And the covers just keep on coming . . . this time from my German publisher, Heyne. Wow.

When I was down in London for the Book Fair last month, Sacha told me I could expect to see the cover art for the German edition within a couple of weeks, and very atmospheric it is too.

I love the subtle detailing. The desaturated palette makes a striking contrast to the rich colour of the other covers for Songs of the Earth, but no less effective.

As usual, click to enlarge. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a higher-resolution image in due course.

To celebrate the launch of my book, Orion are giving away five advance proofs to you lucky, lucky people. All you have to do is answer a really simple question, and your name goes into the draw. Go here – you have until 20th May 2011 – and good luck!

Oh, and for the benefit of anyone who’s been under a rock/on the back side of the moon/in solitary confinement in some Level 10 slam* for the last couple of years, this is the book I’m talking about:

Go on. Click that play button, you know you wanna.
 

*with or without a horse bit in their mouth

On Tuesday 12th April, I went down to London Book Fair. I’d been invited  by Orion to meet up with those of my foreign publishers who were in town for the Fair, and they’d very generously thrown in a hotel for the night, so how could I possibly refuse? I’ve never been to the Book Fair, and I wanted to go and see what it was all about.

Plus I quite like travelling on the train. EastCoast actually make a reasonable cup of tea, and the shortbread fingers aren’t half bad.

I was also hoping to catch up with a writer friend of mine, Judith Kinghorn, who’d just recently been signed by Headline and was due to be at the Fair at the same time as me. We’d first met on the writers’ site Authonomy, and here we were, almost three years later, both with publishing contracts, both marvelling at our good fortune.

Anyway, I arrived at Kings Cross feeling virtuous because I’d managed to do some work on the way down. After freshening up and abandoning the Huge Blue Holdall of Doom at my hotel, I made my way over to Earls Court.

It’s quite an impressive building, if you’ve not seen it before, with the arc of steps leading up to the numerous glass doors that wink at you rather like teeth in a wide, grinning mouth. You get a little holder for your badge in the foyer, then a chap waves a barcode scanner over your left bosom (or wherever you happen to have pinned said badge) and it’s on into the exhibition space itself.

It’s big. Givvus-a-bag-of-crisps big (if that reference is lost on you, scroll down). Brightly lit, and full of people, and there’s books everywhere. All sorts of books. Cookbooks, kids’ books, thrillers, lad lit, women’s fiction, science fiction, you name it. Book porn, as far as the eye can see.

Whimper.

So I got my bearings, and headed for the Hachette UK stand on Aisle H. Head for HarperCollins’ less-than-subtle signage, visible above the heads of the other stands, and it’s just opposite.

And guess what was the first thing I saw? This.

Oh my sweet furry lord.

So I’m standing there, grinning like a loon, wishing I’d brought the camera instead of my crappy old mobile, and it hit me. That’s my book. This is really happening.

Continuing to gawk like a country mouse on her first trip to the Big City, I took a turn around the very smart stand and admired the manor-house-drawing-room styling. Round the far side I found the meeting area, and there was my editor, Gillian Redfearn, who found me a seat and a cup of tea. Over the course of the afternoon I met pretty much the whole rights team, said hello to some old acquaintances, and played text message tag with Judith until she escaped from her various appointments and we were able to meet at last (she’s lovely, and she writes beautifully atmospheric historical fiction).

Sadly, my Dutch publisher was unable to join us for drinks, but we chatted for a while as Day 2 of the Fair wound down, before we collected Stephane and Alain from Bragelonne (my French publishers) and headed off to the pub, where we were joined by Sacha from Heyne and José from Planeta (Germany and Spain respectively). We then ate well, drank well, and laughed much. I seem to remember discussing some sort of pan-European book tour/road trip/pub crawl, but that could have been the beer talking . . .

José also brought me this beautiful boxed proof of the Spanish edition of my book, which is how Planeta are sending them out to the trade. It’s utterly gorgeous: the statue and the ivy are varnished so they shine out from the matt box. You expect to find expensive chocolates inside, or something equally precious. I’ve certainly never seen anything like it before.  The photos don’t do it justice.

On Wednesday I had lunch with my old acquiring editor, Jo Fletcher, pretty much the grande dame of UK genre publishing, who brought me to Gollancz in the first place. It was wonderful to catch up with her; just a real shame we both had to dash off before we got to the bottom of the bottle of wine, her back to the Fair and me to Kings Cross to catch my train home.

The reality of being an almost-published author (63 days to go, not that I’m counting or anything) still hasn’t quite sunk in, but I will admit to feeling a bit more like one now.

——–

McEwan’s Best Scotch TV advert from some 25+ years ago. I’ve scoured YouTube but I can’t find it, which is a shame, because it doesn’t really work in text. Scene: interior, pub, barmaid is pulling a pint of the aforesaid ale (tagline: the one you’ve got to come back for) for a customer recently returned from Germany.

Barmaid: “So how was Munich?”

Customer: “Big.”

“How was the beer festival?”

“Massive.”

<Meaningful pause as she tops off his pint> “And how were the lasses?”

<Cut to flashback of hefty Oktoberfest fräulein> “Oh, give us a bag of crisps.”

It’s amazing what you find when you’re poking around your website stats on  a rainy Saturday evening when there’s nothing on the TV.

Flicking through the “Referrers” list, which shows me where people have come from when they land on my site, I found a site I recognised: Meulenhoff Boekerij, parent of my Dutch publisher Mynx, which led me to the cover of the Dutch edition of Songs of the Earth, a.k.a Het Lied van der Aarde. Heel mooi!

Click to make it (not very much) bigger – hopefully I’ll get a higher-resolution version in due course.

I can’t believe my eyes – I must be dreaming… — Jack Skellington

A parcel just arrived here at Cooper Towers. A thick, heavy parcel, bound in sticky tape and bearing the blazon of none other than Orion Books.

So, naturally, I opened it – or tried to. Application of fingernails, scissors and finally brute strength was required (I don’t know where Orion gets their Sellotape, but this is definitely not regulation Sellotape, being fiendishly sticky and stubbornly durable).

Eventually, the ungodly stuff was overcome, and the parcel disgorged this:

Yup, the page proofs for Songs of the Earth just thudded onto my desk. Ooh. Exciting.

Now I get to read my book for the umpteenth time, looking for errors, misspellings, infelicitous word-choices etc – though hopefully I’ve already eliminated most of the outright clunkers by now, leaving only my prose, to stand or fall on its own merits.

It looks lovely, by the way. Absolutely lovely, like a child in its christening robes, all white and perfect. Sniffle.

Sorry, I seem to have got something in my eye.

There’s white things in the air — Jack Skellington

It bloody well is, you know.

Songs of the Earth is now manifest in physical form, and doesn’t it look pretty, all shiny and clean, ready to be launched into the big bad world to be variously picked apart, analysed, sneered at, reviewed, raved about, blogged over and ignored. Gulp.

I feel like a mother on Junior’s first day of school. Proud, and slightly nervous, smiling brightly and waving goodbye with an emergency hankie or two stuffed up my sleeve.

Actually, scratch that. Junior’s got rather more to worry about than a wedgie and having his lunch money stolen. Some of those reviewers can be downright merciless; it would be an entirely fitting allusion to say I feel like a gladiator’s mum before his first bout, having just walked through the armoury and past the wild-animal enclosure with the screams from the infirmary ringing in my ears.

Still, I’ve done my best, and he’s on his own now. I’ll be proud of him whatever happens. Go get ‘em, kid.

I have been a strident advocate of real books, but Amazon’s relentless Christmas advertising campaign got to me, and convinced me that I needed a Kindle – even though I didn’t actually want one. Add that to my Christmas loot burning a hole in my pocket, and the result was inevitable.

I have to say, it’s impressed me. Beautifully engineered, it is light, readable, vastly more portable than the chunky hardbacks in my library, great for train/plane/long stay in hospital. But it will not replace the paper book in my heart.

Why? An e-reader doesn’t smell right or feel right and has no substance.  Reading an ebook is just like reading a technical pdf (and I had quite enough of them in my last job, thank you very much). It’s utilitarian. It has no soul. And I can’t take it into the bath.

Picking up the Kindle is nothing like walking into my library and seeing the rows of old friends on the shelves, each one of which instantly evokes a fragment of the story, or the holiday where I first read it, or the birthday for which it was a present. An e-reader to me is a tool, and as unromantic as a screwdriver.

We all need screwdrivers sometimes, but we don’t keep them on display like the best china. We bring them out when we need them, then put them away again. And so it will be with my Kindle, I think.

I’ve just finished reading my first ebook, and if the author wasn’t a friend I would feel no compunction whatsoever about deleting it from the device. Yet every paper book I’ve ever bought remains on the shelves in the library – even the ones I didn’t really enjoy that much – and anyone who tries to get me to part with any of them is liable to get hurt.

Oh, come on. Which of these two would you rather pick up?

…for I have sinned.

I’ve never read George RR Martin.

Don’t ask me why, because I really couldn’t say.  I adore the title of the series “A Song of Ice and Fire”.  I’ve just never found myself motivated to pick up one of his books.  Actually, tell a lie, I did pick up a copy of  “A Game of Thrones” in Waterstone’s once but put it down again before I got to the till.

Before the fantasy establishment mob besieges Cooper Towers with pitchforks and blazing torches, ready to burn the heretic,  let me just say that I am remedying this right this instant.  Since HBO has green-lighted a mini-series based on A Game of Thrones, starring the scrummy Sean Bean, no less, my interest has been piqued.

Piqued enough to go and buy the book.  Gawd knows when I’ll find time to read it, since I’m supposed to be writing one of my own here, but I’ll try.  Really I will.  Now put those pitchforks down before someone gets hurt.

Quite a lot, actually.  A lot of to-ing and fro-ing, trying to find one that looks right, sounds right, balances well on a book cover and isn’t too hard to pronounce (so you don’t end up with lots of confused readers in the bookstore who want to buy your book but don’t know how to say your name and are too embarrassed to go and talk to the girl on the Customer Service counter in case they get it wrong and look like a plonker).

In the opinion of my agent, it is not dissimilar to the naming of cats.  I’ve always maintained that cats should be named something you wouldn’t be embarrassed to yell down the street at midnight to get the wretched thing to come home, and my subconscious immediately presented me with an image of a group of agents wandering around Bloomsbury trying to round up their authors after one of Gollancz’s legendary parties.

I’d originally picked Elizabeth Cooper as my pen-name, because I felt my real one didn’t exactly trip off the tongue.  It doesn’t seem to have hurt Conn Iggulden much, but there you go.  Anyway, my publisher was keen to go for something that balanced better on a cover, and we batted round some ideas.  We even tried playing the gender-ambiguity card for all it was worth, since research suggests that boys tend not to buy books written by girls.  Strange but true.

In the end, we decided that the rule book had been comprehensively trashed by the likes of Stephenie Meyer and Charlaine Harris, and that for fantasy authors female is the new black and Elspeth Cooper it would be.  Plus the foreign publishers loved it.  The name with which I have existed in a state of armed truce for some forty years, which I am reduced to spelling out over the telephone as echo-lima-sierra-papa-echo-tango-hotel only to have the person at the other end go “Um…”

But really, I don’t care, because in 2011 the name in gold-embossed lettering on that gorgeous cover over the thick hardback book will be *mine*.

…I entered a short story competition organised to celebrate the author Douglas Reeman‘s 25 years in print.  Somehow, I won, with a rousing Napoleonic War frigate action in the Med.  This was 1984, and I was a whole 15 years old.

I got to meet Douglas for lunch in Mayfair and was thoroughly charmed by the man.  We corresponded for some time afterwards, and he was unstinting in his encouragement of me as a writer.  We lost touch, as school and exams got in the way and I shelved my wilder writerly ambitions for a time.

Recently mum and dad had a clear-out of their bookshelves and I reacquired a sizeable collection of Douglas’ books, including his Alexander Kent “Bolitho” series on which I had gorged myself as a teenager and which inspired me to write my prize-winning story.  Curious, I Googled and found Douglas’ website, which had an email address.

I wasn’t expecting him to remember me but I sent him a short note yesterday to say hello and congratulate him on what is now 50 years as a published author (that’s quite something, in anybody’s reckoning, and boo! hiss! to his publishers for not marking it).

Today I got a reply.  He does remember me, still has photos of the day we met at the Navy Club, and is every bit as charming, gentlemanly and encouraging as I remember.

This has made my day.  I am completely, utterly, and quite ridiculously, made up.