think of this for a room service dish: "Beef with sweet potatoes and cranberries; or wild caught salmon with sweet potatoes and blueberries; or chicken with carrots, peas and apples; to go with beefy brown ale or Green Planet bottled water?"
Unexceptional I hear you cry. But for dogs.....?
Ah well. I guess we should bite our lips and remember The Marshall Plan.
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
FONTHILL RIDES AGAIN
Allow me to use this (very) intermittent blog to announce that my long standing hero, Simon Fonthill, together with his feisty wife, Alice, and old comrade "352" Jenkins, have found new foster parents.
After seven novels published by Hodder Headline - and a brief interregnum while I wrote other things - the trio will reappear in 2012 under the banner of Allison & Busby, equally well established London publishers.
Two novels in the series have been commissioned. The first, with the working title of THE WAR OF THE DRAGON LADY, will be set against the Boxer uprising and seige of Peking in the China of 1900 and will be published in hardback in January of 2012, followed by the paperback (and audio and large print) versions some six months later. The second, tentatively titled COMMANDO, will follow with a similar timetable in 2013.
How on earth can the world wait....?!
Allow me to use this (very) intermittent blog to announce that my long standing hero, Simon Fonthill, together with his feisty wife, Alice, and old comrade "352" Jenkins, have found new foster parents.
After seven novels published by Hodder Headline - and a brief interregnum while I wrote other things - the trio will reappear in 2012 under the banner of Allison & Busby, equally well established London publishers.
Two novels in the series have been commissioned. The first, with the working title of THE WAR OF THE DRAGON LADY, will be set against the Boxer uprising and seige of Peking in the China of 1900 and will be published in hardback in January of 2012, followed by the paperback (and audio and large print) versions some six months later. The second, tentatively titled COMMANDO, will follow with a similar timetable in 2013.
How on earth can the world wait....?!
Saturday, 13 November 2010
PLAGIARISM
I see that good old George W has published his memoirs. Did he, I wonder, write them himself? Or did he, like the Teapot Queen, get some minion to put his thoughts down on paper? We shall probably never know, but this question, burning as it is, is not what has driven me to create a rare blog. No, it is the ever present worry for an author that, somehow, in writing his story, he has committed plagiarism.
The question is prompted by the fact that the creators of Fela, the musical which has been wowing 'em on Broadway and which is shortly to open at London's National Theatre, are being sued by writer Carlos Moore for three million pounds. He claims that large chunks of his biography of the Nigerian muscician Fela Kuti were nicked in conceiving the musical.
The courts will have to decide whether the claim is true - ah yes, more money for the lawyers! - and the accusation of lifting "entire portions" of the book would, one would think, take the case out of the realms of accidential plagiarism. It is this area, however, which poses problems for the honest author, particularly the writer of historical fiction.
In thinking about the Fella case, my thoughts went back to my recent re-reading of the Kipling classic story Kim. It is, without a doubt, the best novel that the old Indian Hand ever wrote and, apart from its intrinsic value as a rattling good story, it paints a wonderfully vivid picture of the North West Frontier in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As a result, I read it, along with many other books, when I was researching the period and the territory for my Fonthill novel, The Road to Kandahar.
Dipping into the old classic the other day my eye was caught by a simple but evocative Kipling phrase, "they rode above the bold birches that signalled, as though with a ruler, the end of the flora and fauna...." It sounded familiar. In fact, it sounded dreadfully familiar. Turning to the hard back version of Road, I found it reproduced on page 250, almost word for word.
Had I deliberately copied it from Kim? Surely not - even if the great novel was out of copyright and the Kipling Estate would have been rather unlikely to have sued. No. Somehow the phrase, exactly right for what Kipling was describing, had lodged in my mind and I had trotted it out, as, I thought, freshly burnished from my own imagination.
Perhaps we all do it subconsciously. I only hope that the creators of Fella have as innocent a defence...
The question is prompted by the fact that the creators of Fela, the musical which has been wowing 'em on Broadway and which is shortly to open at London's National Theatre, are being sued by writer Carlos Moore for three million pounds. He claims that large chunks of his biography of the Nigerian muscician Fela Kuti were nicked in conceiving the musical.
The courts will have to decide whether the claim is true - ah yes, more money for the lawyers! - and the accusation of lifting "entire portions" of the book would, one would think, take the case out of the realms of accidential plagiarism. It is this area, however, which poses problems for the honest author, particularly the writer of historical fiction.
In thinking about the Fella case, my thoughts went back to my recent re-reading of the Kipling classic story Kim. It is, without a doubt, the best novel that the old Indian Hand ever wrote and, apart from its intrinsic value as a rattling good story, it paints a wonderfully vivid picture of the North West Frontier in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As a result, I read it, along with many other books, when I was researching the period and the territory for my Fonthill novel, The Road to Kandahar.
Dipping into the old classic the other day my eye was caught by a simple but evocative Kipling phrase, "they rode above the bold birches that signalled, as though with a ruler, the end of the flora and fauna...." It sounded familiar. In fact, it sounded dreadfully familiar. Turning to the hard back version of Road, I found it reproduced on page 250, almost word for word.
Had I deliberately copied it from Kim? Surely not - even if the great novel was out of copyright and the Kipling Estate would have been rather unlikely to have sued. No. Somehow the phrase, exactly right for what Kipling was describing, had lodged in my mind and I had trotted it out, as, I thought, freshly burnished from my own imagination.
Perhaps we all do it subconsciously. I only hope that the creators of Fella have as innocent a defence...
Wednesday, 8 September 2010
"STARSHINE"
I have just got rid of that monkey that has sat on my back for...ooh, decades, I guess. The little devil sat heavily there, for that long, whispering into my ear: "Write about the first world war, you wanker. You talk about it often enough. Write a bloody novel..."
So I have.
It's called STARSHINE and it's weighed in at just over 112,000 words. Not, of course, a novel in the Fonthill series - there are at least another two of these, set firstly in the Boxer Rebellion of China and, secondly, in the second Boer War, waiting to be written. No, this one is different and set firmly in what we used to call the Great War.
As I have described in earlier blogs, the experience in those muddy, bloody trenches of my father and his six brothers has haunted me for so long. But my thoughts stayed with Simon Fonthill in those "little wars" of Queen Victoria in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and I had to put those into words first. But now STARSHINE is born.
The title (it may be changed, of course) refers to the starshells that climbed into the skies at night above No Man's Land. For those soldiers who patrolled nocturnally in that dangerous ground between the trenches, the shells were a signal to freeze in case their light revealed them to the enemy machine gunners. For a time, then, those seconds when the lightshells broke and illuminated the battlefield brought the war to a halt. No one moved. For one of my two heroes, the highly sensitive Bertie Murphy, it was God intervening to stop the killing for just a few seconds.
The story switches between the back streets of Aston, Birmingham, where Polly waits for her two lovers to return, to the mud of the Somme and the dreaded Ypres Salient.
It now lies throbbing on the desk of my editor at Hodder Headline. It may die there - times are bad in the publishing industry. We shall see. But the monkey is off my back at last!
So I have.
It's called STARSHINE and it's weighed in at just over 112,000 words. Not, of course, a novel in the Fonthill series - there are at least another two of these, set firstly in the Boxer Rebellion of China and, secondly, in the second Boer War, waiting to be written. No, this one is different and set firmly in what we used to call the Great War.
As I have described in earlier blogs, the experience in those muddy, bloody trenches of my father and his six brothers has haunted me for so long. But my thoughts stayed with Simon Fonthill in those "little wars" of Queen Victoria in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and I had to put those into words first. But now STARSHINE is born.
The title (it may be changed, of course) refers to the starshells that climbed into the skies at night above No Man's Land. For those soldiers who patrolled nocturnally in that dangerous ground between the trenches, the shells were a signal to freeze in case their light revealed them to the enemy machine gunners. For a time, then, those seconds when the lightshells broke and illuminated the battlefield brought the war to a halt. No one moved. For one of my two heroes, the highly sensitive Bertie Murphy, it was God intervening to stop the killing for just a few seconds.
The story switches between the back streets of Aston, Birmingham, where Polly waits for her two lovers to return, to the mud of the Somme and the dreaded Ypres Salient.
It now lies throbbing on the desk of my editor at Hodder Headline. It may die there - times are bad in the publishing industry. We shall see. But the monkey is off my back at last!
Monday, 17 May 2010
An autobiography yet....!
Alas, I am a very infrequent blogger. My latest excuse is that I have been very heavy with child. My latest offspring has now been produced: a bouncing, bonny autobiography called 'BOMBS AND BETTY GRABLE.' It is produced by the small but beautifully rounded publishers in the Midlands of the UK called Brewin Books Ltd; it is a largish paperback and being given away at the ridiculous retail price of £12.95.
Why the hell should anyone want to read the story of my life? Good question and I'm glad I thought of it. Ah yes - the answer.
Well. it tells the story of a lad growing up in the back streets of Birmingham during the last war, dodging the German bombs but pledging his undying love for an iconic Betty Grable, and then succeeding as a journalist and businessman, before surviving the greatest tragedy of his life and then becoming a novelist.
I'd like to feel that it gives an insight to the war years and to the growth, earlier, of a great industrial city, but I am hopeful also that it's a tale of love, humour and personal struggle, with one or two fascinating characters emerging to make it not at all a 'me, me' book.
How on earth can you resist it? And it does give a damned good excuse for not having written a blog for two months or more!
Why the hell should anyone want to read the story of my life? Good question and I'm glad I thought of it. Ah yes - the answer.
Well. it tells the story of a lad growing up in the back streets of Birmingham during the last war, dodging the German bombs but pledging his undying love for an iconic Betty Grable, and then succeeding as a journalist and businessman, before surviving the greatest tragedy of his life and then becoming a novelist.
I'd like to feel that it gives an insight to the war years and to the growth, earlier, of a great industrial city, but I am hopeful also that it's a tale of love, humour and personal struggle, with one or two fascinating characters emerging to make it not at all a 'me, me' book.
How on earth can you resist it? And it does give a damned good excuse for not having written a blog for two months or more!
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Too Much Blood and Guts?
Readers of this alas too infrequent blog will know that I have decided to make a temporary departure from the adventures of Simon Fonthill & Co in the Victorian wars of the late nineteenth century to write a different novel, set against the background of the first world war.
Much of the action will take place in the killing field that lay to the east of the little Belgian town of Ypres. For four years it was known simply as The Salient as the Allies (mainly British) faced - uphill - superior German forces. In an area of probably no more than six square miles, the shells rained down as first one side, then the other, gained territorial supremacy.
The result was that the battleground became a quagmire, with, often, the British front line consisting only of a series of water-filled craters linked only by a few yards of deep mud. The misery of fighting in these conditions was compounded by constant rifle and machine gun fire, of course, but the main horror was caused by the constant shell fire that fell from the heights held by the Germans.
My reading of eye witness accounts of these events has produced some terrifying anecdotes that seem to be almost beyond belief. An advancing Tommy, for instance, saw his comrade sliced horizontally in half by a razor sharp shell fragment and watched in terror as the disembodied legs of his pal continued to march on for at least five paces before folding and falling to the ground. Even more disturbing was the experience of a section, also advancing across No Man's Land, who skirted a shell-hole at the bottom of which was a British infantryman caught up to his waist in mud. As they watched, he struggled to free himself only to sink further into the slime. The tried and failed to rescue him and, as the mud advanced up his body, he pleaded with them to shoot him. But no-one could bring himself to do so and eventually, heads down, they were forced to leave him, his screams sounding even above the gun fire as they trudged away.
To include or reject these horror stories? I have always believed in basing stories of combat on fact, but this sort of fact does seem beyond belief and one doesn't want to be accused of over-writing - of pouring on the agony - something of which even that splendid writer Bernard Cornwell can be accused (his Agincourt made me wince).
Yet war has to be portrayed in all its inglory if a writer is true to himself and the period about which he writes. So these and other, similar incidents, are going in. What do you think?
Much of the action will take place in the killing field that lay to the east of the little Belgian town of Ypres. For four years it was known simply as The Salient as the Allies (mainly British) faced - uphill - superior German forces. In an area of probably no more than six square miles, the shells rained down as first one side, then the other, gained territorial supremacy.
The result was that the battleground became a quagmire, with, often, the British front line consisting only of a series of water-filled craters linked only by a few yards of deep mud. The misery of fighting in these conditions was compounded by constant rifle and machine gun fire, of course, but the main horror was caused by the constant shell fire that fell from the heights held by the Germans.
My reading of eye witness accounts of these events has produced some terrifying anecdotes that seem to be almost beyond belief. An advancing Tommy, for instance, saw his comrade sliced horizontally in half by a razor sharp shell fragment and watched in terror as the disembodied legs of his pal continued to march on for at least five paces before folding and falling to the ground. Even more disturbing was the experience of a section, also advancing across No Man's Land, who skirted a shell-hole at the bottom of which was a British infantryman caught up to his waist in mud. As they watched, he struggled to free himself only to sink further into the slime. The tried and failed to rescue him and, as the mud advanced up his body, he pleaded with them to shoot him. But no-one could bring himself to do so and eventually, heads down, they were forced to leave him, his screams sounding even above the gun fire as they trudged away.
To include or reject these horror stories? I have always believed in basing stories of combat on fact, but this sort of fact does seem beyond belief and one doesn't want to be accused of over-writing - of pouring on the agony - something of which even that splendid writer Bernard Cornwell can be accused (his Agincourt made me wince).
Yet war has to be portrayed in all its inglory if a writer is true to himself and the period about which he writes. So these and other, similar incidents, are going in. What do you think?
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