Paranoia on the Amazon Roller coaster

I have discovered a wonderful new game that feeds both my paranoia and my ego as a writer in a dizzying succession of highs and lows – it is called “The Amazon Roller coaster”. My addiction to chart-watching no longer satisfied with the weekly fixes provided by publications like The Bookseller and The Sunday Times, (more or less identical charts with a few minor adjustments by the ST to try to level the playing fields when television heavyweights and the Highway Code come on to play), I can now get fresh highs and lows every few hours by logging on to Amazon and looking up “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride” or any number of other titles.

Like all drugs you take your first hit out of curiosity, thinking that you can handle it. You see that your ‘sales rank’ is pleasantly high – let’s say you are at number 1,000. Thinking this is a good omen you go back the next day to see if you have climbed any higher – you have, you are now down to three figures. Now they’ve got you.

The next time you tune in you have plummeted, maybe in the space of just a few hours, to number 150,000. How can this be? You are filled with angst. Has your publisher failed to send them a new order? Has a bad review appeared somewhere and halted sales in their tracks? Or are you simply doomed to a future of abject failure?

You tentatively go back in a few hours later and, miracle of miracles, you are back in three figures. You are high again, thrilled with yourself and the world. Now you are Amazon’s slave. It will now only be a matter of time before you are unable to stop yourself from checking in almost every hour. It will become a new distraction from the job of writing as irresistible as making another cup of coffee (each cup a little stronger than the last, but that’s another story).

To purchase a copy of The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride for a discounted price of £6.00 (inc p&p) please call John Blake Publishing on 0207 381 0666.

Keira Knightly as a Packaging Concept.

The Bookseller charts are out again “Cry Silent Tears” by Joe Peters has slipped to number two in paperback non-fiction, despite selling virtually the same number of copies as during the four weeks of its reign at number one. It has been overtaken by “The Duchess”, the Amanda Foreman biography which has just been released as a film starring the divine Keira. Although it is always annoying to be knocked off the number one perch, there are some silver linings to be found here.

Firstly it is great to know that a book of the quality of “The Duchess” can be taken to the top of the charts with the right packaging and promotional push. It proves yet again that there are lots of people out there who want to read good stuff if they can just be shown where it is and why they will enjoy it.
My second hope is that if Keira’s porcelain features on the cover can work such wonders for Amanda, fellow actress Olivia Grodd’s porcelain features might work a similar miracle in the cover picture of “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”.

All we need now is major feature film of Steffi and Bob’s your uncle.

When is a "misery memoir" just a "powerful story"?

There was yet more coverage in the publishing trade media this week of "mis-mem sales dipping" - but how is anyone measuring what is or isn't mis-mem?


Misery memoirs are just powerful stories starring great heroes and the world will never grow tired of reading them, however the trade chooses to label them.


Over the last few months I have been involved with four books that might be included in the genre; "Cry Silent Tears" by Joe Peters, (currently number one in the Sunday Times paperback non-fiction chart), "Daddy's Little Earner" by Maria Landon, (which went to number two in the same chart a few weeks ago), "Disgraced" by Saira Ahmed, which is the newly published story of a girl who escaped an arranged marriage in Pakistan and went on the game to support her family and "For the Love of Julie" by Ann Ming, a woman who spent 17 years battling to get the law of double jeopardy changed in order to bring her daughter's murderer to justice.

They could all be labelled as "misery", or perhaps "women in peril", or "crime", or "culture gap stories" - or perhaps they are just powerful tales about heroes and heroines who battle against adversity and have extraordinary and extreme experiences that the rest of us are fortunate enough to avoid. If it is the latter, doesn't that cover virtually every great story ever told?

Or are we saying that "mis-mems" are only the stories told by abused children? If that is the case how can they be said to be in decline when Joe Peters, Maria Landon and Judy Westwater were all in the paperback top ten together a couple of weeks ago?

Powerful tales, with strong and likeable heroes battling against adversity are always going to appeal to readers, whether you pigeon-hole them as "misery" or just call them "powerful stories".

People overcoming adversity, (or misery if you prefer), always make for gripping reading in both fiction and non-fiction and the subject matter they deal with will always develop as we learn and understand more about the world about us. No publisher would have been willing to touch the incendiary material contained in "Cry Silent Tears" five years ago when Kevin Lewis's "The Kid" was first published. We have all learned a lot in those five years and I suspect there are many more moving, inspiring and powerful personal stories to come, whether we choose to call them "mis-mems" or not.