New ...News...

January 2006

Bonjour and bonne année.

And sorry, because this must be one of the most out of date websites on the internet.

But I know it still gets clicked on because I receive lots of emails from people I don’t know, including some who keep asking why the website is so incredibly out of date.

They also ask me what I’ve been up to since my last update in July 2004.

The answer is, quite a lot. All in all, I can heartily recommend setting up your bookselling website and self-publishing a couple of novels. It can really take you places.

For a start, A Year in the Merde has been published in a bunch of highly visitable countries, and in 2005 I went to New York, San Francisco, LA, Portland, Sydney, Brisbane, Auckland, Munich, Montpellier, Montreal. Oh, and Norwich.

I sat in a room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York and did a whole day of interviews with radio stations all across the States, during which I actually got to say the phrase “Good Morning Ohio!”

I begged the Australians to fly me over, and they said they couldn’t really afford it, but would try to get funding from a book festival. If they could find a festival of books and snorkeling, it’d be even better, I said. And a couple of months later I was floating in the sea off Queensland. They’d found the Brisbane Writers Festival, which sends foreign authors to get over their jet lag on a desert island. Books and snorkeling it was.

In Munich, I had a publisher’s sales conference in stitches, not because I was being witty but because my accent when I tried to read the German translation of A Year in the Merde was so atrocious that they thought I had to be joking. Nein, meine Herren, it was deadly serious, I’m afraid.

I was live on a French TV news show when London won the 2012 Olympic city vote. I was able to tell a French ex-Minister of Sport not to be so bitter. “Paris didn’t lose,” I told him, “you just won the silver medal.”  I must say that everyone in the studio laughed, except the Minister, who told me “you think you are funny, but you’re not.” It’s not every day you get a personal insult from an ex-Minister.

What else? Oh yes, I wrote Merde Actually, which was published in September, almost totally ignored by book reviewers, and to my utter amazement went to number one in The Bookseller’s Original Fiction (new novels) chart. Number one. Now I know how Abba feel. Well, almost.

It will be out in a British mass-market paperback in the spring of 2006, and will be published in America at the same time, though they’re changing the title to In the Merde for Love, because the movie “Love Actually” wasn’t such a big hit over there.

I’m surprised the Americans are calling it anything with “merde” in it, because when I was over there I had big problems saying the title of my books. Their linguistic prudery is such that some media won’t say “merde” for fear of insulting someone who speaks French. It’s OK to show reality TV pictures of murder victims with holes in their heads, but you can’t say the French word for poo. Or, of course, show the nipples of any members of the Jackson family. Although I think I agree with them on that one.

The funniest thing was in San Francisco, where I did a TV show with a presenter who said he wasn’t allowed to say the M-word. He could, however, show the cover of the book where the title was clearly legible. So it was taboo to shock the ears but OK to insult the eyes. I honestly didn’t care. I was having too much fun thinking, bloody hell, you’re in San Francisco doing a breakfast TV interview. A year earlier, A Year in the Merde had taken me nowhere further than my local post office.

So what’s next?

Well, I’m having a lot of fun writing volume three of Paul West’s adventures, which I’m planning to finish in the autumn. Merde Happens should be out in early 2007. But I’m hoping there’ll also be a little surprise before Christmas. Can’t say more, though. I’m still waiting to see if it comes together.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone who’s read my Merde and helped to spread it all over the world. I would say something like “I’m doing my best to keep it flowing”, but that would be too gross.

Oops.

Stephen Clarke, Paree, 18.01.06

Old old ...News...

As many of you probably know, I have now sold the rights to A Year in the Merde to "real publishers". In the UK, this is Transworld, who are currently speeding ahead with a new edition of the book.
So I won't be printing any more of my own edition. But you won't have long to wait, because a great new Bantam edition will be available in bookshops on September 2.

I've really enjoyed selling direct, both to individual readers and bookshops. I doubt whether many authors get such direct feedback from their readers.

But I must admit that spending all my evenings and weekends delivering books to shops or packing them up in envelopes and taking them to the post office was getting physically tiring. My arms have grown three inches longer from all the carrying. My fingers are now permanently sticky from all the address labels. I have recurring dreams where I'm getting beaten to death with Jiffy Bags by enraged Frenchmen who are stuck in the post office queue behind me as, just before closing time, I go up to the window with 50 packages and start reciting my mantra: "sixteen 300-gram letters for France, ten by priority mail for the UK ..." And wallop, the first Jiffy Bag hits me in the kidneys.

That's why I have insisted that my contract with Transworld stipulates absolutely zero delivery obligations. I am pretty good at deliveries these days but I want to get back to writing. The further adventures of Paul West are already bubbling away in my head. I want to start writing them. As long as my fingertips don't get stuck to the keyboard.

Oh yes, for those of you who still don't know, Paul West didn't write A Year in the Merde. I did, Stephen Clarke. I just thought it'd be more fun if, at first in any case, people thought Paul really existed. Which I suppose in a way he does. He's part me, part imagination. And it is my imagination after all.
And yes, I wrote the other two books on this website, too. Beam Me Up, obviously, and also Who Killed Beano?

I must apologize to those people who've bought Who Killed Beano? and wondered how I could offer them a signed copy. No, I didn't get Chris Kent to sign a few books before I drowned her in that mysterious diving accident.

When I set up Red Garage Books with its three new authors, I thought that it would be sexist to have only male writers on my list. There had to be a woman. But what would happen if the book was a hit and a journalist wanted to interview Chris, I asked myself (I do tend to ask myself silly questions). I tested out my falsetto, but it wasn't convincing. And what if the reporter wanted to meet her? No way was I going to shave my legs. So she had to die. I felt terrible about it, but at least she died doing something she loved.

That's about it.

Except to say a million thanks to everyone who's bought A Year in the Merde, or talked about it, and made the book a success. I sold about 4,000 copies in the end, which ain't much compared to Harry Potter. But when you thought you might not be able to sell, or even give away, your original 200 copies, 4,000 sounds pretty damn amazing. Thanks especially to all of you who not only bought the book but wrote to tell me you'd enjoyed it and encouraged me to print more. As I said before, it's a real privilege to hear, direct from your readers, that they've enjoyed your book, and want it to be a hit, and even want you to write more. There can't be many better feelings in the world than that for a writer.

I'm really looking forward to seeing Transworld's edition of A Year ... They're a friendly bunch of people, and were the first publishers to go on to the website and tell me they wanted to publish the book. They believe in it as much as I do, and we're working together to make this new edition even better than the first. I hope lots of you will buy it and enjoy it.

So I haven't got any more copies of A Year ... to sell, but I haven't sold the rights to the other two books, and I have around 100 left of each of those. So you can buy them. I'll sign them too, Stephen Clarke or Chris Kent or whatever you want. And I'll take them to the post office myself, for old time's sake. Those postal workers are going to miss me otherwise.

Stephen Clarke, 17 July 2004.