The Repping Book

Summersdale sadly didn’t get the award for Trade Publisher of the Year last night at the IPG bash in Windsor, but awards season is now in full swing so we have one or two other chances coming up. If you’re interested, the award went to Blake Publishing. They thoroughly deserve it, if only for being the first publisher to recognise Jordan for the literary genius that she turned out to be.

I didn’t let the disappointment get to me. The rewrites in my novel are at such a fun stage that I was up and writing at 7am on this Sunday morning, and I made great progress after practical research yesterday got in the way of computer time. The new scenes with Ratty investigating the Arundel tomb are going well, and I wrote a few hundred new words this morning as well as editing a few thousand of the existing text. Good progress overall.

When I started writing this novel I didn’t have a laptop. I think I may still have owned a typewriter. But the book was started with a red biro: I still have the original notebook in which I wrote 45 longhand pages having first come up with the idea for The Sphinx Scrolls. On the front cover of the notebook I had scribbled ‘The Repping Book’ because I was initially using it to plan my sales trips to UK bookshops. The first pages contain lists of bookshops within an area, and I ticked them off as I visited them.

Also in there are occasional ideas for books (such as Classic Shakespeare Poems – which we never published in the end), the guitar chords for the Oasis song Wonderwall (which I had worked out for myself one evening), and the phone numbers of various television researchers that I needed to call back to arrange appearances on their shows to promote my latest books. The shows included the dubiously titled The Erogenous Zone, the more familiar This Morning with Richard and Judy, and The Morning Show on the now defunct channel Live TV.

It was quite common for me to have to rearrange my bookshop schedule in order to fit in a television appearance at short notice. It probably raised a few eyebrows when the producers of these shows saw me turn up in my delivery van. I once had a sales meeting with a bookshop manager the morning after appearing on a television show. I pretended not to be the author of the book I was trying to sell to this manager, but I explained about the television publicity the book had received. His response was, ‘I saw the author on telly last night. Thought he was a right arse.’ I pretended to agree with him and took his order. I got used to that kind of thing.

Anyway, back to the notebook. It’s about halfway into it that there’s a particularly scruffy entry, outlining in red ink the premise for what would become The Sphinx Scrolls. I was obviously pretty excited about it, possibly quite drunk (I was on holiday with friends in the south of France at the time), and it’s clear that I wrote the ideas down in a hurry so that I wouldn’t forget them. The next two pages were written the following morning once I had sobered up, and they went into more detail about the plot. Then the novel itself begins. From those two pages of plot notes I was able to generate five chapters. Much of it has since been edited from the text because it was just a rough first draft, but it’s normal for most of my first drafts to be on the shaky side. We can’t all be blessed with Katie Price’s natural talent for penmanship, after all.