Location, Location
Photo: Valencia, Piers Garnham.
Spain's 'third' city - this plaza is at the heart of 'The Perfume Garden'.
Wouldn't you like to be sharing tapas, or enjoying a celebratory
glass of Cava here? I would ...
How many books do you think you read each year? We've run out of bookcases, again. Even with Kindle, books seem to multiply in this house. Three years ago I arrived with a handful of paperbacks for the MA, wondering if even these would make it through the censorship department. There are no real or second-hand bookstores here - just a handful of blockbuster books in Virgin, a careful selection of English titles in the mainly Arabic bookshop/stationers. Somehow though, through trips home, research books via courier, and the thriving expat second hand market there are over 300 physical books at home, (plus another couple of hundred on Kindle). How did that happen?
I miss browsing bookstores, but the way we discover books is changing. I love book bloggers, and the grass-roots network of book review sites. For many of us you hear about a great new book or writer online first. Maybe you download the Kindle sample. Then, if you are anything like me, you end up buying the best books on Kindle and in real-life (I'm looking at the gorgeous box set of Edward St Aubyn's 'Melrose' novels beside me). That's how the 500+ books in three years happened. But what about the huge numbers of people whose reading isn't influenced by online sites? I remember the last time we were home in the UK I overheard two shelf-stackers in Sainsbury's supermarket whispering furtively about '50 Shades' - to go viral, you still need to hit that tipping point where a book leaps into the collective consciousness. How do you think that happens - word of mouth? paper reviews? availability in real bricks and mortar - whether that's supermarkets or book stores?
Restacking the shelves here yesterday, I came across these images taken for 'The Perfume Garden' by a friend in Valencia. As we've said many times before, the 'method' approach to writing - surrounding yourself with images, music works. Now, instead of printing out photographs and making mix CDs (like back in the olden days - oh, two years ago), I use Pinterest and Deezer to create the storyboards and playlists for books, and you might find that helpful too. I put up a tiny part of The Perfume Garden's playlist here - each one of the songs has a Pavlovian effect (Sarah McLachlan, Eva Cassidy, Beth Neilsen Chapman = the poignant, reach for the Kleenex parts of the book, The Foals = the battle sequences).
Seeing those photographs of Valencia made me want to jump on the next plane. The location of the book was central to the story - the continuity of the ancient architecture, the beauty of the mountains, the sea, the orange groves, provided a link between past and present. The story's twin-timeline has divided people, so I was pleased when Leah over at Chicklit Reviews and News asked me to write about this for the blog tour. The subject also came up on one of the histfic groups on Goodreads, and someone pointed out this list of past/present stories. How many of these have you enjoyed? As I said over at Leah's, I love twin timelines, and it's interesting to note how many of the top 100 have been made into blockbuster movies (The Help, The Notebook, The Hours, Sarah's Key, Time Traveller's Wife ...). These are great, complex stories that made the leap off the bookshelves and into everyday life - the titles are familiar, part of our collective culture as films and books.
So here's the thought for the day - the old mantra about 'location, location' still counts 100% for physical property, businesses, but do you think it matters with books? Every author is aware of the need for platform, discoverability - but does it matter how people find you, as long as they do? What do you think is the 'x-factor' that allows a story to cross over from the world of hard-core readers to every day culture? Answers on a postcard, or in the comments below. x
