Real Live Author Alert!

Writers turning up in person in schools is something which has started happening more and more, especially in the last 15 years - it never used to happen when I was at school. I can't imagine how excited I'd have been if we'd been ushered into the hall to hear a talk from Anthony Buckeridge or Terrance Dicks. About 40 times in a school year - on average once a week - I get to be a Real Live Author. Yes, this is what we're sometimes called by our enthusiastic hosts, who are usually very good at talking up the event for the children and getting them in the right mood for the day.

So, today will be all about how I initially approach schools and make bookings, and my next post will be devoted to what actually happens on the day of the school visit itself.

First of all, a writer who wants to go into schools ideally has to write for children or teenagers. And then, you have to go about promoting yourself - and that's the hard bit. It's very important to say that this stage that it's part of our work, and as most writers are freelance artists we should be up-front about charging a fee. This will vary from writer to writer. Some people think writers should earn only from their books and should do school visits as 'publicity' or out of the goodness of their hearts - I could not disagree more with this, and I know from conversations with fellow children's novelists that almost everyone agrees with the principle of charging the school a fee for the day. Most of us could not live from our writing alone, and most published writers have, as I do, a 'portfolio' of work which includes writing, editing, mentoring, festival appearances, school and college work, teaching of adults, etc. However, charging the parents a one-off fee so that the school can afford the day is something I'm more uncomfortable with - the school should really only invite a writer in if they have the funding. (A special evening event or talk is a slightly different matter, and schools often fund these by asking parents for a contribution or a small ticket price.)  Some very high-profile writers - literally a handful - can afford not to charge a fee, and so I believe they should ask it anyway and donate the fee to a charity.

Real Live Author about to be deleted by the Cyberleader, aka
Mr Drury at Ecclesfield Primary School.

So, how did I begin?  I've been visiting schools since 2007, when I first got involved in the Writers In Sheffield Schools project. I initially worked with just two schools local to my area, which I went into on a five-times-a-term basis. One of them asked me back the next year, and the next - and by this point, I'd plucked up the courage to spread my wings and head off into more and more schools.

Initially, back in 2007-09, my talks and workshops were very general and didn't really refer much to my own work. It helped a lot when my Doctor Who novel Autonomy came out and that I'd put together a Who-based presentation about the history of the show - initially just with slides and sound, and later with video clips too (which can come fraught with its own problems). I've only done a small amount of Who work compared to some people, but it has paid huge dividends in terms of publicity and visit-booking - most children are enormously excited to meet anyone even slightly associated with the programme. I imagine that if David Tennant or Matt Smith walked through the door, some of them would probably faint. Of course, you get the odd one who knows nothing about Doctor Who - I always tell them they'll learn the most today - or the glum-faced one who says they hate it, and I react in horror and ask them why on earth they were watching Ant and Dec's Celebrity Dwarf-Tossing on ITV. (Yes, my good friend and colleague Lord Keith Telly of Topping used that joke too, but I seem to recall I gave him the line once, long ago...) But I even win some of those over in the end.

Shadow Runners arriving in 2012 helped enormously too - this book, published by Chicken House, is aimed at readers aged 10+, and so (being a bit creative with that age-banding) I can say that good readers in Years 5 and 6 will enjoy it, as well as those of secondary school age (Year 7 and above). Most of my school talks and workshops these days are aimed at Years 5 and 6 in primary schools, or years 7 and 8 in secondary schools.

I'm on a couple of writer databases - Contact An Author and Start The Story. They've got me bits of work in various schools. I'm also registered with Authors Aloud, who have only been up and running a short while but have already got me two school bookings and a morning at the Wessex Children's Book Festival in Winchester earlier this autumn. Some people no doubt find me through my own website as well, which has details about school visits on plus testimonials from happy schools!

Word of mouth is effective too. I've met some great librarians and teachers who have done their bit promoting me in various parts of the country. In contrast to other businesses, there is limited potential for 'repeat work' - a school won't necessarily have you back, even if they've liked you, because they'll be keen to try another author for the sake of variety. Nevertheless, I've done repeat performances at several schools over the last few years. Various friends have done their bit too, bigging me up in their local schools in Essex, Oxfordshire and Geordieland.

And then there's the unsolicited approaches. This part of the job makes me feel a bit like a door-to-door salesman hawking my wares, but it has to be done - and out of every 100 or so emails, one or two responses lead to a positive outcome. Some have suggested to me that a 1-2% return on 'junk mail' is an amazing response and that I should be delighted with it, but it does make me wonder what on earth happens to all the others. I imagine they just get plonked into a school secretary or headteacher's spam tray. In three years of taking this approach, I've only ever got two terse 'Unsubscribe' responses, and one from a head teacher who obviously hadn't had his coffee (or maybe his pills) that morning and whose reply screamed 'DO NOT EMAIL ME!!!!!' down the wi-fi at me, almost knocking me out of my chair. Also, what I send isn't 'junk mail' - I take great care not to 'spam' schools with BCC messages, but rather send each one an individual email addressed to the head and the school by name. Sometimes I'll refer to something nice and writing-related on their website, if I can find anything. I've made approaches by post, too, mailing out my writer information packs to librarians, but sadly I think I will stop doing this in future, as it is quite a costly way of going about things and, as yet, hasn't resulted in enough bookings to make it worthwhile...

A successful booking usually starts with either the relevant teacher or librarian asking me what I can do for them, or coming to me with an outline of what they like. On balance, it's easier for me when the librarian does it, because their focus will be on promoting reading for pleasure and not on the dreadfully rigorous government-imposed 'levels' of the literacy framework which teachers are, against their better nature, forced to work within. Nothing makes my heart sink more than a school which expects a writer to come in and sprinkle 'magic writer dust' to get their 'difficult boys' up from Level Splurg to Level Fnarg (I should know the actual names of these, but frankly I don't care what they are and neither should you). I have to bite my tongue when I want o say, 'Look, if you haven't managed it in two terms, there's not a lot I can do in six hours!' And sometimes, things can go horribly wrong when you decide to pin all your writing to the mast of 'Literacy'... 

Oops-a-daisy.

We agree a date and which year group(s) I will be working with. I'm happiest with Years 5, 6, 7 and 8 (that's ages 9 to 13, in case, like me, you went to school a while ago). But I will work with the younger Juniors, and I've got a couple of workshops which can go well with the older teenagers. I do politely but firmly decline offers to lead workshops with the Key Stage 1 classes (infant school, in old money) - not because I don't like them, but because they are too young for any of my books and I don't have anything that works with them. There are lots of lovely authors out there writing for 4-to-7-year-olds who know far more about engaging that age group than I would, and I'm happy to leave those days to them!

We hammer out the details of what they want and what I can provide - and what I'll need in terms of resources. I actually need very little for most workshops, because I come along armed with folders full of exercises and photos to inspire writing. All the children need is a pen or pencil and a piece of paper or a book to write in. (The first few times I went into schools, it was quite an eye-opener what a fuss and commotion it could cause just getting those ready! Never assume they'll just be carrying pencils around as a matter of course...) My talks require a bit of technical support as I run everything off my own laptop and I need to plug it into a big smart-board or a projector, whatever is available. The use of video means I never take any chances using someone else's laptop these days, as it invariably means that those particular Powerpoint slides will end up looking like useless black monoliths from the Dawn of Time. I also ask for speaker sound to be available, which is simplicity itself for some schools and a bit of a headache for others. If it really isn't possible, then I have my portable device which I call The Little Muffin, a good investment from last year and a device which I was first introduced to by the lovely people at Frome Library!

We agree if books will be sold at the event, and if I am providing these (and ideally how many, as I'll be coming on the train and I need to know if I can carry them). Some schools will sort sale-or-return copies from a distributor, or will get a local bookshop to come in and run a stall. Then I sort out my travel and other details, and I have a standard letter which I ask to go out to parents so that they know their children will need money if they want to buy a book. I send that, plus my invoice, in a final rounding-it-all-up email about three weeks before the visit date. I always give my mobile number too, in case the school is closed through snow, alien attack or an outbreak of the Black Death the day before - that's the last thing you want to find out after you've done a 3-hour cross-country train trek. I'm proud to say that in 5 years and over 250 schools, I've only once been a bit late (which was thanks to a Manchester train being delayed by 40 minutes in a landslip, and even then I wasn't late starting the actual talk), and have only once had to cancel, when I was so horrifically ill that I could barely lift myself off the bed to reach the phone. I'm done a few schools when I've felt a bit under-the-weather - croaks, snuffles, headaches and the like will not stop me!

So, next time round, I'll talk about what I get up to on my visits - and I'll be sharing tales of 11-year-old Doctors, Weeping Angel Teaching Assistants, papier-mâché Daleks and so on, plus creatures that hide in chimneys and The Capital Letter Story. And there will be visual evidence of the Lincolnshire library which actually let me graffiti its wall... Plus I may have one or two horror stories to share - and I don't just mean things that go bump in the night...

I have no idea where he picks that stuff up

Almost a week on from the BBC's 50th anniversary Doctor Who episode The Day of the Doctor, I find myself not being able to say very much more about it that hasn't already been said elsewhere! A few dissenters aside, everyone seems to have loved it. It wasn't the Five Doctors-style fun runaround we'd perhaps secretly hoped for at first - it was very much about the new-style show, about that defining moment of the Time War and how it has affected the Doctor and how he can now move on... It was an epic, ambitious, thrilling addition to the Doctor's adventures, complete with Tom Baker cameo, and will no doubt now pass into legend - I expect it will find its place somewhere in the Top Ten stories in future fan polls. It's quite telling that I find myself quoting random bits of it at odd moments. But who knew what 'sand shoes' were?

Peter Davison's 'extra' The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot was a very amusing addition to the celebrations, full of laugh-out-loud moments, in-jokes and quotable bits. The actors - and Steven Moffat - were all obviously having a great time and joyously and affectionately taking the mickey out of themselves, out of each other, and out of Who old and new.

I'll need to make sure I stay in good health to be around for the 100th anniversary at the age of 94. But my son, who will only be 60, is already looking forward to it - and may well be pointing out to his children or grandchildren that the sprightly, bright-eyed, white-haired 81-year-old in the jacket, bow tie and fez who pops up at the end was his Doctor when he used to watch it in the 2010s.

(However, we'd best consign the dreadfully embarrassing 'Afterparty' to history... Are One Direction still trapped in that Chronic Hysteresis? Will any companions be allowed to sit down? And will Steven Moffat remember forever that moment when he had his head in his hands?...)

My next blog is going to be all about some of the wonderful school visits I have found myself doing in 2013 - not just about Doctor Who but about Shadow Runners, Emerald Greene, reading, writing, libraries, random dragons, train timetables and spelling names properly...

Robbing Peter to pay Paul?

A great many Doctor Who fans of a certain age were delighted to see the return of Paul McGann in the BBC's special red-button/online 'minisode' Night of the Doctor, a prequel to the main attraction Day of the Doctor coming on Saturday.

In fact, some went so far as to say that they had enjoyed it more than McGann's previous 90-minute outing as the Doctor, or more than some recent Matt Smith episodes. While I would not want to make such spurious comparisons, I agree that Night of the Doctor was hugely enjoyable, the best 'minisode' the BBC have done in 7 years of online Who extras, with the Tennant/Davison double-header Time Crash coming a close second. (Of course, there were the usual spoiler-related shenanigans, with some people protesting that McGann's appearance had been publicised too soon by those who had seen it - and others going round all day like the Likely Lads in that episode where they are trying to avoid seeing the score of a football match.)

Now, of course, speculation is rife about what a full-length McGann episode under the current regime would look like. Very good, if Night of the Doctor is anything to go by. He was charismatic, entertaining and utterly Doctorish - just the man to star in a 45-minute episode on prime-time BBC-1, looking a very romantically, Byronically youthful 53, with a dashing new costume (and without the unfortunate wig he was lumbered with in 1996).

But then again, we already have a charismatic gentleman in his 50s lined up to play the Doctor from next year, and one would not want to take any of the glory away from Peter Capaldi in his first season. But perhaps the odd adventure with 'the flashback Doctor' would not do any harm? It's new territory - nobody has been in a position, or willing especially, to do this before. Peter Davison's Time Crash outing reminded us all how much affection his Doctor is held in, but didn't particularly lead to a call for him to do odd episodes alongside David Tennant. Everyone was happy with his status as a 'past Doctor'.

But there's always been this sense that Paul McGann, despite his many appearances in books and on audio, is owed another few outings on TV - for one thing, it would give fans a bit more choice in those perennial 'best story' polls! Ultimately it will come down to time and money. But Doctor Who production teams have done brave and unexpected things many times before... who knows?

Hanging on the Telephone

'Are you on the phone?'

I can still remember my parents asking people this in the 1970s. Within my lifetime it was still, just about, conceivable that someone would have a home with no telephone land-line. How odd it seems now to have to phone a building where someone might be, in the hope that they might be lurking somewhere nearby. (And have you heard anyone in the last twenty years answer their phone with the name of their exchange and their number? 'Pilchester 5064?' It's something which I think only the over-70s would do now.)

In the 1990s, of course, this question simply became replaced by the updated version, 'Do you have a mobile number?' - now pretty much as superfluous - and then 'Are you on the Internet?' It doesn't seem that long ago that we heard BBC presenters hesitantly speaking of 'the Information Superhighway', and offering 'our electronic mail address' in a tone of voice clearly designed to indicate that they thought it would be a passing craze, like LaserDisc or CB Radio.

Just as an amusing diversion, here's what the Internet looked like in 1996. And also what the high-velocity real-time-action Kiefer Sutherland TV show 24 would have looked like if shot in the age of dial-up, pagers and dot-matrix printers. Well, I found it funny.

All of that doesn't really seem all that long ago, does it? I still have to pinch myself and remember that, actually it isn't ten years since Ace of Base and 2 Unlimited and the brilliant Century Falls on Children's BBC - it's twenty. How did that happen?! Some adults with proper jobs were born in 1990. The latest Eurovision winner Emmelie de Forest, actress Taylor Momsen, singer Cher Lloyd and diver Tom Daley were all born in 1993-94! They should surely all still be at primary school. So if you wrote a book in the 1990s, thinking it was bang up to date at the time, it's quite salutary to be pulled up short and reminded that it's now pretty old-fashioned. A thriller with hardly any mention of mobile phones, and none of the Internet or social networking, would seem very odd indeed.

And yet writers working today still have to find ways of making their plots work without these things. The Famous Five never had mobile phones or iPods or Blackberries - their tales of skulking in old houses and catching smugglers would have been very different had they been able to keep in touch by BBM and SMS. But it's no coincidence that, most weeks in The Sarah-Jane Adventures - the Famous Five of the 2000s - the script had to find a way of having the young heroes' mobile phones lost, disabled or confiscated. Otherwise it would all have been too easy. And somewhere out there, I'm sure, a media student is writing a dissertation on the effect of the mobile phone on the plot structure of the thriller.

So much of young people's socialising and interacting is done online now. Facebook may already be becoming a little passé among teens, but they have Twitter, Kik, BBM, Snapchat... Entire weekends are arranged through these media, and they are the places where friendships can be forged and hearts can be broken. A teenage girl can fall out with someone not because of a 'look' in the corridor, but because they failed to 'Like' her Instagram post. (To be fair, grown adults do this too.) A recent Facebook meme about the changing face of London, lamenting the departure of the Virgin Megastore, harked back to the days when this landmark would be a meeting-point for teens spending the days in London. These days, of course, there's barely a need for a 'meeting point' at all. ('If you get lost, meet me by the entrance' is a mantra of my mother's I can still recall from shopping expeditions to what seemed like a vast, cavernous Marks & Spencer - after going to the bank and waiting while she stood in the queue with a cheque made out to 'Cash', in those pre-cashpoint days.)

So this presents problems for the writer of young people's fiction. How do we represent interaction via social media, in a way that is still dramatically interesting and exciting? Does the world of BBM and Snapchat represent whole new opportunities for being creative? Perhaps it does. We just need to discover what they are. Or do we just start a whole new craze for retro novels set in the 1970s, with children whose parents tell them to meet at the door of M&S if they get lost, and queue at the bank in the lunch-hour - and ask each other, 'Are you on the phone?'

Written in the Stars

The job of being a writer is, these days, beset with other peripheral tasks which distract from the actual writing. Facebook, Twitter, blogging (whatever that is), emailing, doing invoices...

Then there is the generation of actual work, of something to earn a living above and beyond the paltry pittance which most of us scrape from writing. What's that?... You thought we were all millionaires - or, at the very least, leading lives of serene, effortless, upper-middle-class comfort? It said so in that article about J.K. Rowling which you read in the Daily Mail, and you know Dan Brown has a really nice house? Ah, well, most of us don't begrudge Miss Rowling or Mr Brown their success, but we feel the need to point out (not least on school visits) that comparing them with the average writer is like comparing Bill Gates to an I.T. consultant, or Richard Branson to any number of crazy, inspired, but less financially-secure entrepreneurs. Most writers make a living out of lots of other stuff, all packed together in a lovely 'portfolio' - that's perhaps one for a future blog post. But there's one activity which we find ourselves drawn to over and over again, even when we know it's very bad for us. I'm not talking about eating chocolate, or anything less salubrious. I'm talking about the fact that every writer I know has a hideous, agonised compulsion to check their star ratings on Amazon and Goodreads.

In primary school we had a 'star chart', where you could put a star-shaped sticker up next to your name you did something good or handed in a good piece of work. So I've been conditioned from childhood to see even one star as something good. Someone made the effort to give you something. It wasn't the gold medal, or the silver or the bronze, but it was one of the Highly Commended. Of course, life isn't primary school (really, it isn't - put down those Cuisenaire Rods) and book reviews don't work like that. It's more akin to a mark out of ten - with one star signifying 1 or 2. It's a sign not of affection but of scathing scorn. It's the lowest you can actually give. The single star, twinkling up there next to the book title is not so much like a diamond in the sky - more like a splat of manure beside your name.

But can you give a book a star rating or a mark out of ten? It's more difficult than it might at first seem - as I found when lecturing for Sheffield Hallam University's Creative Writing MA and having to decide on a percentage to award to people's novels, as if they were maths exams.

Back in the early days of my book career, I used to rant (to those who didn't edge away quickly enough) that other professions were not subject to this kind of random judging by the public, and how unfair it was that writers, artists, directors and actors could have their work reduced to simple, bland scores like this. I'd moan that I didn't go into supermarkets and rate their shelf-stacking techniques on a five-star system, or give my bus driver marks out of ten for his attitude.

These days, I don't really have a leg to stand on. Everything has a virtual Customer Complaints Desk or a 'How's My Driving?' phone line. There's TripAdvisor, all kinds of consumer comment sections on various money-saving forums, and of course if you work in the public sector you can expect to have your every move logged, registered, recorded and inspected. We turn into Patrick McGoohan's Prisoner, refusing to be 'pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered' - not that it does us any good. That still doesn't make it any easier, though, when you feel the sting of having a book which you spent two years labouring over (and six months arguing with an editor over) dismissed with a single star and a petty comment by some smart-arse which, you argue, shows that the reader in fact totally misunderstood the book.

Now, I've probably been luckier than most, having had comparatively few utterly excoriating reviews in my time - probably comes of keeping my head down. Other writers whose books have a higher media presence inevitably suffer the 'tall poppy' backlash and can end up with almost as many terrible reviews as excellent ones. At least the system on those two book-ranking sites doesn't yet allow disgruntled readers to accord hated books the ultimate scorn of a zero star review - unlike the New Musical Express, which recently conferred this honour on rising musician Tom Odell, provoking his father to ring them up and complain - and the Guardian, who made the fatal error of sending their usual music critic to the X-Factor Live tour and so must have known what they were letting themselves in for. That same newspaper even has a Zero Stars Hall Of Fame for West End turkeys.

Anyway, one reassuring factor is that there's always seemed little correlation - if any - between bad reviews and sales. In fact, what consumes most writers these days is not the fear of a terrible review - rather, it's the leaden, crushing inevitability that nobody, anywhere has even noticed your book being smuggled out under cover of darkness, sneaked on to the back shelves of the shop and placed upside-down alongside the two hundred Dan Browns and the fifty-six Martin Amises. Or, in this digital age, being sneaked on to Amazon alongside all the other e-books of varying quality. That's the true horror of being a writer. It's not the fear that we have created something so awful that people will talk about it endlessly - it's the brain-numbing terror that nobody will care.

So, zero stars? Young Mr Odell needn't worry. At least it means people aren't ignoring his BRIT Award Critics' Choice album - someone noticed it enough to spend a paragraph hating it. And as Oscar Wilde said, there's at least one thing worse than that.