Foyles Book Trailer Awards

Being the seat-of-the-pants gal that I am, I totally meant to blog about this before now. But totally didn't. Anyway, better late than never...so I insist that you go immediately to the Foyles website and take a look at the amazing (and I do mean amazing!) book trailers that have made it into the final of the 2010 video awards.

There are four finalists and each clip is of such a high standard, you'd think they were for a major Hollywood production. I've already voted for my favourite, Blood Harvest by S. J. Bolton. Sharon tells me "A very talented young German student has produced a fabulous trailer for my latest book and it's got through the the final four of the Awards." A talented student indeed - just look at it! Seriously sinister. And being a CWA finalist for the Gold Dagger award makes this book doubly exciting.

Why am I so enthused by book trailers currently? Because I've been trying to 'direct' a trailer for my latest book. I tell you, it's easier to write the damn book than it is to chop it up into three second clips and come up with a few punchy words. Of course, with a budget of exactly zero pounds, it is proving...interesting. But thanks to the resourcefulness and talent of my techie other half, we very nearly have a minute and a half of gritty trailer to let loose very soon for this week's publication of SOMEONE ELSE'S SON.

Meantime, as I said, I insist you hop over to the National Book Video Awards voting page before OCTOBER 15th (this coming Friday!), take a look at the clips, agree with me whole-heartedly about S.J. Bolton's being the best...and vote! It only takes a second and actually gets you very excited about reading the books. And for more information on Sharon and her thrillers, she has a fab website and blog here.

And talking of trailers...I'll soon be posting news of an exciting 'blog trail' where you can read excerpts from my new novel!
Sam x

Library Events

Just a quick mention of two libraries that's I'll be visiting in October. On 20th October I'll be at Dudley Library between 10am and 12 noon talking about SOMEONE ELSE'S SON.

Then on 21st October (evening) I'll be at Rugby Library with Judith Allnatt discussing our work, including my new book. Our styles and subject matter are very different indeed so should make for a varied and interesting evening! Contact the library for details on 01788 533250.

TGIF

It's been a funny old week. One where lots has been done but has left me wondering if anything's actually been achieved. As for actual creative words, there have been some - mostly in the form of New Novel - and some in the form of a Christmas (yes Christmas!) short story. What I really need to get my head around (and dear agent, forgive me if you're reading this) is a synopsis.

The synopsis is a strange thing. The dictionary says it's a brief summary of the main points of a written work. Absolutely correct, of course, but it's way more than that when you're trying to capture not only the main plotlines and how they all hang together, but also convey the tone, setting, suspense and feel of the novel. And really, no one likes to read a synopsis that's more than a couple of pages long. Lengthy descriptions of characters and scenery are a big no-no and the worst bit is, you have to give away the ending. When you don't even know it. Hence synopsis-avoidance syndrome in my house this week.

With the Frankfurt Bookfair (don't you love 'Buchmesse'?) drawing near, much talk in the trade mags is about ebooks and pricing and basically how it's all going to work. When ebooks were just a twinkle in the publisher's eye, no one really knew how it would pan out. Now it's panning, potentially quite nicely, authors just want it to be fair. For everyone. We all work hard. Everyone has a part to play. I have a Sony ereader and to be honest, I don't use it nearly as much as I should. Not because I prefer the feel of a book (although that's nice) but because I can't get the books I want for it at a reasonable price. But hark at me, the author, complaining about high prices! We all expect £4 supermarket paperbacks to be the norm since the NBA did a runner. What do we expect with ebooks? The truth is, I don't think anyone really knows yet.

I got rather excited yesterday when a delivery man called with the familiar boxes that I knew instantly contained my hardback author copies of SOMEONE ELSE'S SON. I lugged them into the kitchen, snipped the tape and spent an indulgent few moments handling them very carefully. They smell and look gorgeous. And eldest She-Devil was delighted when she saw the dedication. This one's for her.

Talking of the hardback, as I type it's now reduced by £5 on Amazon. A bit of a bargain for such a quality read so why not get ahead of yourselves and bag a few for Christmas pressies? Pre-ordering is easy and you'll receive your copies mid-October. Plus, if you email me your address and what you want me to say, I'll personalise and sign a book plate for you to include. A treat for you or a loved-one. (Sorry, I'm a serious sales slut at the moment.)

So the week's drawing to a close and I'm off to gather the harvest. She-Devil # 1 asked me to bring 'stuff' to school as a matter of urgency for Sunday's harvest festival. Here's me thinking giant home-grown marrows (of which there are none so it would be off to the market) and bunches of fresh carrots are a good idea. But no, they want tins and packets. Doesn't exactly conjure images of thankful farmers praying to the veg gods but hey, it allows me to clear out the cupboard (all in date, of course) and dontate to the cause.

Have a good weekend, all, and I'll be back soon with dates of library visits and other booky stuff.

Sam x

L is for Launch Day

Following on with my (rather leisurely) A-Z of publishing and book-related posts, I thought it quite timely that L should be for Launch Day.

My next novel, SOMEONE ELSE'S SON, will be released in hardback on 14th October and so launches (oh ok, champagne!) are on my mind. I'm thinking about celebrations...most likely a private room in a swanky London club, champagne cocktails for the couple of hundred gliterati that will have been clamouring for an invite for weeks, an emotional speech from me in my new designer dress thanking publishers, my agent, my mum, my kitten...

OK, so the budget's not quite there but that doesn't mean to say I can't drink some nice champers on the 14th and feel all warm and gooey inside because people will finally be reading this book (I'm quite proud of it, you see). And I'm more of a jeans gal anyway, which set me thinking that an online launch party would be just the ticket.

Will I get the whole world raising a glass to their monitors on 14th October? I doubt it, but if I can gain some new readers, chat with some good friends, connect with writing clubs, book groups and forums, and reach as many book fans as possible, then I will be happy. So next month, expect daily tweets and blogs, exclusive excerpts, signed copies up for grabs, the odd competition or two, interviews and perhaps an 'author at home' video. I'll be lurking around book forums (the Book Club Forum is a fab place!), hopefully coercing a few fellow authors into writing some guest blog posts, stalking literary types on Facebook and generally being a bit of a web-slut. Oh, and I have a couple of library events coming up in October too so will post details about those very soon.

Meantime, feel free to add me on Twitter or Facebook and don't forget to pre-order your hardback or paperback copy of SOMEONE ELSE'S SON!

Sam x

SOMEONE ELSE'S SON Cover

I thought I'd share the amazing cover of my new novel SOMEONE ELSE'S SON. Isn't it fab? Quite different from my other covers but totally screams out (in a very clever way) that it's an emotional thriller and something pretty disturbing has happened. It's published in the UK in hardback on the 14th October and will be released in Australia and New Zealand in December - odd to think of it as a summer read over there when we'll be rugged up with fireside reads here! The UK paperback edition will be in the shops from the 3rd February.

Here's what the Amazon description says:

A tense and powerful emotional thriller that asks: Do we ever really know our children?

There must have been some mistake... TV presenter Carrie Kent can’t believe the voice on the end of the phone. Surely it didn’t just say that her son – her beloved son Max – has been stabbed within his school gates? This sort of thing happens only to the guests on her daily morning chat show. Not to someone like her boy. But when Carrie arrives at the hospital and learns that Max is dead, she is thrown into a nightmare. No one will reveal what really happened and the only witness, a schoolgirl, is refusing to talk. Carrie must enter an unknown world of fear and violence if she wants to find the truth. But can she live with what she discovers?

I've been told by several early readers that it's...ahem...my best book yet (no, not my mum!). I love all my books dearly - rather like my kids and, as an author, it's hard to choose between them - but I always strive to make my current book my best work. Sometimes it's hard and issues need to be resolved (technically known as ripping it up and starting again) and other times everything goes to plan and the book seems to sail from my head straight to the bookshop shelves - via a brilliant and dedicated team at Headline, of course. SOMEONE ELSE'S SON was a sailing moment and I really can't wait for it to hit the shelves. Be sure to tell everyone about it!

You can pre-order either edition of my new novel over at Amazon (and why not order any of my other three thrillers while you're there!). Don't forget to let me know what you think when you've read it.

For me, one of the highlights of being an author is actually getting out there and meeting my readers. I still kind of get a dizzy high from realising that yes, people buy, read and enjoy my novels and I'm excited to have several events coming up in the autumn to promote SOMEONE ELSE'S SON. I'll put up the details when everything's confirmed.

Meantime, the summer holidays roll by in a blur of trips, piles of washing, ferrying kids and keeping up with my writing. I'm lucky to work from home and, while my kids are old enough to be pretty independent, I take my hat off to all the mums who juggle work, childcare and school holidays. It's not an easy feat.

Sam x

K is for Keeping it Together - Guest Post by author Neil Ayres

Sam has kindly and rather wonderfully let me take up some valuable space on her blog, ostensibly to do a guest post, but in reality to pimp my new book, which is for the present time actually unavailable as a hard copy. It’s a part of an iPhone app, see, which has lots of other stuff on it, all appropriately enough related to the book. There’s the wonderful cover photography by Nicole Heiniger, the fab illustrations by Johanna Basford, a bespoke music track by Rich Watson and a brilliant, overlooked novelette by Miguel Cervantes (he’s the guy what wrote Don Quixote). All this content has been corralled into order by all-round clever chap Russell Quinn.

But I did promise a guest post, and I know Sam has been working intermittently on her alphabet of publishing. It appears we’re on K. Sam was going to go with Kill Your Darlings, but I’m much too weak for that, and prefer to let them stumble around in the limbos of unfinished stories. More appropriate for me is…

Keeping it together

As with many authors, writing is not my day-job. I have a family to feed and a house to keep out of the hands of the re-possessors. The New Goodbye, the novel included in the app of the same name, took me a good few years to write, in and around working full-time in magazine publishing, getting married and becoming a father and running an online zine. Although not calling for a similar amount of intellectual application or soul-searching, producing the app has been as time consuming, and required managing the various strands that comprise the app. And if anything following its release a couple of weeks ago, the demands are even greater. There’s chasing up publicity, trying to arrange a deal with a mutually beneficial book retailer (fingers crossed that one will come off) and producing a music video that will be included in an update of the app next month.

In and around all this, and writing guest blogposts and the like, my own blog, I’ve somewhat neglected my own blog, which I share with Aliya Whiteley, and the project blog set up to promote the app. Needless to say, as for any ‘real’ writing, I’ve managed very little.

In addition to the marketing budgets assigned to her book, a commercially successful writer like Sam will be in the fortunate position of having a publicity team to work on her profile and secure coverage for her in the national and trade press. Lower down the pecking order though, new and mid-list authors are expected to do most of this work themselves. In addition to writing good, commercially viable novels they have to in some way try and maintain a media profile. Most often the way to do this is by social media, and few are lucky enough to have even a handful of media contacts to help them along their way. Even with these contacts, such as I’m in the fortunate position to have, actually getting coverage for a book is by no means a given, and without an interesting angle to a story, untested authors are going to lose out to established names or the current crop of zeitgeist-riding writers. It’s just not enough to have a good book out.

This isn’t necessarily fair, it’s just the way the media, and the trades that rely on them, work. Publishing success is often more about public word of mouth than media coverage, which is often soothing to an artist’s ego but doesn’t necessarily put readers in front of their work or cash in pockets. Having a huge author with a news story very much of the moment won’t necessarily translate into sales. Like my own novel, Hilary Mantel’s ManBooker prize-winner Wolf Hall has recently been released as an iPhone app. The difference is, people are downloading my app but not hers. To me, the reasons are obvious. I have an iPhone-friendly short novel with a batch of interesting, complementary multimedia features created from other artist’s interpretations of my themes. And, perhaps more importantly, it’s the type of book of relevance and interest to the iPhone-owning demographic of young professionals and parents. Oh, and it comes as a free sampler with the full all-singing and dancing edition costing just £1.79.

Mantel’s book is about five times longer than my own, not exactly conducive to a pleasant reading experience on the small iPhone screen. And, forgive me for generalising, but its core readership is likely to be comprised of middle-aged traditionalists unlikely to be keen to surrender their printed books for de rigeur technology.

It’s early days for The New Goodbye. My hope is that the bookshop deal I’m trying to put together comes off and that eventually a publisher picks the book up for print publication. But for now I’m just happy that people are downloading the app and getting to see the great, collaborative work that has been involved in putting it together.

Related links

Download the app here: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/the-new-goodbye/id372159294?mt=8

Official blog: http://thenewgoodbye.blogspot.com

Neil’s blog: http://veggiebox.blogspot.com

Developer: http://russellquinn.com

Illustrator: http://johannabasford.com

Music: http://www.myspace.com/richwatsonthe147s

Photographer: http://nicoleheiniger.com

Documentarian: http://iampingpong.com

Film-makers: http://thisisorder.com

Win a set of DVDs!

The lovely people at Headline are running a competition for you to win a set of DVDs for your mum! My books are all about family and relationships and tragic things that can blow apart families--the reality of modern-day living that so many people, whatever their background, have to struggle through. So why not show your mum how much you care and have a bash at the competition. Still plenty of time left to enter and good luck! Let me know if you win.

This month sees me in the June edition of Woman & Home magazine again. Perhaps I should have a regular column! The feature is about something that's looming in the next few months in our household - Empty Nest Syndrome. I can hardly believe that my eldest is nearly nineteen and will be moving out this September. Why is no one else round here bothered about this? Two other women also tell their personal tales of what it's like or will be like to have teens fly the nest...something that everyone with kids has to face one day. I just never thought it would happen so quickly. He was a baby a minute ago! (Sorry, Ben.)

And, while I haven't seen a copy, apparently my short story was in the Sunday Express S Magazine last weekend. A quirky little tale about a couple's return trip from their honeymoon. I called it 'Long Haul'.

Finally, I was in WH Smith a little earlier and squealed in delight when I saw Adam Nevill's book Apartment 16 in the charts. Go Adam! He's such a great writer (used to be my editor at Virgin) and this book deserves to do really well. Of course I bought it and can't wait to get stuck in...when I've finished the final proofs of my next one.

Have a good weekend!

Sam x

Another TELL TALE review

My publicist alerted me to this great review on the Crime Squad website. (Scroll down a bit)

Meanwhile, kids are now all back at school so writing can begin again in earnest - although I still do write in the holidays, I never seem to get quite as much done! And thanks to everyone who's emailed me about TELL TALE. It's so good to receive nice feedback.

And do feel free to add me/follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Myspace.

TELL TALE Review

Just a quickie to share this rather nice review... Sums TELL TALE up very well, I think.

Paperback Publication Day!

It feels a little like my birthday today but without gaining a year - TELL TALE is out today in paperback and is straight in the Asda paperback charts at number 18! I think I might have to take a little grocery shopping trip later and see the evidence in real life. You'll also be able to find it in the WH Smith chart section as well as the other usual book retailers. Feels a little odd not to include Borders in the list.

If you buy a copy from Amazon, you can read an excerpt now (although for some reason it doesn't include the prologue!) and watch a little video of me trying to describe the story without giving all the plot twists away!

Finally, not long to go now until my double act with the lovely Sophie Hannah, who I had the pleasure of meeting and watching in action a little while ago. Should be a great evening in Birmingham, so if you're around, do come to the event. It's free!