Whoops. My bad...

The moral of this sorry tale comes at the end. But feel free to skim read until you get there: you simply need to know that I was ranting about big brother on my back and the injustice of rejected reviews...

'I'm writing to you as the author of two books listed on Amazon: Tea & Chemo and Glass Houses. Both are published by a small but increasingly successful, and certainly ethical, independent publisher, Urbane Publications. I'm happy to say that both books seem to be well-received and are gaining good reviews.

You will not need me to tell you that we live in a world where reviews are vital if we want to sell books. All writers these days, whether published by one of the traditional presses, an independent publisher or are self-published, have to promote their books. They have to find innovative ways of getting their writing into the public eye, need to work with the media, social media, blog, have a web site, do talks, signings, appear at book group meetings and generally make as much noise as possible about their book. I am no different. What I don't do however, is coerce people into reviewing. I don’t find a way of putting up bogus reviews or, god forbid, pay for reviews. I've never understood cheating – not because I'm a saint, but because I can't see where the glory is in gaining top place when it's not deserved.

As with many authors. I have no expectation of making huge amounts of money through book sales. I'm in the wrong career if money is my driver. But I want to tell stories. I want to entertain. I want people who read my books to think that their £8.99 is money well-spent. I want somebody to read my book and recommend it to others because it's had a great effect on their day/ week/ life… But I can't make that up. I have to write, get my book out there and hope that it's well received.

With that background, I hope you will understand why I was particularly upset to hear from somebody I've known for years as we live in the same village, even though our paths don't cross frequently. She wrote to say that a review she'd written, as well as one her equally enthusiastic son had written, had been rejected by Amazon. She was disappointed because she'd devoured Glass Houses, wanted to spread the word and had spent time writing a positive review. When the original review never appeared, she tried to re-post it but received an automated reply to explain that the original, 'did not comply with our customer service guidelines. Amazon does not permit reviews from customers whose relationship to the product or seller may be perceived as biased.'

I'm upset on many counts. And what I find particularly galling is the injustice. I have never asked a friend/ acquaintance/ family member/ neighbour… to put up a bogus review to increase numbers. I bring you back to the above – if it isn't genuine, I'm not interested.

I'm also baffled by the 'connection' that has flagged up a problem with this particular review. Is it because the reviewer also reviewed Tea & Chemo? Readers of Tea & Chemo have gone on to read Glass Houses. Personally, I've posted reviews on several books from authors I like – that's normal, isn't it?

Yes, I know this lady, yes I think she's great, but there are other people who've reviewed my book, whose reviews have been posted, whom I know better. Is it because the first part of our postcode is the same (everyone in our village shares the first portion of the postcode) and if so, does that mean that my neighbours aren't allowed to review? I bring you back to my point about the necessary promotion for all writers, as well as the desire for happy readers. My publisher and I held a launch at my local pub for Glass Houses in which we sold over eighty books. Of course, the idea is that those eighty books will be well-read and enthusiastically recommended to another eighty readers and so on. But it's totally normally that those first sales start close to home. These people should still be allowed to review. And trust me, I am not feeding them the lines if they do.

Furthermore, I'm troubled that there may be other instances of genuine reviews of the book in question, Glass Houses, and also my first book, Tea & Chemo, being automatically rejected without my knowing.

In summary, I'm upset that this review hasn't been posted because it was genuine. I don't like the implication of involvement in bogus reviews. And, with reviewing being such a big part of the promotion business, I hope my books won't slip into reviewer-oblivion on Amazon because the machine has decided that reviews on my novel aren't 'kosher'.

I'd therefore like to ask for:
1. The original review to be reinstated

2. A check for any other rejected reviews on either Tea & Chemo or Glass Houses, allowing me to respond

3. An assurance that this won't be allowed to have any negative effect on my author account regarding future reviews and my Amazon ranking

4. Some explanation as to why this happened.'

OK, still here? Thank you.

Here's an abbreviated version of what happened next: a reply from Amazon said that they couldn't liaise directly with me on the nature of the rejection of the review but they included a handy link  with detail on reasons for rejection. Huffing and puffing, I clicked the link. Pah! Yet more of my precious time spent - do they know how busy I am??

Oh.

Amazon, it writes, first on the list and bold for all to see, does not allow multiple reviews for one product from the same household. And you know what, much as I wish the reviewer was allowed the opportunity to delete one of the reviews and thus one review from her household would survive, I do concur. It could get out of hand, couldn't it? In our house alone we must have ten email addresses between us; reviews could soon become meaningless.

And so, the moral of this tale is as follows:

1. Do not jump to conclusions and spend your Sunday morning writing a cross response before you have appraised yourself of the facts

2. Big Brother is not yet as powerful as we might fear in our paranoid dreams: Amazon is not yet able to name your friends simply from their ip address (but it's coming, I'm sure…)

3. However much your partner, your six children, dog, cat and two guinea pigs are impressed by the packaging of the second hand copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the smelly poop bags, or the self-cleaning toilet (I made that one up, nice idea though, eh?) don't, I repeat, don't be tempted to leave more than one review of its brilliance.

PS Next event for your diary: Waterstones Book Shop Party from 1pm on Saturday 8^th October, Harrogate. Very excited about this! More details to come. 

Glass Houses and Tidy Wardrobes

I write with some good news.

Finally, after two long years of good intentions I have finally sorted out my wardrobe – and the drawers. I’ve had half-hearted stabs at it before but this time I did A Proper Job. Phew. I feel the space. Charity shops in Harrogate are rejoicing. EBay has applied for more bandwidth.

But it isn’t that.

I have also cleared out the cupboard in the kitchen, cunningly disguised as a bench, filled as it was with an interactive memorial to my children’s younger years: un-sticky stickers, half-filled sticker books, solid pots of glue, dehydrated finger paint, lumps of tissue paper, defunct pens, plastic boxes with compartments in varying sizes - long since emptied, save for the odd pencil sharpening - pompons, half-made pompons, cardboard clothes with little tabs but lacking the bodies on which to hang them. And shoe polish which reluctantly had to stay.

But it isn’t really that. Although I will admit to lifting the lid every second time I walk past to admire my handy work.

I still have the small matter of the hooks to sew back on the blinds and some rejected bootleg jeans from the wardrobe cull which I can’t bear to part with, sitting in a pile waiting to be ‘skinny-jeaned’. Of course, the moment I’ve threaded the sewing machine, life will revert back to bootlegs (at last – with me not being of the six foot, legs which make a toilet roll tube look baggy - variety). The perennial, Sorting Out The Wi-Fi, is, of course, also on the list. I will not, repeat, will not use my blog to moan about my Wi-Fi. Suffice it to say, Orange say it works, I say it doesn’t.

Can you tell school’s out for the summer?

I’ve managed my fifteen minutes of fiction every day, bar one – a long story – and it’s proving both fun and productive. There's one little ditty, inspired by the silent passenger next to me on the train, which has morphed into 5,000 words and I’m starting to think it might make it into a novel. Exciting as that is, that isn’t what I came here to write about.

Glass Houses has been short-listed in the Retreat West First Chapter Competition. You can read more about it here. Although I am chuffed to little pieces about it, it isn’t really that either. Although we’re getting close.

Remember Urbane Publications, wonderful publisher of Tea and Chemo, due out in November? I blogged about my excitement here. Well, I am absolutely thrilled to announce that Urbane have also signed my novel, Glass Houses for publication in May 2016. We’re currently working on the cover and blurb. (I have to look behind me when I say that to check that it isn’t someone else speaking.) The idea of somebody beavering away to produce the cover of my novel just blows my mind. I’m impressed by the professionalism and dynamism of Urbane Publications, and also their book list. I also like to work with happy, enthusiastic people and this is how my contract came back to me. You can see why I'm thrilled. This is very good news, indeed!

I’ll be busy. We’re working on the final edits of Tea and Chemo now and Glass Houses will be edited at the end of the year. In theory it’s ready for the red pen already. But of course, I’ll have to have another peek before I send it off. I know what that means: a challenge to lose another 5,000 words. Some people constantly diet, I’m always trying to lose words. I apologise in advance if I venture back into recluse-dom for a while as I add, take-away, insert, amend and delete, stopping only briefly to marvel at my pristine wardrobe and sparse cupboard-cum-bench, and shake my head despairingly at the, ‘it’s not slow, no, really, it is,’ speed of my Wi-Fi.

But I’ll see you all at the launch :)

Tea and Chemo

I have no problem with the concept of ‘luck’ but I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with the word. I feel a little squeamish when people say that someone is ‘so lucky’. It smacks a little of their fortune coming through ill-gotten means, chance perhaps, cutting corners, cheating, even.

There are people in my life who really do seem to have more than their ‘fair share’ of bad luck. They’re the ones we all know, where you raise your eyes to god, the powers-that-be, fate or whatever holds the reins in your life, to just ‘give these people a break’. And difficult times do seem to have a habit of clumping together. But here’s the thing, the people who I consider to ‘deserve a break’, don’t seem to be the ones to describe themselves as unlucky. And vice versa.

And so I wonder if luck is all a matter of perception. I think that happiness lies in rejoicing when the toast falls the right side up rather than lamenting for too long when it falls sticky side down.

Granted, it’s annoying when you have to stop your day to mop up the gooeyness. And that pales into insignificance when compared to dropping a full bottle of milk onto quarry tiles in the kitchen and watching it seep faster than you can mop underneath the fridge, cooker, freezer... You’re not meant to cry over spilt milk, but when I think about it, I’ve come close.

I am always dropping milk bottles and they’re always full and they always smash. But then, I’m also always taking chunks out of plates with a slightly too speedy approach to stacking, bashing my hip on the side of the unit as I rush past the large piece of furniture which has been in the same position in our kitchen for the entire eleven years we’ve occupied the house, and have scars on my forearms to boast my devotion, if a little unfocused, to domesticity. If the toast falls sticky side down in my house, it’s probably more down to the inhabitation of fairies in my brain, and the law of averages, than luck.

When it comes to good luck in my life, I’ve had great deluges of it, for which I almost have to catch my breath. My daughter’s amazing recovery from a stroke could have been very different. I could have lost my arm in that spin drier instead of emerging with a scar and a story to bore my grandchildren and a great many others along the way. And I consider myself incredibly fortunate to be currently free of cancer. I am one of the lucky ones and very mindful of that. Even though the side effects of the drugs can contrive to make you forget it, it’s toast sticky side down to lament for too long.

And then there are the moments of fortune on a smaller scale which are nonetheless as sweet.

Such as when I saw That Tweet.

Call it luck, chance, providence, fate or fortune, I thank my lucky stars I happened to be on Twitter that day, when I happened upon a tweet from an author praising the brilliance and general loveliness of their publisher, Urbane Publications. How happy am I that I was playing around on Twitter when I should have been ironing; that I ever signed up to Twitter in the first place?

For whatever reason, I did notice the tweet, it did pique my interest and it did propel me to the Urbane Publications website. Once there, I started reading about collaboration and team working and proper editing and then I was hooked. A quick look at its list of authors and pending publications and a glance at page 17 of Google to check this too-good-to-be-true, small but perfectly formed and, in my humble opinion, going places press was kosher, and I’d dropped everything to draft my submission letter.

Roll forward a couple of months and the cover for my book is being finalised. I’m beavering away on the content for my copy deadline at the end of June ready for Urbane Publications to publish ‘Tea and Chemo’ in November.

When I was diagnosed with cancer I was swamped with factual information about the little blighter as well as the reasons for the treatments I was to have, together with their side effects. It was illuminating and helped me feel more secure. However there’s a difference between knowing what’s going to happen and knowing how it’s going to feel.

As well as the facts, I wanted an honest account of the experience of cancer. What does it mean to lose your hair? I mean, really mean, emotionally? I wanted to hear it from someone who’d been there, done that and got the hat and wig and scarf to show for it. I wanted a book which would educate me in a softly, softly way. I wanted the author to be an ordinary person who was still enjoying life, who’d got through to the other side, and, crucially, done it without any Super Powers.

My aim is for Tea and Chemo to be that book. With my blog posts as a framework and many more anecdotes added, I hope that it will inform cancer sufferers and their loved ones whilst also making readers smile. It’s useful information served with an empathetic hug, the story around the camp fire or a cup of tea with friends on a lazy afternoon.

Since taking my first steps into the cavernous universe of cancer, I have learnt a little in my non-scientific, better-if-you-give-me-an-analogy kind of way about hormones (your body doesn’t take kindly to you changing their levels), medicine induced water retention (who’d have thought to get rid of water retention, or ‘Herceptin Bum’, you should drink err, water?), Vitamin D, Parabens, free make-up, eyebrow tattoos, Prosecco over white wine, Chemo Brain (it’s for real and it sucks but it gets better), chemotherapy, radiotherapy, hormone therapy, tea therapy (ok, I made that one up) and time (that one’s for real because time really does help you get used to anything – and then you can deal with it).

Tea and Chemo is about sharing what I’ve learnt. It’s an outstretched hand if chemo gives you a mouth full of ulcers, your bones feel like they’ve been squeezed in a vice and you just want to go to bed and wake up when the whole darned cancer thing has been sorted.  I hope it will give you a hug when all your food tastes as though it’s been sprinkled with bicarbonate of soda and stirred with mud. And I hope it will help your loved ones, too.

And I know some chemo secrets. I know that white sauce (sweet, not savoury) and Rich Tea biscuits are the only things which taste as they should in the first two weeks after a dose of chemo, and quite frankly, this is a time in your life when you can eat five bowl-fulls on the trot (I did) and even mash a packet of biscuits guilt-free into the bowl. You see, treatment has its perks.

So, was I lucky to have found Urbane Publications? You bet I was. My experience so far is everything that Urbane Publications promises. I’m working as part of a team with people who know what they’re doing, and who are just as excited as I am about Tea and Chemo’s publication.

Regarding my good fortune in reading That Tweet, I am not allowed to complain about sticky toast on the floor, or even a crate of smashed milk bottles, for a good few years to come.