In many ways, this is the worst time in the publishing cycle. The book’s been out for a week or so and you’re waiting for the reviews to start trickling in. If you’re sensible, you put everything to one side and get on with something else. If you are not sensible, you devote every waking hour to googling your name, the book’s name and the publisher’s name and every combination of the three, and wondering what else you can be doing to get the whole world to read the book.
I am not sensible.
On the plus side, I feel a lot more confident about TAKE IT COOL than I ever felt about either MRS DARCY or DOT DASH. Despite the fact that MRS DARCY made it as far as the W H Smith top 50 promotional racks for a few weeks, it was still fighting against a lot of negative feelings from some quarters. It arrived on the tail end of the Jane Austen plus zombies/sea monsters/whatever fad, and however much I tried to tell people that it was conceived a long time before all that and it wasn’t really one of those things AT ALL, no-one was listening. The first review, in the Gatehouse Gazette, was also pretty awful, which didn’t help, and no-one in the print media was sufficiently interested to review it at all.
As for DOT DASH, even though it did eventually get a nice four star review in the Independent on Sunday, I never felt entirely confident about it, mainly because I have a slightly semi-detached relationship with the short story world. This is largely because I have – as yet – no qualifications whatsoever to be writing anything approaching literature and also because I’m the bloke who wrote MRS DARCY VERSUS THE ALIENS.
But TAKE IT COOL comes with no baggage. It’s the first book I’ve written that I feel 100% comfortable about, and I really, really want it to succeed. I know my publisher is working as hard as I am (probably harder) but the truth is that – as with everything in publishing – no-one really knows what is going to happen.
It has, at least, started to get some nice reviews, starting with this from ace short story writer David Rose:
Any mention of reggae calls to mind the Conservative politician several decades ago who attempted to boost his street cred by talking about his love of it, but who scuppered all cred by pronouncing it ‘Reggie’. I did at least know how to pronounce it, but not much more. My point is that this book is not just for reggae buffs (if that is the term). It is intriguing, unusual and very, very funny. Apart from the main theme, there are riffs on the coolness – or otherwise – of the oboe, a cemetery in Portishead, and the graveyard of Stevenage. Even the secondary theme – the worrying possibility of ancestral involvement in the slave trade – while by no means flippant – still doesn’t dampen the wit. And there’s a happy ending (and who knows, maybe this book will do for Dennis what ‘Searching For Sugarman’ did for Rodriguez).
I honestly can’t think of a better, more off-beat summer read, with maybe ‘Total Reggae Summer Vibes’ in the background, and a long, cool drink. ‘Lovely stuff’.
It’s wonderful to hear that from someone who probably wouldn’t have picked up the book unless he happened to be a supporter of Two Ravens Press but absolutely gets it. So much so that he’s apparently ordered another copy for a friend. The momentum is beginning to build. We’re going to get this thing moving somehow.