BOOKSELLER SUNDAYS: On selling more Mary Hooper than Stephanie Meyer and more Penny Dolan than J.K. Rowling – Katie Clapham at Storytellers, Inc.

One of a series of guest blogs by booksellers who work with children’s authors. We’re posting this one today by way of a ‘Happy Birthday!’ to Storytellers, Inc., who are just about celebrate the completion of their first incredible year, during which they have dared and done many brave things, always on a ‘handmade’ and human scale. Bookseller Katie Clapham describes some of Storytellers, Inc’s innovations, including their single copy policy, their ‘Cool Books in School’ campaign and their child-sized secret reading den.

Imagine a place where giant power authors, you know - the ones with their own signature font, are pushed aside for lesser known authors. A place where hand-written signs and friendly recommendations overshadow expensively produced online trailers and bestseller lists. It is your local independent bookshop – a magical enclosure where the bookselling playing field is somewhat smoothed (it will never be absolutely level, but that’s a good thing too).

At Storytellers, Inc. we generally stock single copies of everything. This was a decision we made during the initial stock of the shop nearly one year ago. Range was more important to me than filling shelves with multiple copies of the most popular titles - we’ve got a WHSmith in town for that. Of course this means we’re taking more responsibility for the stock but that’s a power I’m glad to wield. I delight in finding hidden gems and sharing them with customers who are excited to take the risk. Of course there is no getting away from the fact we get more requests for Julia Donaldson and Jacqueline Wilson than Kazuno Kohara and Reinhardt Jung but it’s also true that our bestsellers include Alan Garner’s Weirdstone of Brisingamen (we’ve got generations of recommendations and personal ties to the story’s location), the beautiful Madame Pamplemousse series which have dazzled lots of little girls, who’ve then come back to buy copies for friends, and Chris Ridell’s stunning Ottoline series, which a local school picked up as a class book.

We can’t afford to pay authors and illustrators to visit us in the shop yet so we’re gratefully accepting tour dates from publishers and booking school visits for the authors. They’ve paid off; we’ve sold more Mary Hooper than Stephanie Meyer and more Penny Dolan than J.K. Rowling. The children who heard Penny talk about her book were coming into the shop for weeks after, desperately asking for their MOUSE books with worn-out parents telling us how they’ve heard of nothing else since the talk. Having an author come to the school is a real treat and as the personal investment in the book and its author is sealed, the financial is guaranteed to follow.

As a business we’re trying to find ways of drawing this mass attention to new titles on a more regular basis. I’ve recently written a new scheme for schools that takes a brand new title and develops a term-length feature on it for local schools. The Cool Books in School campaign was launched in September with four local schools taking part. I have selected two new books (one for primary years 3 and 4 and another for years 5 and 6) to work with. The term started with a visit from me to introduce the book and read the beginning as a class storytime (repeated in as many classes as I could until my tongue dried out). Later this term I will return with a creative writing session loosely based on the text (theme or form etc.) and we will finish the term with a schools-wide writing competition. For the duration of the term the chosen books are offered at a promotional price to the schools and pupils taking part. I also wrote to the publishers of the chosen books demanding to know what they were going to do in return for my relentless promotion of their books.

I am planning to repeat this campaign three times a year, getting new releases into schools, raising awareness of current authors and sneaking some creative writing into classrooms. My personal goal is that with each term I will win another school over (some are proving very stubborn!) Author visits within the term’s campaign would increase the appeal even further and I’m really hoping this will form a part of the future model. Should my own children’s novel ever find a publisher, school visits would be top priority on my agenda. I truly believe they are the most useful and exciting way to get children to try new authors.

On the smaller scale we blog, we tweet, we facebook and do everything we can to get on first name bases with authors and publishers. Promotional material can really make a difference – a few extra Department 19 POS packs meant I could chop up some posters and make a window display around the new title; we sold more HB copies of Will Hill’s debut than any other teen novel.

Sometimes it can feel like a hard-sell. We email our regulars with newsletters and offers and I write to the head teachers and telephone their exasperated receptionists but it’s all worth while when a delighted parent comes to the shop telling us that this was the book that created an interest in reading that wasn’t there before, or a child who previously restricted their reading to one genre (or author!) decides to explore the literary landscape. We’ve made an effort to make our shop a place that encourages these discoveries, there is seating and storytimes, coffee and baby changing facility (no, you keep your own baby). We’ve got our child-sized secret reading den and creative writing workshops in the school holidays.

We can’t compete with the prices online and in chain shops so like everyone else we’re trying to stand out in all other areas. It’ll be our first birthday on the 1st of December and we’ll be celebrating the fact that there is a market for the independent bookshop, particularly for children who want to see and touch and smell and maybe chew the book before they buy it. They also want to hear how great it is and for you to look excited and congratulate them on the book they have chosen, they want to come back and tell you about it when they’ve read it. As adults we are so fond of our booky memories, it is such a charming privilege to be part of these new memories in the making.

Caption: photograph of Katie Clapham with her homemade dump bin.

Storytellers, Inc website

What the Dickens? - Sue Purkiss

I recently found myself reading a book I hated. Normally, I would have ditched it after a few pages – but this was for a book group, and moreover it was by an author whose work I normally enjoy and admire.

It didn’t get any better. In fact by the end of it, I disliked it so much that I felt the need to reach for an antidote. I wanted something guaranteed to restore my faith in fiction. I took a deep breath and reached for Great Expectations.

Now, I have always accepted that Dickens is a great writer. It’s just that I’ve never found him easy to get into. I have read some of his books; I once had to teach Our Mutual Friend, which obviously entailed reading it. (Though I did feel a sneaking sympathy for the student who confided that it was his aim to pass the exam without ever having read the book in its entirety – it is very long…) I read David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities back in the dim and distant past, and I’ve read the beginning of Bleak House lots of times – thoroughly admiring the amazing description of fog at the beginning, floundering a little at all the stuff about Chancery, and finally being too insanely irritated by the sweetness of Esther Summerson to carry on.

However, I felt that the time had come to try again. Somehow, I knew that right now, Dickens was what was needed. Plus, it’s the bicentenary of his birth next year, so it must be as well to be prepared for wall to wall Charles.

I was not disappointed. Great Expectations was a revelation. It was exuberant, it was funny, it had me on the edge of my seat; every character was distinctive and unique, Estella was far from sweet and Pip was an imperfect hero. The story rollicked along at a satisfying pace, but it also took the time to explore some interesting byways. And it made me think – about people, mainly, and how fallible but heroic they can be.

But another thing that struck me was that I have recently read a number of books for children and teenagers that have more than a touch of the Dickensian about them. I was interested to explore this: is it because Dickens – perhaps in the guise of film and TV adaptations – is so ubiquitous that his influence can’t be escaped if the setting is Victorian? Or were the writers concerned – Michelle Lovric, Penny Dolan, and Mary Hooper – conscious of his example? I decided to ask them.

Michelle’s book, The Mourning Emporium, follows the adventures of an extraordinary set of characters who we first met in The Undrowned Child, which was set in a sort of parallel nineteenth century Venice. For the second book, the action moves to London. Both books have for me the exuberance, the rich variety and the playfulness which characterise the master.

A mourning emporium also features in Mary Hooper’s book, Fallen Grace – amazingly to me, since I’d never heard of one before. It’s a shop where gloomy Victorians could buy all their mourning clothes, jewellery, cards etc, and arrange elaborate funerals with professional mourners (‘mutes’, whose job it was to look sad and weep), horses with black plumes, etc etc. Whereas Michelle’s book is a fantasy, Mary’s is set firmly in a real world, a world with vast divisions between the poor and the wealthy. Dickens actually has a walk-on part in this book.

Penny Dolan’s book, A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E., concerns the adventures of a boy who loses his parents and is cheated out of his inheritance by his unscrupulous Uncle Scrope and his lawyer. He is sent to an appalling boarding school, Murkstone Hall, whose headteacher is called Bulloughby – as with Dickens, the names tell you a great deal. He escapes, but has a long journey to make, and many villains to deal with, before he can find his way home

I asked the three writers whether Dickens was an influence they were aware of, and what aspects of his writing they admired or felt themselves to have been influenced by.

ML: For me, the greatest compliment I ever receive about my books is when someone describes them as ‘Dickensian’… If it is ‘Dickensian’ to extract the maximum joy from the English language, to royally entertain while pricking the conscience as painfully as if with hot needles… then yes, I want to be ‘Dickensian’.

Another thing I love about Dickens is the way he breaks all the rules. He makes lists. He repeats. He digresses. He invents patently ridiculous names. And yet… he makes it all work. I’ve always suspected that some of his success is precisely down to the gusto with which he trounces the rules. I can picture him writhing with pleasure at his desk while he subverts all the antiquated courtesies and conventions of writing.

When you love a writer as much as I love Dickens, I think you inevitably do end up writing ‘tribute’ characters. In The Mourning Emporium, I have Turtledove, an English bulldog who speaks a Victorian cockney dialect. He is a kind of Fagin character, looking after a band of orphans. Unlike Fagin, his entire being is focused on the welfare and happiness of his ‘childer’. I deployed Turteldove as a foil to a female villain, who pretends to ‘mother’ children, but in fact inflicts outrageous mental and physical cruelty upon them.

PD: There was no influence at the start, other than a preference for writing about the past. The growing points for the book were: a visit to an ancient boarding school; watching young actors ‘fly’ overhead in a theatre production and a BBC R4 fragment about the working conditions of Victorian theatre children.

My agent picked up on the echoes of Dickens and Nicholas Nickleby in the first section of A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E. I hadn’t tried to do a Dickens, but am sure his work unconsciously primes the canvas whenever we try to picture the Victorian period. Although the Ackroyd biography (of Dickens) was part of my random ‘research’ reading, so were biographies of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry and a range of social history books.

Dickens, to me as a writer, offers an intense sense of the child or unformed hero struggling to make sense of an untidy and unkind world. To this he adds a variety of eccentric characters – likeable, silly, cruel or steadfastly brave. A whirl of other lives go on around the central character, enriching the story for the reader. And – is this Dickensian? – I often find myself thinking in terms of light and darkness when I’m picturing a setting as well as using emotional brightness and shadow throughout the story.

MH: I have read Dickens, of course (actually, not ‘of course’, because I only read him twenty years ago) but, knowing I was going to be writing a novel set in Victorian times, I deliberately didn’t re-read him when I was about to write Fallen Grace. I did read Ackroyd’s biography of Dickens, however, because I knew I wanted him to have a walk-on part and it was essential that I knew (a) he was in London at the specific date I wanted him to be and (b) how he felt about funeral directors! Of course, I must have been influenced by all the Dickens’ TV and film adaptations I’ve seen over the years, and quite a few have death/graveyards in them. Oh yes, and I knew Bleak House (my favourite) began with a massive pea-souper fog so I just HAD to have one of those.

I think what I admire most is the way Dickens manages to blend matters of great seriousness with humour. I also love his coincidences – I’ve got plenty of those in Fallen Grace but thought – well, if he can get away with them, then so can I.

SP: I’ve now moved on to my second Dickens – Nicholas Nickleby – and have been reading his account of the boarding school run by Wackford Squeers. (Oh, the names, the wonderful names!) It’s so horrifying I’m metaphorically hiding behind the sofa with one eye closed as I read it. (But I am not liking Dickens’ rendition of a Yorkshire accent. It’s very distracting.)

Many, many thanks to my panel. Oh, and a word to the wise; I’m told that there’s to be a new adaptation at Christmas on BBC of Great Expectations – no doubt the first of many tributes to the great man as his very big birthday approaches.

Sue Purkiss… whose most recent book, Emily’s Surprising Voyage, is set in Victorian times, and does perhaps have a very faint whiff of Dickens about it. For more information, see www.suepurkiss.com