Throwing the book

I have a book coming out in a matter of just days and I want to throw the entire print runit at my publisher.

I've been so wrapped up in contract work, and slaving away for long hours to get it all done, that I didn't really pay too much advance attention to the book. I kept thinking - it's a few weeks away, I've plenty of time to start pitching. Then suddenly the weeks whizzed past and this morning it dawned on me that I'd heard nothing from my publisher at all since mid-March.

Where the hell were my dozen author copies? What had they lined up for promotion? (Back in mid-March, I'd filled in a massive form detailing stuff about various press contacts, local bookshops, names of editors at local radio and TV stations etc, precisely to assist them with that.)

I was just about to pick up the phone when an email arrived from the bunny at the publisher. The bunny's job is to get publicity for the books they publish. So, 4 days before publication she decides to let me know she's hastily cobbling some promo slots together for me.

To say I was enraged was an understatement. My anger was not helped by the fact that I've been severely sleep-deprived for a couple of months, which has made me very grouchy indeed most of the time. I asked her where my books were.

- We posted them to you at the end of March, she said.

- I haven't received them, I replied.

I'm not going to recount the entire string of mails that went back and forth but it transpired that the books had been sent to my old address, which I left 4 months ago and is 40 miles away. This despite the fact that I mailed the bunny in January to give her my new contact details, and again in mid-March to remind her of my new address. So she had all this on file and still managed to send my books to my old house. Worse, she insisted I must have them as they'd been signed for. I pointed out, rather tartly, that I'd not been back to my old town since I left and that I'd paid Royal Mail a large sum to forward all my mail for a year so I still should have received them (and yes I'm going to stick a rocket under Royal Mail tomorrow - watch me light the blue touch paper and stand well clear). But the bunny could have sent them to my current address in the first place if she'd paid a bit more attention. And if she'd bothered to email me a month ago to say the books were en route, the problem would have come to light very quickly.

But I'm more hacked off with the fact that I spent several months working on the book for an unbelievably paltry advance (and basically earned only about £50 in January from other clients because of time taken to finish the manuscript), in the hope that it would sell reasonably well and I'd at least earn some royalties.

But no, it's all been left to the last minute and I ended up bleating my woes on Twitter - some colleagues rallied around with ideas and contacts, for which I'm very grateful (even though I was horribly grumpy at the time), and I've now managed to secure a slot on the local BBC radio morning magazine show. It's something at least. Fortunately, there's an "awareness week" coming up mid-month, so I may yet be able to pitch a feature or two around that, much as I hate awareness weeks.

I am so knackered that I've had to apologise to lots of colleagues today for being a foul-tempered cow lately. And I had to grovel to the parental for going off-radar for several weeks, as well. I'm not massively popular right now. On days like these, I feel like jacking it all in and stacking shelves at the supermarket instead.

Lesson learned, though. I shan't write for this publisher again. Although I shall, of course, milk the fact I have a book out because it's good for the old CV.

Do I wish I'd never signed the contract? Hell, yes. At least right now. But I hope I might still be able to salvage something out of the current mess. The Manchester media community have been the best, today, with their offers of support. The next round will definitely be on me.

PR pap of the day

I think I'm going to have make this a very regular feature, such is the poor quality of the press releases dropping into my inbox every day (and worsening, too).

So, to today's:

One in Four People will Suffer from Mental Health This Year

That was the title. My initial reaction was shock that only 25% of the nation are sane in the brain and the remaining three-quarters are all stricken with problems ranging from depression to personality disorders.

My second concern was that there are only 7 weeks left until the end of the year. Does this mean that the population's mental health is only going to be suffering between now and then? Because really, if you plan to make a 12-month forecast it's best to do it at the start of the year. Alternatively, if you actually mean next year, then say so.

Reading the release, it becomes clear that, of course, the statistic is about 25% of people having mental ill-health. But with such a shoddy, misleading intro I just want to hit delete. After all, if the bunny can't get the title right, what's the chance of any of the rest of the statistics therein being accurate?

Bunny annoyances

Not 1 but 2 bunny boilings landed in my inbox today.

Flacks take note:

1. Sending a press release with the title "JOURNALISTS! READ THIS FIRST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" is going to annoy me. A lot. Partly because there is no need to use shouty caps or 22 exclamation marks (yes I counted them, saddo that I am). It doesn't scream "OMG you must open me as I contain such massive important news". It screams "delete me". I did, out of curiosity, open it - purely to see if it merited even 1 thousandth of that dumbfuck tells-you-nothing title. It didn't - it was about some spa face mask. That title might just have made the grade if it had been to publicise some bigwig's response to Paul Dacre's speech on press freedom, which has been the talk of the hackosphere today. But it wasn't, so it didn't. And another thing - don't send face mask bumph to journalists that aren't beauty writers. Because we really don't care about face masks.

2. I get a lot of "Top 10 Tips" releases - most are dreadful and fit only for deleting. I had a classic today on money-saving tips when shopping for food. Tip no. 4 - experiment with cheaper substitutes such as oyster mushrooms instead of chicken, pancetta instead of bacon - caused me to spray my coffee over my monitor. Since when has pancetta been cheaper than bacon? No 9. was a goody too - rice is a much cheaper alternative to pasta - hello, are you aware that the price of rice is now so high that many Asians in the far east can no longer afford their staple diet? That there are global rice shortages? That even in the UK, rice is both expensive and hard to source? Yes, the price of pasta has gone up too but it's still cheaper than rice. If you must bombard hacks with tips, let them be factually accurate. Meanwhile I'm left wondering where that bunny did her shopping. Harrods? (Where pancetta possibly is cheaper than bacon, if the bacon is sourced from an organic supplier hand-rearing his weaners halfway up a Peruvian mountain and feeding them on Beluga.)

PR annoyances of the month

A double posting tonight, as I return to an occasional favourite of mine...

First up, a very nice PR person actually took the trouble to call me a couple of weeks back to ask me about the kind of topics I normally write about and to see if I would be interested in any of her clients. I explained that her patch didn't really overlap with mine except very occasionally. We agreed that she could email her client list for me to peruse and that I would get back to her if I saw any possibilities for feature ideas. I've been a bit busy since then and haven't had time to look at the list.

I was rather cross today to get an email from her colleague. Said colleague wrote that she was glad to hear I was interested in the type of products her clients sold (er no, I didn't say that), she attached a "feature" that she asked me to place (the feature actually being a press release that consisted of a long list of product benefits - there was no story at all as the product has been on the market at least 10 years in the UK) and finished by saying she'd continue to send me releases (that I almost certainly do not want). An object lesson in how to piss a hack off. And tomorrow I have to write back to her sweetly explaining what she got wrong (I say sweetly because actually I don't want to piss off the colleague who called first).

I also got a release today of no use to me whatsoever from Rainier PR telling me all about why Londoners are sick of reading about Amy Winehouse in the media. Er, hello, anyone home at Rainier? I don't live in London and couldn't give a flying duck about whether its residents want to read about Winehouse's personal problems.

Of what possible use is a London-focused release to any hack a) not living in London and b) not writing about London? This is yet another example of Londoners driving the media agenda with London-based news and forgetting that the vast majority of British people live elsewhere and would rather know what is going on in their own area. It's the same mindset that dictates that the "news" is based on Westminster and the government and reflected in the very patchy media coverage of many counties on the BBC's own news website.

PRs take note: a bit more attention and focus to detail never goes amiss.


*I do realise I'm probably pissing into the wind here...

Bunny annoyance of the month

It's only 8 days since I changed my email address. A couple of days later, I amended the contact page of my website to include the new addy and also an extra paragraph of text. This stated very plainly that any PR types who might be thinking of adding me to a mailing list should contact me first (and that PRs who didn't bother would have their mail treated as spam.)

There are two very simple reasons for this:
1. I might not be interested in what a PR type is trying to promote, so it's always useful to check.
2. I have a dedicated mailbox for press releases that has a completely different address, which stops my inbox from being filled up with 100+ press releases a day.

I'm really fed up of being bombarded with press releases that have no interest for me. If they go into my PR mailbox, that's no big deal, but it's a major annoyance to have unsolicited PR landing in my POP3 account - unlike all the fake rolex and viagra spam, my ISP can't filter bunny droppings.

It took less than 24 hours for a PR bunny* at Ptarmigan PR to add my new email address to their database. Did they bother to contact me? Of course not. Do I write about property? No. Do I want press releases on how to flog a house? Work it out for yourself...

I immediately instructed my email filter to block all future mails from Ptarmigan. This morning my postie delivered an envelope from Ptarmigan containing the same press release - 4 pages, what a waste of paper.

I can't wait to hit the phone on Monday morning.

*A PR person who has fluff where the brain normally resides.