A Poet’s Warning for my Family Memoir.

To celebrate the delivery of my book from the printer, I threw a small lunch party at The Castle for Tim Mercer, my publisher, and his graphic designer, Reuben Wakeman. They arrived with a bottle of champagne and a card Reuben had made for me , its cover bearing words written by the American Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Edna St Vincent Millay. It read: “A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.”

Inside the card, my two friends had written a touching message. “Nothing can hurt you,” they said.

Well, I hope they are right. Certainly, Alexander Waugh, Martin Bell, Rosie Boycott, Jonathan Meades and Julian Fellowes, the five distinguished writers whose rave reviews adorn the back cover make me optimistic that My Archipelago will leap off the display tables and bookshelves at branches of  Waterstone’s and elsewhere across the UK when the book goes on sale in September.

 To my surprise, an unsolicited telephone call I made to Waterstone’s HQ in Brentford yesterday gave me more encouragement. They took time to talk.  Like all the store managers I have spoken to, they were interested in this little-known, self-published author. They even have an “Independent Publishing Coordinator”. Here is a company with an enlightened literary policy. They do not worship starry names to the exclusion of the rest of us. They actively promote good writing from wherever it may come.

But, of course, the real test will come in September. Will the reading “populace” go for it? Having “willfully” appeared with my “pants down”, will they buy? All I have to go on for the moment is anecdotal evidence from those people who have bought preview copies and, for what it is worth, that evidence is terrifically positive. Messages by email, text and telephone are telling me they love it! They are reading the book through tears and smiles. Locked in by the drama of the narrative, they say they can’t but it down. This anxious author cannot ask for more.

Kit Chapman, author of My Archipelago

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Waterstone’s: The Author’s Best Friend.

Two weeks on, since I announced that preview copies of the book were available from The Castle, I have been staggered by the response. I’ve lost count of the numbers we have sold, but they run into the hundreds and I am relying on my Finance Director to keep a tight fist on the cash. More extraordinary is the number of people coming back to buy additional copies because they like what they read. Christmas shopping seems to have made an early start this year. One customer has bought 32, that’s thirty-two, books! Another twelve! And many more are buying in parcels of three or four.

But selling a few hundred preview copies to the friends and loyal customers of The Castle Hotel is the easy part of the mission. The real test will come when the book is published and seeks to win an audience beyond the boundaries of this parish. 

My last three books had the powerful backing of the PR departments and sales forces of big publishers. My Archipelago is self-published, so the job of getting distribution and persuading the press to publicize the book falls on Tim Mercer, my small Somerset publisher, and me. Publication date is September 20th, and between now and then we shall be working like lunatics to get the book noticed and sold into the trade. The competition to be seen and heard above the crowd is mad. Literary editors in the national press receive something like 300 books a week of which perhaps a dozen are reviewed. Famous authors, celebrity memoirs and the muscle of the big publisher leave precious little room for the rest of us.

But amid the frenzy, I seem to have found a friend and ally in Waterstone’s, surely our most cherished chain of booksellers. The company grants a high degree of autonomy to its store managers to decide which books to display. Empowered in this way, individual managers are free to organize their own events. So for the past week, I have been telephoning Watersone’s outlets in the West Country, speaking to the managers and discussing times and dates for book signings this autumn. Some of them have also suggested evening talks in their local libraries which, I gather, are very popular.

So far, I have been in touch with Waterstone’s managers in Taunton, Exeter (both the High Street and the Roman Gate branches), Yeovil, Wells, Tiverton, Dorchester, Weston-super-Mare and Cribbs Causeway. What touches me is their enthusiasm! These good people love books, love their authors. With their help, I have half a chance of selling enough books for Tim Mercer and me to cover our £19,000 investment. Thank you Mr. Waterstone!

Kit Chapman, author of My Archipelago 

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The Owl, the Pussycat and your magical wedding in a fairytale castle.

Nursery rhymes aren’t just for the nursery. Because of their romance, their magic and their fantasy, nursery rhymes live in our imaginations for ever. For me, a childhood favourite was The Owl and the Pussycat. And as a grown-up, I couldn’t resist invoking the whole poem in the Castle’s weddings brochure. After all, the day of your wedding has to be a moment of romance, magic and a touch of fantasy.

Now, if you decide to celebrate your wedding at The Castle, you may not want to dine on “mince, and slices of quince” like the newly wed Owl and Pussycat! But, if you choose, you may certainly want to dance “by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon”. And if there’s no moon, you can always dance under the magnificent starlit dome in BRAZZ, our brasserie, which is available for your exclusive use.

So why is The Castle a natural choice for your special day? What are the “must-haves”? Well, with a handsome 12th century castle at your disposal, we believe in romantic tradition. After church or a civil ceremony in our elegant Music Room (we have been granted a licence), you, your family and friends can take your drinks amid the rose bushes and ancient stones of the castle keep and moat… the hotel’s garden, and a magical spot for your wedding photographs. Or for smaller parties, The Castle’s Penthouse and rooftop garden terrace offer you and your guests fabulous views across Taunton’s skyline to the Quantock Hills, Exmoor and the Blackdowns.

And on the subject of great views, our spacious bridal suites with their seven-foot beds overlook the 12th century garden and Somerset’s glorious hills.

But what of the feasting and merriment? Here, our brides and grooms often like to mix the classic with the modern by booking BRAZZ for the dinner and dancing. Our brasserie, with its long zinc bar, its giant aquarium and spectacular starlit dome, adjoins The Castle Hotel and is terrific fun… the perfect place to celebrate your wedding. And our award-winning chef will cook up your chosen menu – a feast which will excite the most critical of gourmets.

Finally, what of our service and our attitude to wedding bookings? Unlike some of the big corporate venues, as a family-owned business, we care. This is the most important day in your life and our greatest wish is to shift the strain of organization off your shoulders and onto ours. We want to make the great day the happiest for you and one you will both always remember. So, our attitude is to offer you a bespoke personal service and a wedding which will be organized and overseen by our senior management team led by my General Manager, Kevin McCarthy, who will greet you on the red carpet when you arrive, escort you into the hotel and take care of all your wishes.

What, you are asking, will all this magic and romance cost? I think you may be surprised. We insist on offering the best value in the West Country! Just call our Events Team on 01823 328303 or email events@the-castle-hotel.com or go to www.the-castle-hotel.com

We want you to sail away from the Castle as happy as the Owl and the Pussycat.

Kit Chapman, author of My Archipelago

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Mozart’s Don Giovanni – a perfect antidote to “The Book”!

After a hectic week of stuffing promotional flyers into envelopes and fielding questions about the meaning of My Archipelago, Louise and I took a break for an evening at the opera. Bliss! The perfect restorative.

And I’m not talking here of a trip to Covent Garden or a night with Welsh National Opera. This was a production of Don Giovanni by Somerset Opera, staged at King’s College in Taunton. Frankly, the group’s daring and ambition for on opera on this scale worried me. I should not have been concerned. Given the extreme limitations and constraints on small companies like this, Somerset Opera’s staging was a triumph where, quite properly, all the emphasis went into the music (an orchestra of 13 instuments under the direction of Christopher Ball) and the performances of a cast who were supplemented by a sprinkling of young up-and-coming professionals.

The production was intelligently directed by Sebastian Petit, a veteran of Taunton’s Brewhouse Theatre, who succeeded in eliciting some quite outstanding performances. Here was a cast whose acting ability matched their voices. For me, central to this success was the comi-tragic interplay between Don Giovanni (played by Guy Robinson) and his venal servant Leporello (Phil Turley). Robinson’s presence dominated the stage. He has a fine baritone voice and, in the lead role, mustered the most wicked and lascivious of leers as he went about his conquests. Leporello was his master’s perfect foil and the cavortings of the pair on stage had us rolling off our seats.

There were strong performances, too, from the principal ladies – Penny Daw as Donna Elvira, and Suzanne Manuell as Donna Anna. But the performance which really captured my heart was Celena Bridge’s playing of the peasant bride, Zerlina. Miss Bridge only graduated from The Royal Academy of Music three years ago. In Taunton on Wednesday, she made a spirited and wonderfully engaging Zerlina.

If there was one disappointment, it came in role of Don Ottavio, Donna Anna’s suitor, played somewhat woodenly by Christopher Hunt. Oddly, Sebastian Petit’s excellent programme notes suggest that this leading aristocrat in Seville society should not be portrayed as “a wimp”, but as a “strong and vital” character. Mr Hunt, regrettably, played the wimp!

Nevermind, in spite of this minor cavil, Somerset Opera deserve high praise for another great success. The company is a registered charity, relying on the support of the local authority and various artistic associations as well as support from commercial sponsors and donations from individuals. The group’s mission is “to foster and promote the education of the general public in the appreciation of music”. And this they do magnificently.

Kit Chapman, author of My Archipelago

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Archie-pel-argo! Did I pick the wrong title for my new book?

I am in a state of shock. My book! My book! The first wave of promotional mailings has been despatched and, already, the in-coming orders are overwhelming my hard-pressed office team. But, to my horror, I am beginning to wonder if my choice of title was not a terrible mistake. Few people seem to know what the word “archipelago” means. Worse, they have difficulty getting their tongues around the word’s five syllables. A variety of pronunciations is emerging, the front-runner being a tortured “archie-pel-argo”! The rising phonetic falling on the “-ar” of “-argo”.

The derivation of “archipelago” comes from two Greek words: “arkos”, meaning chief (as in archbishop), and “pelagos”, meaning sea. Originally, the proper name for the Aegean Sea was “The Archipelago”. This then became generalized to mean any sea with a lot islands (like the Aegean).

My book was written from a terrace overlooking the Bay of Skiathos which is scattered with smaller islands. And Skiathos itself is part of a group of Aegean islands called the Sporades. Hence, My Archipelago, the title of my book. And it makes a neat metaphor for “My Family”, the subject of the narrative.

I hope this clears the fog!

Kit Chapman, author of My Archipelago

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My Archipelago is delivered. How to promote a self-published book?

My blog at the end of May described the pleasure and the pain of writing my fourth book. I then found myself landed with the added challenge of publishing it in a world where the collective body of established professional publishers were already struggling to survive in a turbulent marketplace. So, just before Louise and I left for Greece, Tim Mercer, my partner in this venture, took me to meet Butler Tanner & Dennis in Frome, the printer we had selected to produce My Archipelago.

Last Thursday, two pallet loads of books – 164 boxes – were delivered to The Castle. After my four-year labour, the moment of delivery, like a birth, was filled with a confusion of feelings and emotions of how the book might be. Would I be pleased? Would I be disappointed?

It took me a while to rip open a box. I wanted to be alone. But when I did, and when I held the book in my hands, my sense of pleasure and relief was intense. My baby looked handsome beyond my dreams! And my first reaction was an instinctive realization that no publishing conglomerate would have come close to matching the quality that Mercer Books had produced for me. As a small independent design house, their passion and commitment to the task detached them from a publishing world transfixed and constrained by the threat of the digital revolution. The iPad and e-books cometh, and publishers these days live in fear of the end of the printed word.

In an interview for Literary Review this month, Margaret Atwood, prize-winning author and an amateur expert in the “New Media”,  defended the printed word, describing it as “the thrill of looking at a pristine page”. I felt that thrill with my book in my hands. The look was good, the feel was good. Even the smell was good. Electronic books do not possess the aesthetic and tactile allure which might place them on a bookshelf in your drawing room, or on an ottoman, or by your bedside. Printed books ornament our homes as well as our minds and imaginations.

So much for my bibliophilic hymnal. The job now is to sell the book and recover the investment Tim Mercer and I have sunk into the project. With a print-run of 2,000 hardback copies, the arithmetic needs careful management.  The print bill alone is £9,500. But with design costs, legal fees (a libel reading), copy editing, proof reading, indexing, permissions for using copyright material, storage, marketing and a dozen other incidentals, this figure doubles. The book’s RRP is £25 and we have made the assumption that 50% of our stock will be sold direct and 50% to the trade through a wholesaler who takes a massive 57.5% discount off the RRP. So, we have calculated that our average take on every sale will be about £15.35. On this basis, we hope to break-even at around 1,25o copies.

So, the sales and marketing plan now gets underway – well in advance of the official September publication date. Clearly, the more books we sell direct from The Castle, the better off we shall be. The website went live yesterday – www.the-castle-hotel.com/kitchapman or www.myarchipelago.co.uk – and we are offering signed preview copies of the book for £20 (P&P extra). Several thousand leaflets have been printed to carry the message and the offer which we are mailing to the hotel’s regular customers. E-newsletters have been posted to our database, and will be repeated again at the end of July with the offer (which closes on 31st August). The leaflets will also be displayed in our bedrooms and public areas. Tent cards will sit on our restaurant and brasserie tables.

Meanwhile, a public relations campaign is beginning to gather momentum and several newspaper and magazine editors have already expressed an interest in the book. For me, Waterstone’s will be a particular target. I plan to call individual store managers and offer to do a talk and a signing. And a literary lunch at The Castle on October 7th is already marked in our events diary.

It’s going to be a busy summer and autumn. It’s going to be fun. Best of all, one customer has already emailed me with an order for 30 books. A good start.

Kit Chapman, author of My Archipelago.  

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The Gentlemen of St. John’s College Cambridge to perform at The Castle

The pleasures of the Aegean Sea in June have given way to our duties at The Castle in July. But these too are not without their pleasures. On the 23rd of this month, Louise and I welcome a small group of gifted choristers who will be performing in the hotel’s Music Room before dinner and entertaining us between courses at dinner. The Gentlemen of St. John’s College Cambridge have acquired a worldwide reputation for their “pure tone and controlled excellence” in concerts played both at home (including London’s Royal Albert Hall and Wigmore Hall) and abroad, in Sydney’s Opera House and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, and across America, Europe, South Africa and Asia.

I have a particular affection for choral music because, I suppose, as a boy I was the lead treble of my generation at school and for the three years before my voice broke, I sang solos in chapel and on stage – not least, the first verse of Once in Royal David’s City unaccompanied at the annual Christmas carol service.

The Gents – all Choral Scholars at St. John’s – lead busy lives balancing their studies with their musical commitments both in college and on tour. So we were lucky to engage them for The Castle, although we had a little help from a school chum of Louise’s whose son is a member of the group. But what settled my determination to bring them to Taunton was a weekend visit we made to Cambridge last summer. On Sunday morning we attended Sung Eucharist in chapel with the full choir – an experience more wonderful, more spiritually uplifting than I can begin to describe.

The college takes its name from the Augustinian Hospital of St. John situated on this site in the 13th century. The construction of the chapel was completed in 1869 – an imposing High Victorian building which now ranks as one of the most beautiful Gothic Revival chapels in England. It is the perfect setting for a choir with a distinguished tradition of religious music reaching back 350 years.

But The Gents are not just about sacred music. Their repertoire is enormous and eclectic, ranging from folk songs to modern close-harmony versions of pop music, as well as creating their own arrangements of classic jazz standards. Their mission is to inspire, amuse and entertain. And that is what they will be doing at The Castle on July 23rd in a two-part programme, beginning with the concert in the Music Room at 6.45. Then dinner in our restaurant afterwards, spiced with song and laughter in between three delicious courses presented by our Chef, Richard Guest.

For more details, check our website: www.the-castle-hotel.com

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