Here’s the back cover of Sunderland – have a look, it says some nice things about the book. It’s due to be launched tomorrow, 6th of May 2014. I’m a bit apprehensive as I have still not seen a copy, but I have faith in the printers.
I did post a cover earlier here, but this is the final version:
Ken Barris and I have a novel called Sunderland coming out with Jacana at the beginning of May. There’s an interview with us by Karin Schimke here.
In case anyone is wondering, writing a novel (or other book-length publication) is not over when the final full stop is put down, nor is the actual writing of the book by any means all of the work involved. After the writing comes the attempt to find a publisher, and if one does bite, there is an almost endless stream of small administrative and publicity-related tasks that continue until well after the book is actually issued, as well as a vast amount of editing, proofing etc., if one wants to get the thing right in all its details.
While Ken and I were working I saved all the related emails in a folder. Up to the time when we had a draft that we could send out, there were 573 emails. Lets say 80% of them can be placed with “thoughts you might have had if you were writing the novel by yourself.” That still leaves over 100 administrative emails – permission requests and so on. After that, there are a further 631 emails, all administrative in some sense, dealing with the attempt to get published (which lucked out very quickly with Jacana) and all the tasks involved in the actual creation of a book. The closer to publication, the hotter the pace. In the last 3 months, there have been over 100 emails a month. This won’t stop until mid-year, though I’m hoping that it will taper off. I daresay Ken has as many emails, though they are probably distributed among his many email addresses. Of course it goes way beyond emails – one has to DO things – read, mark up etc.
This is not to discount the huge effort of writing all those thousands of words, but just to say that it doesn’t end there. Writing is hard work.
In the current literary economy, Ken and I can reasonably expect to share about R10 000 ($1000) for our efforts.
The picture is of a sample cover. (101 emails with the words “Sunderland Cover”)
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