Jojo Moyes’s blog

… is my first broadcast piece of writing. It’s almost impossible to say how excited I am to have a short story going out on Radio 4, but if I add that Doon Mackichan of Smack The Pony is the narrator, you will know that my cups runneth over.

All my published books have been made into audio by the wonderful WF Howes and it never fails to surprise me how alien - and how much better - one’s own words can sound when spoken by a professional. I’ve heard an advance CD of Doon Mackichan’s reading, and the words could have been written for her slightly weary, faintly acerbic, but very human tones.

Ooh…It’s given me a taste - I can see suddenly why every other waitress and valet in LA is a would-be screenwriter….

Literary lunches can be strange events. You can turn up and find yourself eyed up by four people and a dog, eat a curly-edged sandwich or two, and sit plaintively, pen primed, at a table of un-bought books, as the guests slink embarrassedly away. Or you can, as I have just done today, find yourself at the kind of supremely well-organised event, with the kind of receptive, attentive audience that are a company-starved author’s dream.

Readers, I sold 100 books today. And I ate a delicious lunch of smoked salmon and new potatoes. And I spoke to an audience of 100 paying guests who asked questions and laughed in the right places. This, in Lit Lunch terms, is like winning the Premier League, Grand National and Pop Idol all in one.

Having had one of those dispiriting weeks, pitted with gloom and disaster, which ALWAYS seem to come in February, today filled my little heart with joy. While signing books (pausing only to swoon surreptitiously with pleasure at the lengthy queue) I took the opportunity to ask some of the good ladies of Hartley Wintney what they thought of the new Silver Bay jacket. (It’s the one on the right. The left-hand one is the hardback version.)

Whereas the rest of the re-jacketed backlist met with general approval, Silver Bay elicited a polarised response. Those for said it was “beautiful”, “compelling”, “intriguing”. Those against said it was “cold”, “ghostly” and “too dark”. I had loved the image, as had the publishers, but several people commented that it did not reflect the book’s contents.

In a world where bookshops are bursting with fictional offerings, and shelf-space is hard-won, these are words to strike fear into an author’s heart. Because readers *do* judge a book by its cover, and unless you are a “brand”, or one of Richard and Judy’s chosen, that one image is likely to determine thousands, or tens of thousands of sales.

So the question we face is: can you afford to risk alienating half your potential readers? Or does this approach doom us to generic, water-colour images and copycat covers for ever? Please do let me know.

Okay… so I was going to write about how I didn’t win the RNA prize today (it went to the very lovely Freya North) and how hard it was to wear my gracious loser face when I was wearing my new too-high boots and they had given me blisters EVEN BEFORE I GOT OFF THE TRAIN, and about the very many very lovely RNA ladies who said they loved Silver Bay, and made me feel pretty happy about being shortlisted at all…

… but having bought a copy of OK magazine on the way home (Silver Bay is reviewed in its Hot Stars section) I was diverted by this little exchange, with Z-listed married couple Michelle and Andy Scott-Lee:

“OK: Has (Michelle’s friend Jordan) spoken out about how she feels before (plastic) surgery?

Michelle: I suppose she gets nervous like everyone else… If I had the means to do it I’d get stuff done as well but, my God, I’d be proper pooping it beforehand.

OK: Katie has also talked about getting a designer vagina

Michelle: I’d rather not comment on it…otherwise it’s me talking about Katie all the time.

OK: Are you and Andy thinking about babies?

Michelle: God, we had a fright when I thought I was pregnant about three weeks ago, but I’m on my period now, so I’m not.”

Ah… the elegance of Jane Austen. The grace and restraint of Elizabeth Gaskell. It’s easy to get snarky about the supposed coarsening of modern culture. But it’s something when you start hankering after Waynetta Slob as a step up…

I have mixed feelings about discussing my children in public - but in this case I’ll make an exception. Lachlan, our youngest, was born deaf. Not a bit deaf, but properly, profoundly deaf, so that he heard nothing.

When he was 15 months old, we were offered a cochlear implant, which, after a lot of discussion, we agreed to, and another 15 months on he is not just talking but stringing together whole sentences, mimicking us, and - albeit pretty tunelessly - singing.
We have felt so blessed - not just to have him, but to witness his entry into the world of sound, - that I agreed to write this piece for the Mail on Sunday’s magazine:

How Lockie Broke Through A Wall Of Silence

Cochlear implants are by no means the answer for all deaf children. The procedure is not risk-free, they can be controversial within the deaf community, they are expensive, and they are not available to everyone who would like them.

But for our son, a deaf child born into a hearing family, it means he can now make his own choices later in life about who he wants to be, which community he wants to make his own. And that while he decides, he can sing “heads shoulders knees and toes”, while watching The Simpsons. Which feels pretty bloody great from here.

Okay… I was drawn in by the fact that Bertelsmann, my German publishers, had given Silver Bay a new title (”The Sky Is So Close”). So I HAD to see their plot synopsis, right? Except the translated version (courtesy Google) is never, quite, what one expects…. (although it does raise the interesting question of what jobs I could do tomorrow that “from the wrist shake…”)

“Mike Dormer, a karrieresüchtiger businessman, flying from London to Silver Bay, a small village on the sea in Australia. There, he will rebuild the millions of Silver Bay hotel management. A routine task it from the wrist shakes, thinks Mike. And perhaps there is still a little time with his girlfriend Vanessa luxusverwöhnten the beach to enjoy life.

But Mike has the bill without the hotel hostesses made Bootsführerin Liza McCullen, their ten-year-daughter Hannah and aunt Kathleen behave not exactly cooperative. The crew of Mike Walbeobachtungsbootes is hostile. The whole city signaled him that he is not welcome. And soon it comes to the collision of two worlds: the arrogant, and the London manager of the self and with nature, in accordance women living of the hotel.

Mike’s beautiful business world gets more and more into the mountains, and finally, it all his previous life in question - particularly as he and Liza, the first violent war, become ever closer… A wonderful read about romantic entanglements in a small Australian fishing village.”

Here at Moyes Towers we are digging out matching shoes and handbags as I write … Silver Bay has been longlisted for the RNA 2008 Romantic Novel Of The Year.
I have been lucky enough to be shortlisted twice before, for Foreign Fruit, which won the prize in 2004 and The Ship of Brides … which didn’t.

The RNA Award is one of the few awards which celebrates “commercial” fiction. Its contenders are books not generally celebrated in the back pages of the broadsheets (although readers of previous blogs will know that Silver Bay is the first of my books to make it into The Times). Equally it is not what the trade calls “category romance”, whose best known proponent would be Mills and Boon - that has its own fiercely fought award, announced on the same day.

And no, it will not be feather boas at dawn. And no I bear no physical resemblance to Mrs B Cartland. Yet.

The RNA Award has grown in profile and importance over the past few years, in part due to good pr, but also due to the inclusion of such luminaries as Andrea Levy (Small Island) and Philippa Gregory, the kind of names that make it a little harder for critics to dismiss romance as lightweight, or as being without literary merit.

As I bleat on, to anyone who will listen, commercial does not have to equate with a lack of quality. Or as Kerry Fowler, books editor for Good Housekeeping and a member of the judges panel says:

‘Russell Brand wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole, you’d never see it in a glossy coverline and late-night programming doesn’t know the meaning of it. But the R-word is at the heart of virtually every good story ever told.

… I cannot resist this statement, put out to mark the end of Chantelle and Preston’s 10 month marriage.

“We hope we can always remain friends and still love each other but we both think we put so much pressure on one another to make our marriage work that it has ended up destroying our relationship.”

I guess it makes a change from irreconcilable differences…

So… him indoors is dead jealous. He’s just discovered I’ve got my very own wikipedia page .

I’ve resisted the temptation to edit me - even though Wikipedia has mysteriously missed out achievements such as my 10m front crawl certificate, and the fact that I evidently don’t look any older than 21, but it’s nice to be noted. As the original writer noted (you can see the originator of an entry in the “history” tab) - “she has non-trivial reviews of her works”. As opposed to trivial reviews?

It all reminds me of a plan I once had to set up an alternative “Who’s Who” - for the unrecognised. It was to be called “Who?”

Wikipedia is equally capable of bringing you back down to earth. If you look me up simply under my first name, I’m the sixth most famous Jojo. That’ll be me under - among others - “Jojo the Monkey” from the videogame Monkey Island 2, and, best of all, a sideshow performer of the 1800s - Jojo The Dog Faced Boy.

It’s ten days now since we picked up six rescue hens from the Battery Hen Welfare Trust’s Essex wing. Our old girls were six years old, geriatric in poultry terms, their numbers diminished by a nearby fox, and the two we had left looked a little lost. I had heard about the work of the BHWT and thought it would be good to be part of it.
The charity pays 50 pence a bird to farmers whose hens have reached a non-commercial age (that’s one year, to you and me) - the sum they would receive selling them on for meat. I thought I might nip up after the rescue party returned and choose a few.

Hah. It was like Picaddilly Circus in rural Essex. The charity had rescued 275 hens from Devon the previous day, and were oversubscribed by potential owners three times over. There were people from 50 miles away who had come to give a few hens a new life. Watching them being carted away in boxes by children, grandparents, in smart cars or boxes balanced on prams, the sheer effort and numbers of people involved in giving these creatures a new life was curiously moving.

Because it’s only when you see these hens up close that you get the full measure of how we treat our livestock today. It’s not so much the semi-bald state of them that was upsetting (we had been warned they would look a little oven-ready) or the severed beaks, the scabs, or even the anaemic appearance of creatures who have never before seen daylight.

But the way they sat down repeatedly (birds who have only ever stood on wire find flattening their feet on solid ground painful), the way they perked up dramatically within days (they have dope regularly sprayed into their water to stop them killing each other) - and most of all the side of A4 paper which replicated the size of their previous living quarters made us decide to alter our eating habits. We have smugly eaten our organic chicken once a week, and bought locally produced eggs. Now we have struck off takeaway, or chicken sandwiches - anything which might contribute to that production process.

The six girls are - ten days on - pleased with their lot. They are feisty, argumentative, have not stopped laying since arriving - and eat so much that I wonder how they were fed before. We move their runs several times a week so they get a different view of the farm, and somewhere new to scratch, and their confusion at their first drop of rain was funny and sad at the same time.

Their feathers will grow, their anaemic floppy combs pink and perk up as they become accustomed to life in the open air. Even if our dreaded neighbour Reynard gets one, according to one of the charity’s workers, they will have had a blissful time living outside as they should have done from the start.

But to call it battery farming misrepresents it; these animals were kept beyond any sense of what it means to be living. They were simply living food, on a production line. The fact that I have - even unwittingly - contributed to this in the past makes me feel ashamed.

It’s not uncommon for writers to approach other writers for “blurbs” for the covers of their books. We all need them - and when we ask, we’re really hoping not for a neutral critical response, but just, you know, a few nice words. This is never said, explicitly, but if you’re asked, and find it impossible to say anything nice about the 90,000-odd words, the form is generally to plead that you haven’t had time to read it.
A friend - a successful writer whose name I am deliberately omitting - recently received one of these requests. I’m just guessing, but I suspect the “just haven’t had the time” excuse is not going to work here. I quote:

“I’ve attempted to make your involvement as easy as possible. If you are willing to help, I have developed a few guidelines and a selection of sample testimonials for you to put your name on or adjust accordingly, if you feel this is appropriate.”

These guidelines and suggested testimonials can be viewed at www.deleted to save her blushes.com . There are - count ‘em - ten. My personal favourites (edited) included number three: “A must-read”, number ten: “What a fantastic, straightforward and honest book. I’ll be recommending it to all my single friends”. But for sheer chutzpah, I have to recommend number nine: “This book will surely be a classic.”
Now I know where I’m going wrong. So for the paperback of Silver Bay, when it is published in January, I shall tell Hodder’s publicist to avoid pesky reviewers. We’ll send out a list instead. For ease of everyone’s involvement, of course…