THINGS IN THE REVIEW MIRROR MAY BE CLOSER (AND MORE PRECIOUS) THAN YOU THINK!

Reviews are vital to writers like me.

If you’ve bought/downloaded a copy of MAKING OUR CHRISTMAS PRESENT: A Merry Journey, or plan to do so, then I’m VERY grateful.

Pretty please WACOT: post a review on AMAZON if you like it!

PPWACOT!

Reviews are free, quick, easy. A few words or click a star rating when u r ready!

Screenshot of actual reviews – you can just enter a star rating if you ‘ve no time to write anything…

It means a lot.

Best,

Alan

Alan Camrose

AMAZON BOOKS – BESTSELLERS UPDATE

Making our Christmas Present: A Merry Journey (around the bestseller lists on Amazon)

Bestsellers update as at 4pm UK time on Amazon Books:

at #2 historical reference

at #3 parodies

at #4 humorous essays


DOWNLOAD IT FREE FOR A LIMITED TIME ON AMAZON



If you like it, please post a review! Many, many thanks…


???

Cheers,

Alan

Alan Camrose

RIGHT NOW – FREE FOR CHRISTMAS

On AMAZON Books

MAKING OUR CHRISTMAS PRESENT: A MERRY JOURNEY

Free to download the eBook for a limited time

If you download it and enjoy it, please support me and please do drop a review!

Free Christmas eBook

Many, many thanks!

Alan

Alan Camrose

THERE IS SUCH A THING AS A FREE LAUNCH

MAKING OUR CHRISTMAS PRESENT: A Merry Journey is now completely LIVE and LAUNCHED on AMAZON Books in paperback and hardback!

There is a FREE DOWNLOAD OFFER of my eBook – FROM MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. Don’t miss out!

Kindle Edition – FREE FROM MIDNIGHT TONIGHT – for a limited period

Hardcover – £ 24.99

Paperback – £9.95

Why do mince pies no longer look like coffins?
How do you navigate yesteryear’s family games without a fire extinguisher?
Why did Father Christmas trade in his wagon for a sleigh when he first came to town?
Why should you complain if you don’t receive at least one gold ball from the Big Man?
And how do the best Christmas songs jingle our bells?

A perfect festive stocking filler or present, this delightful book is illustrated with glorious pictures, and can be shared with your family and friends for years to come.

The scramble for promotion

I love writing books, and I love writing my blog. Promoting them? Not so much, I find that to be a distraction from what I really want to do: write.

But that’s not the attitude that works now. The internet has created a massive, bottomless vortex of material that continually swirls around with countless writers trying to be heard in the wilderness. If no-one is reading your work , are you in fact writing in the forest? Does the writing make a sound if there’s no-one there?

I write promotional material for my books, and I hope that thee posts and ads not only give a squeak of publicity to my work but also either raise a brief chuckle or groan, or provoke questions.

I try to steer away from the HERE I AM, BUY MY BOOK style, but it does creep in sometimes and I apologise for that.

Here are my Top Five favourite ads so far for my new Christmas book, ranked in my order of preference. Please do let me know if you disagree.

With the wonders of techie apps, they take longer to think up than publish sometimes, but I hope you have gained something from them. I have a few left up my sleeve before the 4 November when my book comes out on Amazon Books.

The featured image has probably the daftest so far, accompanied by the words: BREAKING NEWS – Santa is a confused Vulcan. I noticed the odd positioning of his fingers and couldn’t resist. Either that or Santa’s a Mason.

Here are the promotions that I’ve selected, in ascending order…

5

I quite like this one, using a quote from my book to make a point on Santa’s provenance…It gained points with me for being probably the most lurid offering.

4

This is still pleasingly on theme but a little more enticing. Why such a specific date for Santa’s stage entrance? Who was there before him? Has he always been like the jolly man in the red and white robe?

3

More mystery! What in God’s name is the reference to graffiti and Banksy doing here? Is it just the shock value, or is there a grain of truth in this? Granted the framing is a bit crude and the pink lettering a bit OTT, but hey ho. Or at least, ho-ho-ho.

2

This is more what I had in mind, but it’s, to be honest, a volume business so some of the material will miss the mark. This nicely alludes to the 1863 date – Santa was here before he took the world stage, but not necessarily as we have always “known” him…

Cute pic – thanks to Unsplash for the image.

1

Without question my favourite. A hint of mystery, righteousness, scandal and intrigue which hopefully makes you want more…The quote from my book is rooted in the reality of the Christmas card industry at its outset.

Cheers!

Alan

Alan Camrose

Amazon Books – 04.11.2021

eBook, paperback, hardcover

Title Fight!

Working out what couda been a Christmas contender…

I wanted to share with you some of my thought process about finding the title for my new release Christmas book for a chilled out festive season.

It has gone through various incarnations before it goes live on 4 November 2021 – in hardback, paperback and eBook. On Amazon.

First up, it was going to be part of a series that I will be publishing in the New Year about how beds tuck into our popular culture. My Christmas book was going to be the first in the series, called Two Turtle Duvets.

The Christmas project evolved into a stand-alone book on how the Christmas traditions that we have come to know and love have evolved. Nothing too serious, nothing too heavy, but a playful look at our Xmas season.

That demanded soemthing else on the title front, something catchy. I thought I had found it:

Checking it Twice: A List of our Christmas Present

Quite pleasing, I thought, but a bit too “list-y”, not least because of the cunning use of the word “list” in the sub-title… It didn’t last long enough to make it to the spell-checker. I didn’t want a laundry list; I wanted a walk, a search, a romp (no!), a promenade (too formal), a meander (too waffly…)…

A Journey.

I wanted to play with the double meaning of “Christmas Present”, and arrived at:

What makes our Christmas Present – on some sort of journey. Like the Three Wise Men but with a lap-top.

First make it sharper and snappier: Making our Christmas Present. With a better sub-title, then.

First thing that came to mind was A Brief History. That made it sound like an academic treatise, not a journey. So, getting closer, I decided on A Jolly Journey, but that sounded like a booze cruise.

I chose A Merry Journey, because who doesn’t want Christmas time to be a merry way of looking at the festive season?

And here it is:

Making our Christmas Present gives you an idea of discovering Christmas as it now is, with a merry journey to get you there.

There. I’m done, from Two Turtle Duvets to the final version, in the St Nick of time for Christmas…

I hope you like it!

Best wishes,

Alan

Alan Camrose

Santa’s Book is coming to Town

If you are one of my several thousand subscribers and you had a moment, could you please comment/share/comment/communicate on my recent post about my upcoming new book on

4 November 2021

I would love to hear from you to know that the post arrived and if you’re interested in the new Christmas book, under the limited time free download from that date…Or if you’re interested in the paperback or hardback.

Some help here would be much appreciated…

Thanks…

REVEALING THINGS ABOUT MY COVER REVEAL

Why do mince pies no longer look like coffins?
How do you navigate yesteryear’s family games without a fire extinguisher?
Why did Father Christmas trade in his wagon for a sleigh when he first came to town?
Why should you complain if you don’t receive at least one gold ball from the Big Man?
And how do the best Christmas songs jingle our bells?


All these questions that I wanted to answer about Christmas, packaged up in a glossy cover for my new book, Making our Christmas Present: A Merry Journey.

The answers and a lot more will be revealed from 4 November 2021.

This will be a FREE download, which I hope you will enjoy, and I would ask you please please please to take a few moments to post a review. It’s the lifeblood of authors like me, and I would appreciate it very much.

But enough of that!

I wanted to give you here a quick insight into my author thought processes around the book.

I wanted a snappy, Christmassy cover with instant appeal. I don’t know whether I managed that but this is how I got to where I am now.

The book looks at centuries of Christmas, and where the traditional bits came from that individually and together serve up most people’s vision of Christmas. It’s not a history epic or a social commentary or a heavyweight study. The heaviest it gets is fretting over Santa’s belt size…

So I needed light.

I started by thinking about Christmas. There is of course more than one major defining point:

But I fastened onto Santa and how he became the figure we know today – instantly recognisable for the cover, at least today’s version.

I thought about him using an evolutionary cover, something like this, with overlapping pictures merged together:

St Nicholas
Holly King
Santa 2021

Too complicated.

Too serious.

So, Plan B was initiated. A Christmas Kiss – otherwise known as A Christmas Keep It Simple, Stupid

Christmas trees. We all think of brightly-lit and decorated trees at Christmas time…

So why not go for a more sophisticated dark background, and a blurry tree.

Thanks to Kelly Sikkema, Unsplash for the pic

Much better. I like this but it’s a bit tooo sophisticated for a book that’s supposed to be merry while Santa is “Checking it Twice”. That had been the original title. This pic was too serious, looking like it was dressed up for cocktails…

Third time lucky, then.

I went for Christmas trees again, but not just any old Christmas trees. Toy ones, with the addition of a Santa hat on one of them.

I think (hope) that hits the more amusing, whimsical vibe that I’m after, which fits in with my writing style.

And here it is, in all its glory with the new title, the one that will be published on 4 November: on Amazon Books:

Ta – dAAAA!

More playful, less creaking with history, not so blingy…

I hope you’ve found this insight into this part of my creative process interesting

More to come on other stuff soon, and you’ll get it first on my blog…

Cheers!

Alan

Alan Camrose

Thanks to Mitya Ivanov, Unsplash

The Art Gallery of Doctor Moreau

The art exhibition at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire is fabulous in the true sense of the word, derived here from fables. Magnificent and profound.

Gustave Moreau (1826-98) (he was not a doctor and did not live on an island) was a French painter who created in watercolour a suite of 64 exquisite paintings to illustrate the 17th-century Fables of Jean de la Fontaine. Those Fables were in many cases re-workings of Aesop’s Fables, telling tales of Gods and dragons, lions and golden chariots, rendered in rich detail that seems to generate its own light.

The Lion and the Gnat is probably my favourite of the paintings.

The Gnat uses his brave sting to best the mighty Lion. Then he, without thinking, trumpets his unlikely victory to the world, flies up in the air and is trapped in a spider’s web and eaten.

All opponents deserve respect, no matter how weak and feeble they may look, but arrogance from victory can lead to disaster.

The Lion and the Gnat

Jean De La Fontaine

‘Go, paltry insect, nature’s meanest brat!’
Thus said the royal lion to the gnat.
The gnat declared immediate war.
‘Think you,’ said he, ‘your royal name
To me worth caring for?
Think you I tremble at your power or fame?
The ox is bigger far than you;
Yet him I drive, and all his crew.’
This said, as one that did no fear owe,
Himself he blew the battle charge,
Himself both trumpeter and hero.
At first he play’d about at large,
Then on the lion’s neck, at leisure, settled,
And there the royal beast full sorely nettled.
With foaming mouth, and flashing eye,
He roars. All creatures hide or fly, –
Such mortal terror at
The work of one poor gnat!
With constant change of his attack,
The snout now stinging, now the back,
And now the chambers of the nose;
The pigmy fly no mercy shows.
The lion’s rage was at its height;
His viewless foe now laugh’d outright,
When on his battle-ground he saw,
That every savage tooth and claw
Had got its proper beauty
By doing bloody duty;
Himself, the hapless lion, tore his hide,
And lash’d with sounding tail from side to side.
Ah! bootless blow, and bite, and curse!
He beat the harmless air, and worse;
For, though so fierce and stout,
By effort wearied out,
He fainted, fell, gave up the quarrel.
The gnat retires with verdant laurel.
Now rings his trumpet clang,
As at the charge it rang.
But while his triumph note he blows,
Straight on our valiant conqueror goes
A spider’s ambuscade to meet,
And make its web his winding-sheet.

We often have the most to fear
From those we most despise;
Again, great risks a man may clear,
Who by the smallest dies.


Jean De La Fontaine

The frenzy of the lion is right there on the canvas, and the buzzing, stinging gnat, painted in a different medium – shiny gouache – to make it stand out more – is like a deadly ghost looming over the now beaten beast. But the gnat’s glowing triumph is moments away from despair and defeat in the looming darkness above.

This is flash fiction, nineteenth century-style.

I felt the need to bang the drum for this Moreau, the great Symbolist.

Cheers,

Alan

Alan Camrose

Phoebus and Boreas, 1879
Roaring, violent North Wind
is beaten by the warmth
of the Sun in persuading
a passing traveler to
take off his coat…

Featured image at top of post: Jupiter and the Thunderbolts. Not a heavy metal band.

The exhibition is still open at Waddesdon until 17 October 2021.