A New Year Progress Update

I'm so excited about recent progress in marching smartly down the road to publication, that I just had to write this update. Excuse the gush that follows (or stop here, if you prefer).

Just before Christmas I created a Facebook page for The Day Parliament Burned Down.  Do please 'like' if you're on FB!  I admit I've become a pretty shameless social media tart - apologies if I've also become a bore in the process.  

I've been in discussion with my commissioning editor, Matthew, at OUP about an image for the endpapers of the hardback.  We've decided on one of the unburnt old Palace of Westminster, which will contrast with the vibrant cover showing the fire in progress from the Lambeth bank of the Thames.  The Production Editor, Emma, has been in touch to say that production has now started and with details of the schedule for producing the book.  It will go to press in early July, and be published late August or early September.  My agent Bill is now asking for ideas for the next book too, and we are going to be talking over nine possibilities I have come up with later in the month.

I've now received a number of bookings for talks this year, and shortly I hope to be discussing the publicity programme OUP has lined up, with their marketing and PR folk.  The need to create a talk/events page for this blog has highlighted the limitations of the software Blogger uses (there are also bugs preventing followers from posting and being visible as members).  I'm therefore planning to move the Dustshoveller's Gazette to WordPress in the next couple of months, but don't worry - I'll redirect from here to there, when it happens.  Quite how many bells and whistles I'll need, and whether I'll be getting some professional help with the design, is still being pondered.  If you belong to a society, group, library or bookclub who would like a talk on the 1834 fire in the autumn, please get in touch with me at cshenton *at* hotmail.co.uk.  Sorry for that clunky email rendering which is designed to stop junk email: yet another reason to move to WordPress - with a spam-foiling form.

Then, finally, all of sudden on 3 January, I found that my book had been listed on OUP's online site, ready for pre-order, and with lots more about its content.  And now it's been given an ISBN by OUP, it's also available on Amazon for pre-order, and has already attracted several 'likes'.  The official marketing has begun.  2012 has got off to a really great start...and no blisters so far.

Cover Story

OUP has now had its editorial and sales meeting and has produced this thrilling cover for my book.  I'm really delighted with it, as it is almost the same as the image I've had in my head all along.  Book covers are often a source of friction between publishers and authors but I couldn't be more happy.  Choosing the book's title, however, has caused me, my agent and my editor much more difficulty - right up to the last moment. I had used the working title of Conflagration throughout the book's creation and that was the title as sent off in various submissions. This wonderfully evocative word was used constantly about the fire at the time. However, I became increasingly nervous that this was not a title which would make the book walk off the shelves, so after much dicussion - with the sales and marketing people having the final say - we have settled on what had emerged first as a subtitle - The Day Parliament Burned Down.  However, a definition of the word 'conflagration' from the Oxford English Dictionary still opens the book: it means a lot more than just 'a great and destructive fire', as the narrative gradually reveals.

The Day Parliament Burned Down: Live!

Sunday 16 October 2011 is the 177th anniversary of the 1834 fire. Today I'm tweeting a 'live' feed of events from 1834 in real time on Twitter. I've prescheduled the tweets so I can watch as the come through: it will be fascinating to experience it myself in real time, rather than just writing about it. You can follow my feed even if you don't tweet yourself, by googling 'Dustshoveller' and 'Twitter'.  And next year, I hope, today will be the day The Day Parliament Burned Down is published.


If you've arrived here today as a result of seeing the story unfold on Twitter, you can find out more about the fire from the short 2009 BBC Parliament film on it here and here.

The Hard Reality of History Publishing

If you're writing a history book which is original and scholarly but which you hope has popular appeal too, then the news is pretty grim. The market for such books is extremely tough at the moment. You only have to glance at this photograph to see what I mean. Taken earlier this week at WHSmith in the departure lounge at Stansted airport, it tells you everything you need to know.

History gets one bookcase in a large outlet of maybe forty bookcases. Of the six shelves, the bottom four contain books on military history, specifically World War Two, shading into special forces memoirs. The remaining top two shelves are for everything else that ever happened, anywhere, and a very eclectic mix it is too.  In fact the top shelf is labelled (not visible in this photo) 'Ancient World'. Except there's not one book on there pre-middle ages. There is a fair proportion of books by well-known journalists with TV tie-ins too taking up the top two shelves, as well as prominent prize winners.

Don't get me wrong - I know as an author how difficult it has been for each and every one of those writers to have got their books, on any historical subject, published. I'm not dissing them. All I'm saying is that it's a sobering sight for anyone trying to break into the market with a book on a quirky topic or those which deal with less well-worn periods. Getting a publishing contract is only one of many steps.  The bookshop buyers have to take it on.  They have to agree with the publisher that their readers will want to reach out and buy it, even if it's not their usual sort of thing.  It has to be marketed well in the shop and elsewhere, and displayed prominently and attractively to make people stop and take a look.  Then the punters have to decide to buy it as well.  It seems that just when you've leapt one hurdle, another appears.  And they're mostly out of your control. 

One Year On....

Hooray! This blog is celebrating its first birthday!

In the course of the last year I have completed my book, which found a great agent, who found me a great publisher, and as an added bonus I met lots of like-minded folk on Twitter. Thank you all for reading this blog or tweeting me with ideas and suggestions. If you're doing something similar yourself then here's a book I wish had been around when I started; it's been invaluable and I recommend it to anyone writing narrative non-fiction (or any other sort of book) that you'd like to make money from.  Harry Bingham, the author, really knows his stuff, is brutally realistic and unlike many other books on publishing for newbies, it's often hilariously funny.

Conflagration won't be published until the autumn of 2012, but who knows what the next year will bring...?

What the Dickens...?

Dickens in the 1830s, looking a good deal
 more glamorous than in later life

Filling in the publicity form, one question which came up asked about anniversaries or other events which could be used as a hook to promote THE BOOK. There's the fire itself of course (16 October every year - 178th anniversary in 2012). More topically, there's the 2012 Olympics in London which will feature lots of aerial shots of the new Palace of Westminster during the marathons and the beach volleyball in Horseguards. 2012 is also the 200th anniversary of the assassination of Spencer Perceval, the only British PM to have been murdered in office (in fact in the lobby of the Commons,and which plays a part in the book)...and finally it's the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth next year.

Dickens appears four times in Conflagration. Surprised? You shouldn't be. He began his writing career as a journalist a couple of years before the 1834 fire, and was in fact a Parliamentary reporter. He wrote for the Morning Chronicle, one of the main newspapers I used in my research, and his sketches of London life "by Boz" came out less than two years after the fire, followed by his first - serialised - novel in 1836: The Pickwick Papers. He clearly knew the old Palace and Parliament well, including some of its personnel.  Expect 2012 to be the year of Dickensmania...

Dustshoveller joins the Twitterati

Very exciting news on the book emerging over the last week, which I hope to be able to divulge shortly...

In the meantime, I have joined Twitter @dustshoveller...tweet you there!

Me (and others) nattering about the Fire on the BBC - Part 2

Me (and others) nattering about the Fire on the BBC - Part 1