It's all change

There have been changes aplenty in the world of The Bromley Boys since this blog began. Tom, the editor who commissioned the book has taken redundancy, as has Helen, who handled publicity. I've moved from New Zealand to Hartford, Connecticut, which is arguably not a good thing.
Still, there have been a few pluses recently. Time Out published a 3-page extract last week and the Kentish Times called The Bromley Boys "one of the year's best sporting books". Sales in December were good, especially in the South-East, where it was the Xmas bestseller in a couple of shops.
The problem is still getting the national press interested. I think most of them still see it as a local-interest only kind of book. But it's not. Honest. As a new review on Amazon says: "Why don't Waterstones stock books like this?"

Reviews and news.

The book's been out for a couple of months now, and after googling it on a daily basis, I'm now starting to see some reviews. They've all been pretty good (so far) and my particular favourite is one that appeared in the Yorkshire Evening Post, as well as the Birmingham Post.

I realise that readers of this blog are busy, successful people, so I'll just give you the highlights: "exceedingly funny...this marvelous memoir is a must-read...the type of book you could read on a train and suddenly burst out laughing...it ranks among the very best books with a sporting theme."

That'll do me.

I also had my first ever experience of a mass book signing (well, 20 of them) at Waterstone's in Bromley, where I can be seen above in an entirely natural pose. They told me that sales were "going through the roof." If only that was the case at all Waterstone's branches...

Still, I have to say I'm pretty happy with everything so far.

When Reviews Come

With the book all finished, and the orders all taken, the focus now moves towards the publicity for The Bromley Boys. And it's a nice way to kick off proceedings with a very positive review in When Saturday Comes. The reviewer, John Carter says

'Robert's wry, self-deprecating style is his book's biggest asset. Football fan or not, it's a genuinely funny read ... if you've ever endured a season like Bromley's, you'll recognise the tears hidden behind the smiles ... thoroughly recommended'

In fact the only thing that the reviewer doesn't like is the shoutline on the front -- written not by Dave, but by me (oops). So sorry about that, Dave.

The eagle has landed

As Tom touched on below, it's one of the best parts of writing a book. When that first pristine copy arrives in the mail. And that's what happened today. What made it even better was that I wasn't expecting it until the end of the month. I think the book looks great - I especially love the jacket and keep reading the cover quotes over and over. Even the Shakespeare quote at the beginning (not the result of a good education, but stolen from a recent Eastenders episode) seems perfect.
I never thought a book about a non-league football team's 1969 season could be made to look so sexy...

Back of the Net...

And after all that effort and writing and editing and tweaking and fine tuning, a finished copy finally rolls off the printing press. One of the nicest moments in the publishing process.

Well done Dave!

Quote Me Happy

Another part of the publishing process is to try and garner some useful pre-publication quotes for a book. This involves trying to work out which writers would be right to give an endorsement, and then pursuing them politely in the hope that they can spare you a couple of hours to read (and hopefully enjoy) the book. As you might imagine, there are some writers who are simply overwhelmed by the number of such requests: Nick Hornby, for example, has been asked so many times, he simply turns down the lot for fairness (and, I suspect, sanity); I wrote to Michael Palin last year for a quote, and got a polite letter back declining to give a quote for a completely different book.



For The Bromley Boys, the two people I thought would be perfect were the two I managed to hunt down. I commissioned a book by Match of the Day 2 presenter Adrian Chiles in a previous job (the extremely wonderful ‘We Don’t Know What We’re Doing’) and although he is fantastically busy, managed to squeeze out of him a quote. Harry Pearson, meanwhile, is the author of what I think is the greatest football book of all time, 'The Far Corner', and as I was in touch with him about another project, took the opportunity and asked if he’d be kind enough to read Dave’s book. Which he was.

The result are the following, extremely well deserved quotes:

‘Will strike a chord with football fans everywhere’ Adrian Chiles

"Agonisingly funny - perfectly captures the sad, futile, yet glorious world of the adolescent male football fan" Harry Pearson

If I saw those quotes on a football book in a bookshop, I’d pick it up.

The Burden of Proofs

It’s been a little while since I’ve written here, given that Dave and Malcolm have been busy crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. But the publishing wheels have been grinding on in their grinding on sort of way. With the manuscript finished and the layout designed, the pages have come back from the typesetters, still on A4, but beginning to look like a proper book. At this point, the joy that is proofreading takes place – checking that none of the t’s and i’s have lost their crosses and dots in the transfer. It’s the part of the process that I don’t really have the patience for, so thank the Lord for professional proofreaders. Though in my defence, as a rule of thumb, anyone who has edited the book shouldn’t proofread it as well – because you’re so familiar with the text, you can’t really look at it with the necessary fresh eyes to spot the errors. That’s my excuse anyway, and I’m sticking to it. In theory, you should have two sets of proofs, the second to check that mistakes from the first have been taken in. In practice, to the immense frustration of production, you can quite often end up with a third, fourth set, and even more. With hopefully all the mistakes spotted, next time we see the book, it'll be the finished product.