Last year, I wrote a book. You might not know this because I don’t advertise it as heavily as maybe I should.
I was inspired by TV’s Alexander Armstrong, who made a documentary series on ITV on a similar journey, Norway to Alaska via the Arctic, and then wrote (or possibly “wrote”) a tie-in book. But he had the whole thing planned and organised by a TV production company. He did what he was told, went where he was told, recited what he was told. It was interesting but I thought “I’ve more or less done that journey, completely alone. If he can write a book about it…” I remember that moment of realisation. I was in Hammersmith Apollo, waiting for Dara Ó Briain to come on stage, reading this other book on my Kindle app. The first few paragraphs were written there and then, on my phone.
For a lot of travel bloggers, maybe a book is the endgame. Maybe that’s the best way to do it. I’d been told by people at work for years “Oh, you should write a book!” and after a few years of “Yeah, it’s not that easy”, I sat and write a book. It’s not that easy. It took two years and a dozen drafts. But I wrote it. What do I do with it now? There’s not a lot of money in the travel publishing industry. You only get a book published if you’re bringing a ready-made audience with you to buy it. I have no more chance of getting a book accepted than I do of getting a seat on the next Mars mission. So I self-published it. Maybe this is why the book is the endgame, when you’ve already built the audience. But I wanted to write a book and as they say “some day” means “never get round to it”.
This is how long it took to get to the final result. It was far easier to get it printed as a book to edit it than to print and carry round a two-inch thick pile of A4 paper, so I did it… well, seven times. Yes, it literally went through four titles and three covers and several fonts. All seven books underneath are full of pink and green notes and entire paragraphs scribbled out.
My friend Tom is the most eager advocate of this book. He tells people about it and I add the “It’s self-published” on the end. He did this at the pub the other night, to one of our other old & beloved friends, who replied “My mum’s books are self-published.” Of course! She writes books! She tours schools talking about them.
“Why are you excited about hers and not yours?” Tom asks.
Well, there’s an element of over-familiarity. I’ve read my own book a thousand times. I can see a thousand things wrong with it. I know exactly what’s hiding backstage and behind the curtain and everywhere else. And I know how many people’s faces have changed when they see “self-published”.
But you know what? In his introduction to American Gods, Neil Gaiman, award-winning famous author and writer Neil Gaiman, defines a novel as “a long piece of prose with something wrong with it” and says of American Gods “I was fairly sure that I’d written one of those”. So I don’t worry too much about something wrong. Other people don’t see what I do.
I wrote a book. It’s not a very big book and it doesn’t have a real publisher but it’s a real book and I wrote every word myself. I’m allowed to be proud of that. I’m allowed to talk about that.
Let me tell you about my book.
It’s non-fiction. It’s a book about travel. It’s a book about adventure. It’s a book about a single female traveller who journeys from Helsinki, on the Baltic coast, up into the Arctic Circle, up into the High Arctic. She travels by train and plane and boat. She looks for the Northern Lights, she rides snowmobiles and dogsleds and reindeer sleds. She finds hot springs in the snow, reads her fortune by firelight, falls over on snowshoes, doesn’t fall over on snowshoes.
She’s me. It’s non-fiction, of course she’s me.
Its title is Minus Twelve: An Arctic Adventure. Minus twelve referring to the average temperature in Celsius.
Bonus book fact: I’m writing a second book. It’s Iceland, it’s summer, I’m doing a lot of camping and visiting a lot of volcanoes. Provisional title: Lava Land. Out… well, when I finish it. Hopefully by the end of 2019 but we’ll see
Please buy a copy of Minus Twelve. If you’re reading my blog, you’ll like my book. If you’re not reading my blog, you’ll still like my book! I’ve read it at least a thousand times and I like it!
Buy it here, direct from the printer where I actually see the price of a small coffee in royalties (whereas Amazon offers up a single copper coin).
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