It's been a funny old time since publication in the UK (April) and the US and Canada (May). When friends know you have a new book out everyone asks the same question: 'How's it going?' This is a hard question a) to interpret and b) to answer, because the definition of success is pretty subjective. I find I generally answer 'fine, I think', because to explain at any great length about the low state of the British or US market at the moment, the death of the hardback in the UK, the closed doors of the literary reviewing establishment, the fantastic odds against any new author making an appearance on a bestseller list or in a supermarket chart without the support of the Richard & Judy Book Club, all sounds both whingingly defensive and achingly, anally dull. Put two authors together, or an author and a publisher or (I am the worst case of course, being both in the same package) an author, publisher and agent together and you can have post mortem conversations of this nature ad infinitum. The truth of the matter is that most books sell at a certain unstartling level, don't make it into the top 10 or are heralded everywhere from the Sunday Times to the Washington Post as the future of literature; but even for those of us who know the odds it's hard not to be faintly disappointed for the world not to have changed shaped because your book was published. I can hear all the authors I've published over the years laughing hollowly at this little lesson in realism...
On the other hand there have been some nicely starry moments. At last count there were over 50 Amazon reviews posted for CROSSED BONES averaging out at a very decent 4 stars, with a large preponderance of 5 star reviews brought down by a few readers who really didn't get on with it at all! (Although, as any author will tell you, it's always the negative ones you remember, no matter how glowing the comments in the good reviews.) And great blurbs from a number of authors, papers and internet sites around the world. Some heart-warming emails from fans, including a number of European women who also found love in Morocco and are either terrifically happy or still battling bureaucracy, with whom the novel struck a deep chord.
The German, Dutch, Swedish and Italian publishers have been sharing their fantastically ambitious publication plans with me, and have all devised extraordinarily different covers for their markets, all of which are striking and elegant in their own ways. I'll be visiting the Netherlands to publicise the Dutch edition in September and Rome and Milan to publicise the Italian edition in October.
Best of all, the new novel that I'm working on now, THE SALT ROAD, has been sold in Germany and the UK so far, and is about to be submitted elsewhere, so I am hard at work. And in the meantime I've delivered the latest children's book - THE MASKMAKER - to Marion Lloyd, head of Marion Lloyd Books at Scholastic UK, so that will be published in the spring of 2009, around the same time, I imagine, as the paperback of CROSSED BONES, which will see yet another incarnation of the cover packaging.
So it's been an odd, up-and-down sort of time; and on top of all this I've been inundated with HarperCollins work, with several authors delivering at once and some high profile submissions that have had to be read quickly. I'm looking forward to a holiday, but other than 3 days in Paris next month to visit Abdel's family, I don't think I'm going to get one any time soon! Still, am happy to be living in interesting times.
