Archive for the ‘getting published’ Category

Posted on June 11, 2008 - by MG

Author Tour Report 1: Obviously, I’m a philistine…

Author Tour Report 1: Obviously, I’m a philistine…Originally uploaded by mgharris

…because today was my first time at the British Museum.

My lovely publishers always out me up at a boutique hotel in Bloomsbury when I’m doing author stuff in London. It’s right next to the British Museum but until today I’d not taken the time to visit.

Quite awe-inspiring stuff actually. Mind you, all the big London museums are.

The striking thing is that unlike the huge museums of Mexico City (and I believe, Cairo), they aren’t dedicated to indigenous culture. London’s museums reflect a fascination with every other part of the world.

Is it hubris on the part of Mexico and Egypt, compared with generous interest on the part of the Brits?

Or does it simply reflect the success of Britain’s plunder and conquest of ancient treasues? And modern Mexico and Egypt’s lack of conquest over anything except a dead indigenous civilisation?

The people who think the Elgin marbles should be returned to the Greeks might argue it’s the latter.

While I was writing this blog post, two American tourists from Minnesota -father Lars and 12-year old Leif – sat down near me to enjoy some yummy-looking chocolate cake and Coke. We started chatting about this and that and the Maya.

The museum is light on Mexican exhibits, but the little they have is nicely displayed. An excellent lintel from Yaxchilan shows a Mayan queen performing the blood-letting ceremony.

Anyway. An amazing day followed…brilliant visit to the quite fab Eltham Centre library to meet a class of year 6s from a local primary school. Then a sumptuous afternoon tea with my publishers. Then champagne cocktails and canapes at Waterstones Piccadilly as we watched a Sotheby’s auctioneer sell off handwritten short stories by famous authors (read the BBC news report here…)

Luckily for me they hadn’t asked Murakami or Vargas Llosa so I wasn’t in danger of losing my head and getting into a bidding war. One of my publishers was a bit miffed at being beaten to the Doris Lessing. And we all felt that the 800 word Harry Potter went cheaply at around £25,000. But the auctioneer was taking absentee bids. The whole room could sense that Mystery Bidder was prepared to go to daft numbers. So everyone chickened out. Afterwards we all felt daft. Because you could probably have doubled your money at least even on eBay. Later I asked one of the Bloomsbury team why they hadn’t bid to push up the price. She pointed out that even JKR’s agent hadn’t bid. And from what I heard about who was there…he was probably the richest person in the room.

It would have been public-spirited to have kept Mystery Bidder going to what would probably have been silly money. But it seems no-one wanted to risk that tricky conversation at home. ‘Honey, I seem to have spent fifty grand on a bit of a story…’

Then Scholastic kindly took Axel Scheffler and I to dinner at the Criterion. His lovely Gruffalo story was the fourth most expensive at the auction.

Ee. See what a fabulously glamorous author life I’m having just now? Today doing a bunch of bookshop signings and then playing the biggest room I’ve done as an author – 180 years 5 and 6 in Dulwich.

Better get up then…
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Posted on May 30, 2008 - by MG

Very Cool Things to promote “The Joshua Files”

Today I’m especially excited because a) I’ve seen photos of the AWESOME point-of-sales materials that are going to be used to sell ‘Geheimakte Joshua: Die Unsichtbare Stadt’ in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and b) the lovely publicity department at Scholastic have been working with me to develop some fact cards to play a Joshua-themed game at events on my upcoming book tour. They are fab!

So without further ado, here they are…

If you know anyone who runs a bookstore in a German-speaking country, they can order these from the publisher (Dressler):

http://meta.verlagsgruppe-oetinger.de/index.php?id=3391 (scroll down to Geheimakte Joshua)

Also – very exciting – here’s an excerpt of Frank Böhmert’s translation of Joshua Files.

And below is an example of the Tyler fact card. Aintitcool?

Posted on February 19, 2008 - by MG

themgharris.com is launched…

 
Look what Redhammer made me!!!

Well, what do you suppose a newly launched debut author does in the first week after her book is out…?

About a year ago I imagined I’d be walking around rather light-headed, visiting bookshops and placing my book somewhere more prominent… And the rest of the time sort of basking in a glow of happiness.

Well, guess what?

I actually AM doing quite a bit of that! (Although they’ve done really well with the book placement – it’s on tables and face out everywhere that I’ve seen. Yay!)

But my hard-working agent is also seeing to it that I’m not entirely frittering away my time eating cream scones, bagels and ice-cream and watching TV. He’s had me thinking of and writing articles for the super-whizzy new fan site that he’s developed at www.themgharris.com

Why did we call it that? Cos mgharris.com is taken and there is more than one MG Harris…

(although I bet there isn’t another Maria Guadalupe Harris but, yanno…drat, I just checked and there ARE!)

So check it out and maybe even join up!

In other news, in Cuba Fidel Castro has ‘resigned’ as El Presidente For Life, Glorious Dictator and Supreme Revolutionary Commandante (or some such overblown title). I guess we’ll have to wait until he checks in by phone with one of his best buddies like French movie actor Gerard Depardieu, to find out if he’s really still alive at all.

He’s put his brother Raul Castro in charge. Cubans have been waiting a long time to see Fidel die or stand down. They have a lot of patience, those people.

Posted on February 15, 2008 - by MG

JOSHUA FILES launch party!

Elaine McQuade (Scholastic), MG Harris, Elv Moody (Scholastic) and Peter Cox (Redhammer) at the launch party for THE JOSHUA FILES

So finally, we threw a party for THE JOSHUA FILES at La Perla, a Mexican restaurant/bar in London. Team Joshua from Scholastic were there, plus many other wonderful people from that company. We were joined by influential children’s booksellers and people from the children’s media. I had some brilliant conversations, although all too brief. So many people to meet!

Elaine and I gave little speeches. Luckily for me Elaine went first. While she spoke I realised that I was in severe danger of forgetting everything I’d planned to say. It was all lost behind a tequila-and-lime-flavoured fog. I had to struggle to latch onto any aspect of what I was saying. Thank goodness I’d decided to start with blaming (totally unfairly )my sister-in-law for my skiing accident. I don’t have any trouble at all talking about that day. Nope, falling onto the Eggli mountain and snapping my tibia is a path quite well etched into my neurons.

Over the next few weeks there will be plenty of opportunities to buy TJF on promotion. It will be Book of the Week in Sainsbury and Tesco, and is on discount now at WHSmith, Waterstones and Borders.

It looks as though the next stage for me will be visiting schools. I’m really looking forward to doing this. Finally hanging out with readers! Might even find a way to combine it with school governor work…asking for 30 mins with all curriculum deputies to talk about 14-19 education initiatives or something. Hmmm.

My agent Peter Cox (pictured above) has been working with designers on a super, super cool new fan site. I hope readers will love it. Should be ready by Monday…but if you are clever at searching on Google you might already be able to find it.

A prize for the first one to locate it! I don’t know what, yet, but something token…

Posted on February 11, 2008 - by MG

Week one…a report

My agent warned me not to go into London for fear of getting The London Lurgy. You know, that virus that everyone’s getting.

But not me, until two Fridays ago, because as you know from reading this I have very little actual contact with anyone outside of my Extreme Inner Oxford Circle (family, neighbour Gabby, me pals Becs and Susie…). Sometimes weeks go by and the only people I spend more than five minutes with are the EIOC.

So I went to London, caught the virus and was violently ill that evening. By Sunday night I was well enough to go to see ‘Cloverfield’.

Which made me sick, motion sick. I had to walk out after 40 mins…but was struggling to hold back feelings of nausea all the way through. Five more minutes and I would have barfed.

Then I went down with post-viral exhaustion. Yes, yes, excuses for not keeping the blog updated, but there you go.

Monday we did the little Joshua party at Krispy Kreme. I hardly touched the doughnuts but it was lovely to see everyone.

Tuesday I stayed in bed most of the day.

Wednesday ditto, conserving energy for the Bill Heine BBC Radio Oxford show. Bill and I met first at Costa where he amazed me by telling me how much he’d enjoyed ‘The Joshua Files – Invisible City’ and producing a stack of photocopied pages from the book; his favourite passages highlighted.

“This is what I’ll be wanting to discuss with you,” he said, picked up his coffee and scurried down the road to the BBC studios on Banbury Road. I followed behind slowly, looking at the pages. He’d picked out all the deepest and most personally revealing sections…not what I’d expected at all. (There aren’t many such sections…)

Over the course of Bill’s 3-hour show we talked on-and-off about the book. Every 15 mins Bill’s producer Sean popped in and knelt down beside me, took the mike and read out the headlines in a really posh voice. Bill fielded calls, read headlines, threw opinions around, punched buttons and managed screens and talked to me, all with dizzying aplomb.

After about 2 hours I worked out that the red light to my right went on everytime our mikes went live. So I didn’t need to be whispering and making hand signals the rest of the time. Duh.

I don’t know if I’ll ever again by interviewed by someone who a) loved the book so much and b) got right to the heart of the more serious stuff I thought I’d buried behind all the action adventure. As a radio debut it was a pretty extraordinary experience, I reckon.

Thursday I stayed in bed half the day, then wrote an article for National Geographic Kids about the Maya.

Friday – the Archbishop of Birmingham and his Bishop came to the school where I’m a governor and in a beautiful, moving ceremony, blessed the £21 million new school buildings which have finally been completed. The mass was also attended by representatives from all Oxfordshire’s Catholic schools and parishes, local dignitaries, Andrew Smith MP, city and county councillors, senior officers from the two authorities who oversee the school – the Diocesan Schools’ Commission and the Local Authority, plus most governors, past and present, teachers and of course, students from the school. The students were without exception impeccably dressed, courteous and helpful as guides, and basically they performed all the music for the mass too.

During one of the musical interludes the students brought banners representing every feeder parish. They’d made them themselves with the help of School’s brilliant art department. The banners were taken behind the altar, where they will be used to decorate the bare halls of the fabulous new hall. Watching, I remembered so many moments in the establishment of the school, from the first time I heard it mentioned in mass as a possibility, when having our own Catholic secondary school was just a dream that we had to petition for, to the first announcement, to meetings in people’s houses to discuss marketing plans…to the hard years of establishing the school…all the pain and struggle everyone had been through and all the minor successes on the way…to standing in that very hall with the architect when it was just bricks and mud, listening to him explain, waving his arms around, how it would all work. I watched those kids bringing the Archbishop those banners and I have to admit, tears sprung to my eyes. I think many of us felt that way.

It’s quite a thing to see a brand new school created. Meanwhile, inside the deluxe surroundings the hard work of driving up attainment and standards goes on.

And on Saturday I did my first ever signing in a bookshop!

Not a bad week. Pretty, pretty, pretty good.