Don't beg, borrow or steal it - Buy A Copy

A busy few days, including Sainsbury’s, invoices, the dentist, the hairdresser; meeting up with a friend on Wednesday and tea with friends whose daughter with 9 month old baby was staying, on Thursday, prior to a productive Goldenford meeting in the evening.

I might have offended the friend on Thursday. I’m not sure, because she changed the subject pretty quickly. She had told me how much she had enjoyed Tainted Tree, and I couldn’t appreciate her enthusiasm because on the telephone, recently, she told me she was loaning it to her son, and today she told me she was loaning it to her sister in law, together with my other books, A Bottle of Plonk and The Fruit of the Tree. All this adds up to quite a lot of enjoyment. She also said she hoped she would get them back. I suggested she tell her relations to buy their own books and she said, ‘Oh, I couldn’t.’

Later I gave her a little hint – ‘If any of your friends want to buy the book for Christmas, I can easily get them to you – delivery to your door, if you like.’ Then she said that her s-i-l would be receiving Tainted Tree at around Christmas. ‘That wasn’t what I meant,’ I said. As she well understood.

What I can’t understand is how normally intelligent people cannot understand that a book will die if it’s not bought. When you loan to your friends, it probably hastens the demise of said book. And yet many of the people who have been most enthusiastic about Tainted Tree, to the extent of ringing me up specially to tell me, have gone on to boast that they have loaned it to all their friends. People in my village enjoyed The Fruit of the Tree so much, that one copy circulated around virtually the whole village. I exempt my friends overseas from anger – I know how prohibitive the postage costs are, though with the lowered pound, it’s not quite so bad. But if only my local friends would realise, if groceries could be eaten, then magically appear again, to be passed on to a friend, then grocery shops would soon close. It’s the same with books, folks.

Writers like JK Rowling can weather this. We can’t. If we don’t get the sales, we can’t afford to publish more books; we can’t afford to advertise; we can’t afford to pay for selling opportunities. If we can’t get those people who’ve enjoyed the books to support us, who on earth can we rely on?

However, we have some selling opportunities ahead. Irene and I will be at the Guildford Institute at lunch time next week, on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday with all our publications; later in November - 27^th at 7.30 p.m., we will be at Horsley Library to give a presentation. Good news, the Friends of Horsley Library have got the Surrey Library service to take copies. So there's a thought. If all those people who enjoyed our books told their friends to get copies from the library instead of loaning their own copy, maybe we would actually benefit from Public Lending Right.