One particular part of my father’s family got more than the family tree treatment, though.  My Great-great-great-grandmother, Julia Canning, kept all the letters she received until shortly after her marriage, and they’re riveting.  She arrived in Britain from India, where her father was a colonial administrator, aged 7.  Her mother died on her way back, separately, to England and her father shortly afterwards before he could embark for leave, and Julia and her next-oldest sister were left in the care of an uncle and aunt (she had two older half-sisters from her mother’s first marriage, who lived elsewhere).

Foxcote, where Julia grew up.

Julia was a Catholic at a time when Catholics were still proscribed in the UK, so she was sent to France for her schooling almost as soon as she reached England.  She lived through the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots and the rise of the railways, in which her uncle was an investor, and married James Fleming, a young lawyer who was to become England’s first Catholic QC.  He specialised in proving succession to peerages that had been considered extinct, but failed to prove his own claim to the Barony of Slane.  One of Julia and James’s sons travelled out to Tasmania in the 1880s (he was in the Colonial Service) and kept a diary of his travels which is eye-opening to our much softer generation.

I typed all the letters from the original MSS onto my computer but failed to back them up before the hard-drive died.  Now I have the printed copies I originally sent to Ma.  I’m aiming to copy them back into the computer via OCR, sort them into date order (for some reason she’d filed them by writer’s name) and then re-read, because I think there’s a book in Julia’s extraordinary story.

Two very remarkable ladies: I salute you.

The most obvious thing would be my laptop, as that’s what I use for all my writing.  I write quite differently in long-hand, constantly editing so I don’t have lengthy rewrites.  I write much more freely on the computer as I know it’s very simple to change, move stuff around, rewrite without having to waste the sheet of paper, edit spelling mistakes and so on.  But laptops take up a lot of space and everybody will be expecting me to take one.

A quill?  I have a lovely swan feather I picked up on the shore at Loch Leven, though I’ve never shaped the nib.  I use it, with an antique writing-slope, when I have a stand at exhibitions and the like.  But I definitely don’t use it for writing with.

A dictionary?  My trusty Chambers, Penguin, Johnson’s (1811 edition), or Roget’s thesaurus, perhaps.  I certainly use them a lot, though there are others I turn to as often – online specialist sites that translate scuba terminology or provide rhyming suggestions.  But they all weigh a ton (or come on the laptop – see above).

Perhaps I should just take my brain, my necktop computer.  It’s the tool I most rely on, developed over 50+ years through constant reading, writing and thinking.  It may be a little less reliable now than, say, 20 years ago, but it’s holding up pretty well all things considered.  There’s only one slight problem – you can’t see it, so it’s a little hard to “show and tell”!  Cranial surgery at the breakfast table?  I think not…

Better get my thinking cap on.  Wait – now there’s an idea!

I’m reading an enchanting book at the moment called “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” (henceforward called “TGLPPPS”).  I picked it up in a second-hand bookshop because of the title, as you do.

The novel is set in 1946, shortly after the Germans had left the Channel Islands, and in the first half (all I’ve read so far) many of the letters concern the islanders’ struggle to survive the war.  It’s the second book I’ve read on the subject; the other is a first-hand account called “Prisoner of the Eagle” which was published shortly after the end of the war.  Both books tell the same story of near starvation and privations of all sorts, not just for the islanders but for the Todt camp slave labourers and, in the end, for the Germans as well.

It’s easy to forget that part of the United Kingdom was invaded; that Brits living on their own soil were sent to concentration camps for minor infringements of wartime rules.  Strange too; it’s not something I ever learnt about at school. I guess back then we still had the “we rule the world” attitude and it was hard to admit.

“TGLPPPS” doesn’t sound as though it should be enchanting, but it’s written so lightly and touchingly that it really is so.  Conceived as the correspondence between an authoress and the members of the eponymous society, plus her publisher and a couple of friends, there’s love interest, human frailty, anger and a real sense of history about it. 

Epistolatory novels are quite hard to bring off as you have to describe each character in their own words, rather than having an all-knowing narrator or a hero/heroine from whose point of view the story is seen.  Interestingly “TGLPPPS” has two authors, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, which may have helped.  It works brilliantly, and I’d recommend it to any reader with an interest in history, books or just people.

How can you earn money when it’s free?

Bizarre, but that can be the reality of an Amazon promotion.

Let me backtrack. I’m a newly self-published author (in fact I’m just approaching my first month anniversary). I started my book over three years ago and faced the uphill climb to find a publisher. My day job got in the way and the book sat on the shelf for over two years. Probably just as well because in the intervening years I have learnt so much more about writing and structuring a story that I believe the finished result now is far better than it would have been back then.

Anyway, also in the intervening years, along has come the Amazon Kindle and Amazon’s invite to ‘self-publish’ with them. ‘Wow!’ I thought. I can get my novel on a major platform where millions of people conduct daily searches. It will be found and I can sit back and wait for the royalty cheques to arrive!

The minute I pressed the button to commit my novel to the process I realised the reality. With over 5000 new books in the same genre in the last month alone, mine was never going to get found without a lot of promotion. For the next couple of weeks I spent a lot of time tweeting, posting to Facebook & LinkedIn and looking for sites where I could list my book or my author profile. I took part in a lot of discussions that ordinarily I wouldn’t have gone looking for. In all of this activity I learnt a lot from other authors who generously shared their experiences of Amazon and self-publishing. I learned that I am comfortable promoting my book, when for the last twelve years I have been uncomfortable promoting my services as a trainer. I also established a blog site.

With few sales (I suspect only from people who knew me and were curious!), I decided to take advantage of the free promotion Amazon allows through the Kindle Select Programme. For two days I set the price of my novel to 0.00.

For those two days I became addicted to my stats page. Every time I refreshed the screen I had more sales. Over a 48 hour period I had more than 9000 downloads. I achieved new readers in US, Germany, France and one person who has reviewed the book lives in Australia. I was in the top fifteen for free downloads in the UK and the top 40 in the States. I was beyond thrilled at this result.

So, back to where I started. How have I earned money when it was free? Well, since the promotion ended the novel has enjoyed a modest, but steady, stream of downloads each day. You see, as so many people downloaded the book at the bargain price of free, it now appears on countless other book pages as an ‘also bought’ item and is easier to find amongst the thousands of novels in the genre. I now feel like an author, knowing it is no longer just my friends who are reading a novel that I’m very proud of. I may have given away thousands to achieve sales of hundreds but it’s better than the tens before.

If you are self-published on Amazon and reluctant to give away your hard work, please don’t be. It will pay dividends (well, royalties) in the long run.

Sarah Fredricks

Self-published author of ‘The Millionaire Falls Hard’

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00768T7DK

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00768T7DK

Thanks, Sarah.

If you need a little light relief, I suggest you follow that link to Amazon now and buy Sarah’s book!

Would I use the word in work for my clients?  Almost certainly not because, like me, most readers would have to resort to a dictionary to discover what it means.  In commercial writing clarity is vital: not exactly words of one syllable, but words that readers would use in everyday conversation.  Familiarity may breed contempt but it also breeds comfort, and there is a case to be made for using clichés despite what your English teacher (and quite a few purists in the copywriting community) would tell you.

Copywriting is all about communicating with your readers – your potential buyers – and you have to write in their language.  If they use clichés, slang, bad grammar, ellipses (…) and so on, use them too.  Within reason, of course….  The trick lies in using them in such a way that people who don’t use them won’t be turned off.  You can’t write exactly as people talk (“So I er, I says to her ‘Well, you know, it’s kind of… it’s like – oh, you know what I mean – sort of … red!”); nobody would wade through that.  But you can and should use their normal language to speak directly to them.

Here’s to – like – you know – great … um, what’s the word?… communication.

I had hoped that it would be a feature full of words of wisdom, experience, charm perhaps.  But no – it was all about how I came up feet first on a training dive.  It does seem to have struck a chord, though.  Several people have commented on their first (and usually only) feet-first ascent, and the measures they have taken to prevent a repeat of a deeply unpleasant experience.

One little “crow” is that the editor said I have a “lovely writing style”, and asked what else I’d like to write!  So I’ll be doing a piece for him later in the year about a club trip to Northern Ireland.  The only N. Irish member of the club says it’s bound to rain (according to him summer is two days long, and you’re lucky to catch them!), so if you have a hot line to the weather god please could you ask him/her for a particularly good spell in the area in the second half of July?  Thank you.

I love writing about diving because I love diving, but I also love finding out about businesses and disciplines I have no prior knowledge of.  For example, at the moment I’m having to learn about alpine skiing and what a GP may need to talk to patients about, so that I can write blogs on those subjects.  Neither of them are areas I know anything about.  Last time I skied was here in Scotland, about 12 years ago, and I hated it; it was so icy I’d have done better taking my skates up the hill.  And I’m lucky enough to be ill very rarely, so I don’t keep much of an eye on health news.  Nonetheless, I’m finding both blogs fascinating to write because I have to broaden my knowledge to do them.

That’s what I love about this job.  Every day I learn something new, every day I feel I hone my skills a little bit more, every day is different – and every day is free from office politics.  How many people get that much fun and satisfaction from their Monday-to-Friday?

For example, my uncle chortled for years over an ad he once saw: “Don’t spend a penny on a new carpet until you’ve seen our range”.

I don't know who took this, but thank you. I wonder: how long before it was noticed?

My friend Helen chuckles over ”Piano wanted for man with three legs”.  Huhhh?!?  The man?  The piano?  I can’t get my head round it.  Does anyone make three-legged pianos?  Did they have a couple of bricks sitting around with no other purpose than to become the fourth leg?   Did Jake the Peg come into it somewhere?  Too many questions….

A friend sent me one of those “funny” emails the other day; unusually this one did have me rolling in the aisles.  It was a list of badly-edited headlines including “Miners Refuse to Work after Death”, “Panda Mating Fails: Veterinarian takes over” and the glorious “Red Tape Holds up New Bridges” (I always thought it was tougher than steel!).

Years of amusement for us, recalling these gaffes – and years of red faces for the authors, ditto.  It’s hard to say whether recommending a proofreader would be a good idea or a bad one; I guess it depends which side of the fence you’re sitting.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: “I know you believe you understand what you think I said but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”   It’s all about communication.

If you come across any similar gems, do share them below!

So I looked it up in my trusty Chambers dictionary, and it seems we were both right.  It means “the terminology of a profession, art, group, etc; an artificial or barbarous language; a pidgin; unintelligible talk, gibberish; chatter, twittering”.  Jargon can also be used as a verb meaning to twitter or chatter (the poem King David, set to music by Herbert Howells, talks of a nightingale that “jargoned on and on”).

As you may know, I’m a scuba diver, and there’s a lot of jargon involved in that, as in so many other sports (think of googlies – lobs – piked dives – mohawks and salchows in ice skating – the list is almost endless).  If I’m writing for divers I don’t need to explain what a regulator is – in fact I’m more likely to call it a reg – or that bottles tend to contain air under water and beer on land.  If I’m writing for non-divers, the regulator would be described as “the thing you hold in your mouth and breathe through” and I might even explain that it’s called a regulator because it helps regulate the flow of air, reducing the pressure in the bottle to something that won’t blow your lungs apart when you inhale.  I’d then say that the bottle, correctly know as a cylinder, holds breathing gas (air or another mixture) sufficient to let most divers stay under water for around 40-60 minutes.  (I’d probably skip any mention of the beer bottles.  Don’t want to give the sport a bad name!)

Last week I was learning all about dealing with diving emergencies, which can involve administering oxygen to a casualty.  One of the signs to look out for with burst lungs is “crepitation”.  That’s not a word I use in everyday life (the spellcheck has just drawn a squiggly line under it, so obviously Microsoft doesn’t use it in everyday life either), so I looked it up.   Chambers describes it as “a soft crackling sound detected through a stethoscope, and usually resulting from inflammation due to pneumonia or other disease”.  As we don’t have a stethoscope in our first aid kit, I’m not sure how we’re supposed to hear it.  Maybe it’s more obvious in something as drastic as a burst lung; with a bit of luck I’ll never find out.

Anyway, what’s your take on jargon, however you define it?  And how do you define it?  Do let me know!

Image gratefully pinched from youblog.typepad.com

With Valentine’s Day coming up I thought it was a good time to talk about when “we” is not the best word to use.

If you’re visiting a website is it
a) to read the history of the company, who designed its premises, and the number of widgets it can churn out on any given day? or
b) to solve a problem, find information or buy something?

Forgive my jumping to conclusions, but I would bet it’s b).  Simply because it is for most people.

Including your readers, O Wise Business Person.

Therefore there is a saying in the copywriting business: “Don’t ‘we’ on your copy”.  In other words, don’t write about us, we, our, I, me, my… except on the About Us page.  That’s what it’s there for.  (At least I hope it’s there – it’s very useful for people researching who to send communications to, if it’s properly thought out.)

The same goes for any other business communication: speak to your reader as a person who needs a solution that you can supply, whatever that solution is. 

Don’t bother them with facts – they probably don’t care when your factory was built, unless they’re industrial archaeologists or potential landlords; they definitely won’t care whose grandfather founded the business, unless he was really famous (in which case they can email or phone for details).  They want to know if you can get your widgets to them by yesterday.

So use you, your, yours (yourser, yoursest – sorry, getting a bit carried away here) – no-one will mind if you ‘you’ all over the page.  And write to one reader, because that’s typically who’ll be reading – one reader per screen, though potentially millions of screens at once – not a group. 

If you follow this advice you’ll set yourself up above nine-tenths of businesses who take the easy route.  Solve one person’s problem, scratch an individual itch, sell one customer your product, and those ones will  become millions.

One of the speakers was the co-owner of The Scarlet Bakery, who uses Facebook for all their marketing.  They have no website, have never spent a bean on ads of any sort, have never distributed fliers or used any of the other “normal” ways of finding customers, and they’ve gone from start-up in June 2010 to selling 4,000 cupcakes a week by November 2010.    All the cakes are pre-ordered online so there’s absolutely no wastage.   (You can find them at http://www.facebook.com/?sk=apps&ap=1#!/pages/Dundee-United-Kingdom/The-Scarlet-Bakery/122153114489088).  I thought that was brilliant.

Immediately after the workshop I met a potential client to talk about promoting her health-drink business.  She wanted some press releases written in the short term and her website updated later, when she had the money.  Press releases aren’t really my forte, but I was able to give her the details of a specialist.  Then I told her The Scarlet Bakery’s story and she lit up: I’d just given her the ideal no-cost answer for her marketing.  No need to update the website; possibly no need to pay the press release specialist.  Certainly no need to pay me – though she did buy me lunch (she said it was the best £10 she’d ever spent).

I do hope this isn’t “the future” for all small businesses, or mine will go down the tubes

Mind you, my halo’s shining that wee bit brighter….