Word Count 77: Book credits pages, talking to your audience, H2G2 on Backlisted

Plus authors funding their own PR, Fieldwork progress, and literary festivals attacked by activists.

Hi there, 

The newsletter’s a little late today because this week seems to be The Week That Everything Happens. We’ve had two sets of visitors from the US, and had to spend five hours in A&E with one of them on Saturday after an accident left him with three broken ribs. (He’s as OK as one can be with three broken ribs.)

We had a Crowded House gig last night at Wasing which was truly amazing, to paraphrase Neil Finn. And to top it all off, I had to drive a manual car, which made me so tense I only got five hours sleep last night. 

There’s no rest for the wicked, though, as we’ve an event tonight, more time spent with our visitors tomorrow, and a wedding on the weekend where I’m one of the bridesmaids. Seriously, I’m going to need a holiday to get over my holiday.

I’m not complaining, though, because the weather’s been beautiful, and it’s a delight to see friends and family! 

Suw’s news: Fieldwork script on second draft

I always knew that signing up for Dave Cohen’s course to write a sitcom script in eight weeks was a good idea, if only to give me a deadline for drafting and redrafting the script. And my plan has worked! 

The Fieldwork pilot script has now had two rounds of feedback from Dave and, after a week off, I’ll attempt to write a third draft to address his final comments. My next move will be to trim it down into a 10 minute script, then convert it into an audio script. That latter job will be an interesting one, as I hadn’t quite realised just how visual it was all going to be.

Just in case you missed it, last week I wrote about the 400 hours (!!) of prep work that went into the 8 hours and 41 minutes that I spent actually writing. I can add to that 5 hours of rewriting so far, though that number will definitely get a lot larger over the next couple of months! 

Read this: Adding full credit pages to books

I am 100 per cent behind this piece by Maris Kreizman about the need for us to publicly acknowledge everyone whose skills have helped to create a book. She quotes author Molly McGhee, who has “requested full lists of credits in the back of [her] works” as saying, “I just really wanted there to be physical evidence that someone put their time into this book and I wanted them to be able to keep it and for it to be special.”

Kreizman finishes her piece by saying,

There is an enormous amount of invisible work that is done in publishing. Adding a standard credit page would not be an answer to the various and copious labor problems in the industry, but it could be a nice (and cost effective) start in making publishing staff feel more valued. 

But I think full credits does more than that. It illustrates to readers and writers alike just how much work beyond the writing goes into making a book, and demonstrates the wide variety of careers available in publishing (even if they are horribly underpaid). And it’s a step towards exploding the ridiculous myth of the lone genius author, which has persisted for far too long.

Full credits pages really should come as standard. There’s just no reason not to. 

Stop, look, listen: Draft Zero, E109 Talking Directly To Your Audience and E110 Voiceover

It’s funny how sometimes the right podcast episodes come along at exactly the right time. 

As I said above, I need to turn my TV script into a radio script, which means that I need to think about how the visual stuff can be translated into audio. One way to do this would be to use a narrator, as ReincarNathan did with Jenny the Spiritual Liaison Officer (Diane Morgan) who was both a character talking to the repeatedly reincarnated Nathan (Daniel Rigby), and the narrator describing things that couldn’t be captured by sound alone. 

Listening to Stu Willis and Chas Fisher dig into different ways to talk to your audience and do voiceover added some serious grist to the mill. The discussion about what the character wants from the audience as they talk to them, from when in time the voiceover or speech is coming, and narrator reliability fired off so many neurones in my head it was like New Year’s Eve in there. 

Both episodes are well worth a listen: 

• E109 Talking Directly To Your Audience

• E109 Voiceover

Stop, look, listen again: Backlisted, E213 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts

I also absolutely loved this episode of Backlisted in which comedy writer Joel Morris and author Gail Renard joined hosts John Mitchinson and Andy Miller to discuss Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts. Renard knew and worked with Adams back in the day, and had some lovely insights and stories to share. And I’m always here for Morris’s comedy analysis. 

I was introduced to H2G2 via the novels, then the TV series in 81, the regrettable film 05, and the marvellous stage adaptation in 2012, but I was a smidge too young to have listened to the original radio show, so it was marvellous to get more of a sense of how the radio show worked.

Read this, too: Authors funding their own PR

This’ll surprise no one, but authors are stumping up to pay publicists and book PR experts. The article puts a bit too much of a gloss on it by saying that it’s the “key to success”, whilst entirely failing to point out that this prices working class people out of the market, pushing publishing further into pay-to-play.  

Read this, three: Fossil fuel activists attack literary and music festivals

I am furious about the campaign by Fossil Free Books and other activists to defund cultural festivals by attacking sponsors. This is not the best way to tackle climate change or genocide — it’s selfish grandstanding. I know how hard it is to raise sponsor funding for events, and I suspect that a lot of these affected festivals are going to struggle next year, as will the rest of the events sector. Meanwhile, not one fewer barrel of oil will be extracted, not one life in Gaza will be saved. 

Obligatory cat picture

What better way to end a newsletter than with a photo of the wonderful Douglas Adams and a slightly odd-looking cat, which may have been a friend’s, according to the internet.

That’s it for this week! T’ra!

Suw