Month: September 2019

Blog Tour Day 6 has delivered my best review ever, from Julie at alittlebookproblem! I wish I could forward this to the publishers’ editors who loved it but wouldn’t take it on because they didn’t know how to market it, or to all those people who like to have an undiscriminating dig at the quality of indie authors from time to time…via The Magic Carpet by Jessica Norrie #BookReview #BlogTour (@Jessica_Norrie) @annecater #RandomThingsTours #TheMagicCarpet

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The Magic Carpet by Jessica Norrie – Blog Tour

The Magic Carpet by Jessica Norrie – Blog Tour

Here is another lovely review from a participant in my blog tour. She has a background in teaching and schools too, so if I had struck a false note she would have found me out! What would we do without book bloggers?

Herding Cats

Magic Carpet BT Poster .jpg

Thanks to Ann Cater of Random Things Tours for organising this blog tour and to Jessica Norrie for a copy of this book in exchange for a honest and unbiased review.

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Synopsis

Outer London, September 2016, and neighbouring eight-year-olds have homework: prepare a traditional story to perform with their families at a school festival. But Nathan’s father thinks his son would be better off doing sums; Sky’s mother’s enthusiasm is as fleeting as her bank balance, and there’s a threatening shadow hanging over poor Alka’s family. Only Mandeep’s fragile grandmother and new girl Xoriyo really understand the magical powers of storytelling. As national events and individual challenges jostle for the adults’ attention, can these two bring everyone together to ensure the show will go on?

My Thoughts

I must admit that I got an expected but completely welcome surprise when I read this book.  The magic carpet is an intricate…

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We’re going on a blog tour!

When I published The Infinity Pool in 2015 I barely knew what a blog was, let alone a blog tour. I didn’t envisage blogging myself, and I had no idea of the goodwill, time, energy and commitment put into spreading the word about books by bookbloggers, helping readers choose and writers survive.

More experienced authors pointed me in their direction and I began to get in touch with them, mostly via Facebook. It could be laborious – not because the bookbloggers were obstructive or unhelpful, quite the opposite. They were generous, informative and kind. But life became full of tasks and lists:

  1. Identify and visit blogs.
  2. Get a deeper sense of their flavour by exploring a number of posts.
  3. Read guidelines, consider if they apply to me.
  4. If they do, construct a polite contact email.
  5. Await a reply, consider whether to contact again (most bloggers are very prompt about responding so this wasn’t often necessary. However, a sub task was keeping a record of who I’d contacted.)
  6. Sort out what I had to do when they replied with an invitation, eg write guest post / send blogger a copy for review / answer blogger’s q and a / fit answers to quirky format only used by individual blogger to help them stand out. Send them.
  7. Put together all the other documents they need, eg extract / links to buy book / author photo and biog / social media links / cover images. Send them.
  8. Make a note of the date the post will appear.
  9. On that date share it on Facebook, Twitter and anywhere else I can think of, bearing in mind that overkill is, well, overkill.
  10. Share it again later (remember overkill though. And underkill.)
  11. Thank anyone else who’s shared it on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
  12. Now I have this blog of my own, reblog the post (having first remembered to ask if the original bookblogger is happy with that).
  13. Respond to any comments, on the original blog and my own.
  14. Thank the bookblogger…
  15. Add details to my file of “online presence” because agent told me publishers like to see authors have one when considering whether to take their books.
  16. Repeat…

It all takes time; my eyes even then were finding it a strain spending too much time gazing at screens; my grasp of Twitter was (and remains) more a case of clutching at straws.  

As one kind early reader of The Magic Carpet said, “Such an impressive leap forward!” Now a proud author second time around, I’m about to have my very own blog tour for #The Magic Carpet. No’s 1- 8 on the list are taken care of by the blog tour organiser – huge thanks to Anne Cater at #RandomThingstours! I’ll certainly still be contacting bookbloggers who aren’t involved at some point, but for now I’ve enough time on my hands to spend some of it adapting a much loved children’s rhyme (appropriate as my book involves children discovering the power of stories and words). 

MC blog tour

To the tune of “We’re going on a bear hunt!”

We’re going on a blog tour. It’s going to be a good one! I’m a bit scared  – What will the bloggers say?

Uh uh! A guest post! A compelling original guest post! I can’t not write it. I can’t write badly…Oh, gee! My audience is waiting!

We’re going on a blog tour. It’s going to be a good one! I’m a bit scared  – etc.

I did write more verses but I’ll save them for a rainy day when I can’t think what else to blog about. A troll comes into it, but I think we have him licked. I’m sure you get the gist.

Anyway, whether readership, reviews and sales rise or not, THANK YOU to the clever, generous, unpaid, sharing bookbloggers from The Bookwormery, The Magic of Wor(l)ds, The Book Decoder, Herding Cats, Random Things Through My Letterbox, A Little Book Problem, B for Book Review, TheBookCollector32, Being Anne, and Over the Rainbow Book Blog for showing my book to the world from Monday 16-Wednesday 25 September. Also for spreading the word about books in general, to benefit readers and writers everywhere.

The Magic Carpet Advert 2

©Jessica Norrie 2019

Maps for lost readers

Tidying up last week, I came across this initial sketch for the road The Magic Carpet families live in, made when I realised I wasn’t describing their comings and goings consistently. I may have had early thoughts of including it with the book – I’m a sucker for any book that has a plan or a map at the front, such as the Cluedo style plans used by Agatha Christie. A Book Riot post here has more great examples.

map 1 for MC

I recently read two contemporary books with house plans for endpapers. It’s a dangerous device as they do suggest extra riches within – Lucy Hughes-Hallet’s Peculiar Ground lived up to the promise with panache as reader and writer explored the grounds of her stately home setting together, but for me bestseller The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle didn’t work for several reasons, one being that the map didn’t match the story.

Joanna Cannon, in The Trouble with Goats and Sheep and Fredrik Blackman in A Man called Ove write their residential street settings so clearly that my mental picture tricked me into remembering plans that aren’t actually provided – I had to check my copies before I realised. I don’t think Richmal Crompton’s William Brown books provided one either, but fifty years after first reading them I could guide you round William’s village to his house, his long suffering school, the Bott’s nouveau riche manor house, and the various cottages where the Outlaws and assorted bespectacled men and tall lady writers lived. My mental navigation skills had first been stimulated by Joyce Lankester Brisley, author of Milly-Molly-Mandy, who does provide a map of M-M-M’s village and by the maps in my Pooh Bear books of the Hundred Acre Wood. Copyright won’t let me reproduce them here but you can see them on the Look Inside pages on Amazon.

A house, a small village, a cul-de-sac – these are all excellent settings because the writer can keep them closed to trap the characters inside while their story unfolds, or open them up partly or in full to admit strangers, dangers or resolution. With only one way in or out (or a sinister back way known only to locals, as in Cannon or Helen Kitson’s The Last Words of Madeleine Anderson) the writer can control character movements as a good general would deploy troops. A fan of early Brookside, I was particularly attracted to a cul-de-sac – a French word but the French don’t use it. They say “impasse” instead, which is much less helpful for plot purposes. Real British cul-de-sacs tend to be designed for and house a more homogeneous demographic than Brookside’s – but in London the monstrous permutations of the property, rental and social housing market lead to all sorts of cheek by jowl variety and make life much more interesting.

Five narrators, aged seven to sixty

So I set The Magic Carpet in a cul-de-sac, with a mix of family structures, incomes and backgrounds, and initially just the school their children attended to unite them. In my childhood, we’d have played outside in such a street. I hoped my characters might grow into that. My initial layout didn’t last: I changed the road name, moved some families and evicted others, swapped addresses, added some posh flats, divided some houses into maisonettes and extended others. I got rid of the central block and paved over most front gardens, with only a posse of gnomes resisting on one of the last remaining lawns. I turned  the luxury flats and the poorest house (council tenanted via a private landlord) to face the main road and the dangerous world outside. With no planning permission required, it was quick and easy. Unfortunately all my new maps turned out like phalluses; if you imagine the (deleted) outline of the close you’ll see what I mean. So with no budget for a pro to  resolve that particular embarrassment, I didn’t include it in the book. But you people who read my blog are special, so here’s my amateur effort: an additional reading aid just for you.

MC final map 2

©Jessica Norrie 2019