by Chris Harris
As we speak, Something About England has been cobbled up into Amazon KDP and will shortly be spat out as a book of short stories for the delight, or the despair, of the readers. It was two months ago we went through the same process and realised the book just wasn’t good enough, and set about re-editing it. This took Eloise and I 120 hours, and Louise, to proofread, a further 30 hours. Utterly mind-numbing when you think you have reached the finishing line to realise you have another load of laps still to go.
What was obvious was that when I started writing it a year ago, whilst I could string a sentence together, it was relatively disorganised and slapdash. Over the last year, I’ve learnt a lot about English and writing that I really should have been taught at the expensive, but low-grade, public school I had the misfortune of attending. Whilst I remain a long way away from being highly competent with the principles of story writing and structure, I know enough now to be able to pull it off. With a little help from my friends.
For this book, I needed to get an editor and a proofreader. For the second book, which is nearing completion, we Eloise and I will edit ourselves and, this time, just get Louise to proof it, keeping it simpler.
In hindsight, the problem with your first book being a book of short stories is that it is 13 different segments of work rather than one. It lends itself to glorious levels of disorganisation. It was difficult for Louise doing the editing, jumping from story to story, and, from my point of view, having never done anything like this, even more difficult. So the book, it’s fair to say, was cobbled together.
But my writing is a long-term project. We’ve already got another two books nearly in the can: another book of short stories and my non-league novel, an alternative to Ted Lasso. So, of course, the next ones will be so much easier. I’ve run a business all my life, and it’s just me needing to apply those principles of organisation to a book, which is difficult to do when you’re starting to do something for the first time and you don’t have a clue how to do it, apart from references to Google and AI for advice.
But during the last year or so, they’ve been excellent resources of information, and it’s through those that I haven’t wasted enormous time and effort going down rabbit holes trying to do what so many other short story writers do: enter competitions, which just seems to be a complete waste of time; trying to get a shoo-in with independent publishers, who basically are almost too difficult to even get an audience with.
The one thing we’ve definitely done right is deciding to do this on our own and self-publish, as we now embark on the part I’m actually really quite looking forward to, which is promoting it.
We’ve already set up lots of social media and other platforms for promoting it and have dilly-dallied around with those for a while, a few months ago. So it’s time to, one by one, get my head around all of these platforms and do, as I’m doing now, as I dictate this on my walk, start creating the content.
A couple of weeks ago, I set up my own podcast. We already have a podcast for the book, which I’ll be doing with Louise, but it’s important that I actually learn how to do these things myself as well, so I can actually now go through the whole process of making an, albeit amateur, podcast.
So Louise is off to France for a couple of weeks. When she comes back, we’re off to France for a week as well. The book will be published by then, and rather than attack the promotion with the disorganised approach of the book, Louise will focus on audio, audiobooks, her wonderful Radio 4 voice, and podcasts. Podcasts are simple, engaging content to produce; there will be loads of them, and with almost 1000 pages of material published across the three books over the next six months, there will be plenty to talk about.
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