Marketing our books

My sister, Ricky Hunter, and I have both published books in the last few months. That's the easy bit. Then you need to sell the little blighters. Aha, you think, no problem! But it's not that easy.

When you write a book it is your 'baby', and of course you are in love with it, although there is a love/hate relationship too, because by the time you have edited the thing a zillion times you are at the 'nine months and one week' stage, when all you want is to get this birth over and done with. A book is no different. Nevertheless, being brilliant authors is not enough. You have to tell people that the books are there, and that they would love to read them and of course to read them they need to spend a bit of money.

My sister and I have decided to market to the libraries. I took my book into my local branch of the public library. She handed it on to someone in another library who does the buying for this area. Fabulous, an order for 22 books came through a week ago. So now, we are slowly building spread sheets of every library in Australia and emailing every last one of them with details and cover pictures of our books.

What a job! Do you know how many libraries there are in this big brown country? Lots and lots and lots. So  the spreadsheet is getting bigger and bigger. We have already contacted New Zealand library suppliers.

Then comes USA, England, Ireland, Scotland and Canada, and any other English speaking country we can think of. On top of that I have to make up a spreadsheet of all the TESOL colleges, because my book will be good for them. Oh well, no rest for the wicked.

Completely different topics, but a bit of shameless promotion on my own blog can't be too bad.

Humility today.

Peter found an article in today's Courier Mail and I think it is worth sharing.

With the advent of 'praising' our children for everything they do, big or small, the attitudes of children are changing. There are times when extreme praise for seemingly little things are good. How many times have parents stood over a potty, with the first wee or poo in it and excitedly told the child how wonderful they are, how clever they are, that Mummy is so pleased with them and so proud, and just wait until Daddy gets home from work and he will be completely excited too?

But praise is getting out of hand. Children are not allowed to fail at school these days. Everybody is a winner.  Of course the child  might feel good, but you and I know that not everyone is a winner. There are some real duds out there, who don't try, don't care and spend their entire life messing up someone else's life. So as they grow into teenagers, they have this belief that the world thinks they are fabulous come what may, they are a success no matter how much of a failure they really are, and to top it off, we are not allowed to shape our children any more with a bit of judicious discipline.

You may think my view a little warped, but we have brought up five children, none of them criminals, all in the workforce or 'at home' mums, and so far we haven't had to face police or courts on account of them.

This is why the article in today's Courier Mail really appealed. This is a copied and pasted article, it is not my writing, and I give the references here so you can go to the source and read it for yourself.

The article below was written by Angela Mollard, and here is the link.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/kids-dont-understand-the-meaning-of-the-word-humility-let-alone-practise-it/story-fncak5zz-1226474389761

The article by Angela Mollard starts here:

"RECENTLY I read Charlotte’s Web to my daughter.

Remember the story? A tenacious and articulate spider writes words in her web to describe a sweet but otherwise unremarkable pig.

‘Terrific’, she spells out, then ‘radiant’. Just before she dies – because even uncommonly gifted arachnids still cark it – she spins the word ‘humble’.

“What does humble mean, Mum?” asks my daughter.

“It means you don’t have tickets on yourself; let’s say you won the spelling bee at school, you wouldn’t show off about it.”

My daughter thinks for a moment, then replies, “I don’t know anyone who’s humble.”

There, dear reader, is the voice of a generation. Humility, that most venerated, ancient and biblical of virtues, has slipped out of our lexicon, swept away by a culture that’s all about the ‘me’, not ‘we’.

As a freshly minted journalism graduate, I wrote obituaries when there were no ambulances to chase. It was brain-numbingly dull. Most of the subjects hadn’t actually died, but the editor wanted to be prepared.

So I’d eulogise on Sir Edmund Hillary, Nelson Mandela, the Queen Mother (I knocked her off three times) – extraordinary people defined by a common adjective: humility.

Years later, his obit yellowing in a file, I cajoled Hillary to confess who stepped on the summit of Everest first, he or Tenzing Norgay? “We reached the top almost together,” he said firmly. (Notably, there’s no photo of Hillary on the peak; he simply didn’t think to take one.)

In these days of social media and ‘selfies’, it’s not hard to be humble – it’s impossible. Everybody is a brand to be self-promoted. “Get yourself an agent,” said a showbiz friend when I started this column. “Why?” I asked.

“People will read it for the writing, not because I’m some chick on a yoghurt ad.” He smiled knowingly: “Trust me.” (Wish I had, there’s a motza to be made spruiking dairy products.)

“Humility,” said CS Lewis, “is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.” What a quaint notion for a culture raised on praise and driven by a need for recognition.

This lack of humility now defines who we are: the arrogance that drove the global financial crisis; the self-inflation and deflation of our athletes in London; the buying of Twitter or Facebook followers; the slow death of civility.

“We’re going to audit you,” a media exec told me recently when I was up for a new role.

“Audit me? What for?” I asked anxiously, regretting my tax tardiness.

“For popularity; you know, to see how many followers you have and how often you’ve been ‘liked’ and ‘favourited’.” Jeez, Louise – I’m a writer. Do you reckon Shakespeare could have knocked out 37 plays and a zillion sonnets if he’d had to constantly tweet about how fabulous he was?

Look, I love social media, but this need to shop-window ourselves is creating a generation that calculates its worth on external adulation, not personal integrity. Where will our next Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi or Aung San Suu Kyi come from if we continue to pursue glory over good?

One obituary I wish I’d written was Neil Armstrong’s. When he died, TV producers scrambled for video footage.

Yes, there was the moon walk, but there were no red carpets, no appearances on Letterman, no reunions with retired astronauts. He was the ultimate humble hero – an explorer who sought greatness not for one man, but for mankind.

Catch Angela Mollard every Sunday at 8.45am on Weekend Today, on the Nine Network.

Email angelamollard@sundaymagazine.com.au. Follow her at www.twitter.com/angelamollard."

How true is that? And today our children and grandchildren gauge their level of success on how many facebook friends they have, or who likes them, when in fact, most of them would fall over them in the street and not know them.

In my book, a little bit of humility goes a long way.

Different towns - different water.

It's surprising how much the water quality changes from one place to another. Our current house sit does not have a built in water filter for drinking, but it does have a couple of filter jugs that sit on the bench and do a satisfactory job.

It is a very  basic design, but it does the job and filters the water. It's easy to refill and holds about a litre of filtered water in the base.

Today I decided to replace the filters. They are cartridges that you have to buy and insert into the jugs. I took the old cartridge down to the supermarket, because in previous houses I have bought the wrong cartridge, and once all the packaging has been opened you can't really take them back, and they are expensive to buy, these ones were $13.00 each.

After we had unpacked the groceries Peter put in the first cartridge. From memory you have to sort of wash them through, I think rinse them a couple of times. On the outer box it says, 'Instructions for use, please see cartridge foil'. Okay, we open the box and take out the cartridge completely enclosed in a blue and white foil covering.

'There's no instruction on here', Peter says to me. The printing is so tiny, probably a 2 font! and the whole foil  cover is covered with this tiny white writing. But there is nothing in English! There are instructions in 9 languages that seem to range from some sort of Russian Language to Korean, possibly Greek, French, maybe Malaysian, but no English. Not one little bit of English to tell  us how to deal with this cartridge. There are 25 listings in 25 languages telling us who the distributors are in different countries. Way down the bottom there is a bit that tells us it was made in Oxfordshire in England. The outer carton says proudly that it was made in the UK, and the Australian distributor was savvy enough to make the outer package of recycled material. That's good, that helps the tree situation. But no English instructions on what to do with it.

So Peter has gone off to have his afternoon nap while the cartridges are sitting waiting. While I have been closely examining the foil wrapping, guess what I have found. Hidden way down the bottom, are a series of six little diagrams! Ah here are the instructions! Picture one shows the cartridge going into the jug, or maybe its showing the cartridge coming out, its hard to tell. The second pic shows a jug with the lid up and something happening with tap water, I'm not sure. Maybe its rinsing out the inner part that holds the un-filtered water. The third pic shows a hand putting the cartridge sideways under water and moving it back and forwards. The fourth picture looks the same as number 1, although maybe there is water in this one. The fifth picture shows a tap filling the jug and emptying it again and has a 2X there. The last one, has the same jug with a little bit of water in the bottom, a 3X=ok and a big tick.

I think it is saying to submerge the cartridge and rinse three times before using it.

Someone in England needs a very basic lesson on how to write instructions.

As for the water quality in different places. Here on the Gold Coast it is not too bad, but where we are has some of the chlorine smell to it, and I don't like that, so am happy to filter it each day. On the Sunshine Coast the water was quite good to drink. In Brisbane it was okay. But one of our house sits in New South Wales was a different matter.

The house itself was fine, having an enormous concrete tank, and the water was pumped to the kitchen and came through a good filtering system at the tap. But we went into town one evening to a Chinese restaurant, and asked for water. It was revolting. We sent the first lot back and said it was undrinkable, could we have another. The second one was just as bad. When we commented on it to the waitress she just shrugged her shoulders and said it was the town water, and more or less indicated, 'take it or leave it'. We left it. She didn't care. She didn't even offer us a bottle of water, or coke or something which we would have bought.

Anyway, when Peter arises from his afternoon nanna-nap I will show him the little pictures. We are going to put the jugs through the dishwasher to give them a good clean, then he can rinse 3X and put them in.

What to do with the car? Ah! Gold Coast Airport Parking.

If we are flying, we usually get someone to drop us off at the airport and pick us up. But this time it was not so convenient. Our daughter that lives close to us had children to pick up and take to school at the times we flew. But when you are house sitting and moving around a bit, it's not always easy to get to know a lot of the local businesses. So we checked the internet and decided to try a permanent car parking arrangement.

We found several options. It was possible to leave it in a long term car park at the airport itself. But it was open to the weather, and no one was there to check on it. The other option was to use the Gold Coast Airport Parking company.

This turned out to be a really good system. They are easy to find, close to the airport, and not far from the main Pacific Motorway south. They had very clear instructions on how to find them. Then they used their van to take us to the airport. They housed our car under cover. Then when we got back today, they picked us up at the airport again, and took us back to our car. It had been moved out the front ready for us. Not only that, they had washed it, and blacked the tyres. We were very impressed. Having the peace of mind knowing it was under cover and secure was important. Their service was really good, and there was no messing around or waiting.

The booking was easy too, all done online.

So if you are thinking of leaving your car at the Gold Coast airport for a day or several days, you might like to try them. We would certainly recommend them. It cost us about $80 for five nights, and full peace of mind.

http://goldcoastairportparking.com.au/?gclid=CI_8lsrTsrICFcdbpQodcBIAeQ

Flying home.

We flew to Melbourne from the Gold Coast airport. We flew Jetstar, and were very happy with the service. We had good smooth flights both ways.

I have been very reluctant to use Qantas any more. They have had a poor safety record in my view, often having flights diverted due to malfunctioning planes. But Jetstar, although being part of Qantas doesn't seem to have had these problems.

The view from the Gold Coast airport is fabulous. As we took off we were right above Tweed Heads. This city is the boundary between Queensland and New South Wales. You can stand on the boundary line, one foot in each state.

This is our daughter from Melbourne standing on the dividing line in Tweed Heads. NSW and QLD are the abbreviations for New South Wales and Queensland.

Here are a few views of Tweed Heads. Like so many of the Australian cities, they straddle a river, and in many cases the rivers have been highly developed with many areas for fishing and boating.

From this map you can see how much water there is around the river mouth.

The breakwater is clearly visible here, and these are lovely beaches have many hotels built around them. Like the Gold Coast, and this is really the very southern end of the Gold Coast, this is still very much a tourist area.

The view of the Gold Coast airport shows Tweed Heads close by. The quality of this picture is not so good.

With both our flights we had lovely views right over the Tweed area.  Aussie is certainly a beautiful country.

Graduation day.

The girl filling in for us with our house sit says she may change the locks....haha....she has just loved being here in the quiet, with so many birds around. She has lazed by the pool, and thoroughly enjoyed her few days here. She has also left the house in tip top condition, so we are really pleased that we had such a reliable friend.

Wednesday was my graduation day. I have worked hard with my writing over the past five years or so, I did my Bachelors degree in two years, doing all the units, two a semester are considered full time study and I normally did 3 units per semester, sometimes 4. Then there were 12 units in my Masters Degree, and I sometimes did two of these per semester, so it has been full on. Today is the day to reap the rewards.

My cold was still fresh and my throat a bit sore from getting a bit chilled on Monday. So I had a couple of easy days at my daughters place. She is right in town, and there are some excellent restaurants within a minutes walk. One was called La Notte, Italian, and had the best food, large servings and the prices weren't too bad.

I was still in my jamas when, mid morning, my daughter turned up from work, with my eldest son! He had made a surprise trip down from Brisbane to come to the graduation. I was thrilled to bits. When I graduated with my B.A. my Brisbane children attended, but my Melbourne daughter couldn't come. Now it was her turn to be there, and surprise! my eldest son too.

One handsome husband and one very handsome son.

So I had a shower and got some clothes on. We had some lunch and Matt and Peter went for a walk. At 3pm I took a taxi to the Convention Center. I met up with Di Hill, a writing buddy of mine from Brisbane who was also graduating.

The actual ceremony lasted just under 2 hours, then there was refreshments provided. Both Di and I were absolutely amazed to find that of all the students we worked with during our two years doing our writing degree, we were the only two that had turned up for the graduation. I know some of them were overseas, but only the two of us? I don't know if that was a statement about Swinburne or not!

There was another disappointing factor too. They had almost no souvenirs for sale. When I graduated with my BA through Griffith University on the Gold Coast, they had key rings, lovely presentation pens, bags, pins, teddy bears, luggage labels etc, all with the Griffith logo splashed all over them. I got several things that I have kept in my treasure box. But Swinburne had some miserable looking teddy bears, or little fluffy toy dogs, that were very expensive, and the only recognition of what degree you had passed was by putting a tiny piece of ribbon round the neck the same color as our gowns. I was very disappointed with that. They did have some rings, but even they didn't look very good.

You could get your degree framed straight after the event, but that was hugely expensive too. Someone was making a lot of money for very little effort. In the end, I didn't bother.

The venue was very nice, and they had an Aborigine playing the didgeridoo, along with a couple of dancers. The didgeridoo playing was very clever.

We finished off the night by having a late supper then off to bed. Even then it was pretty late and we had to be up at 4am to get the taxi to the airport for a very early flight home.

Anyway, it was a lovely few days away, and another milestone in life passed.

Day three in Melbourne.

Ahh, well our house sit doesn't have Foxtel, but my daughter does. We have been watching the US Open, tennis, and yesterday Serena Williams won the women's title and today its a marathon between Andy Murray and Djokovic. They are both exhausted, well into the fifth set, and they have been going for about four hours.

The winner of the men's and women's titles gets 1.9 million US$. Not bad for a few hours work. Of course they train for years for this, but I reckon it will take me nearly 160 years on the pension to get that sort of money.  Ah well, Andy Murray has finally won, and it was just a couple of minutes under 5 hours.

I got quite cold yesterday when we were out, and I have woken up with a sore throat again, and a sore foot, so am having an easy day. Peter has gone out for a walk round the local area.

Tomorrow is my graduation, the reason for the trip down here and on Thursday morning we fly back. I don't want to be sick for either of those things. It is a nice day today but the forecast for tomorrow evening and Thursday morning is lousy.

Day two in Melbourne.

I should have taken my  jacket! The wind was really cold out there. Anyway we had a good day, lots of walking. Today was my book sales day. First stop the National Library. They don't buy for all the Melbourne libraries, but I left one with the buyer there in case they want some for the National Library. Then to the 'Chinese book shop', which was quite small, but I left one there and they may stock it.

Then to Xinhua bookshop. Well this was a magnificent flop. We found the place ok. The website says it opens at 11am. The door says it opens at 11.30. In reality it opens whenever the guy feels like turning up. He rolled up about midday, spoke very limited English and using a student at the shop as an interpreter, it seems that I need to work through a Chinese publisher to get books into the Xinhua book shops. So I have some contacts, I'll work on that next.

We did the rounds on the city circle tram. This is a free tram that continuously circles the city center.

That was good, it goes round round the city, so we got a good look around. We had a coffee and sandwich and checked out the Immigration Museum. We were quite disappointed with it. The Adelaide Immigration Museum seemed to be much better, more personal stories, and just generally much more interesting.
There are some very interesting buildings around the city center.

This is the Flinders Street train station. It is the main central station for all the suburban trains.

Outside City Hall they had some lovely flower beds, with all the colder climate sorts of flowers we don't get in Queensland. Cyclamen, primulas, cyclamen. It was very pretty.

More flowers and some unusual elephants advertising the Melbourne Zoo.

Below is a very tall building. Our oldest son is a builder. When he was a new apprentice, he thought he would show off his newly acquired skills and put a shelf in his bedroom. The shelf was a triangular shape. He spent most of the day trying to get the thing to fit. In the end, Peter took over and got the measurements right, getting the shelf in the right spot in just a few minutes. This has become a family joke, talking about corner shelves. This building reminded us of that. I think he would have had some problems getting all the angles right for the corner shelves in this building. I didn't count how many floors it has, but I think about 40.

Right in the city center there was a woman with the music playing doing Tai Chi. It is very common to see men and women doing this in China, but not so usual in our Aussie cities. Mind you, there are thousands of Chinese people here, they are just everywhere.

This is part of the RMIT, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. A lovely old building, although it looks like it needs a really good clean.

So all in all, a good day, and the busiest day since we have got over our really bad colds. At least we got to do quite a lot of walking. Tomorrow, if the weather is good we'll go back to Victoria markets.

The broken arm.

Well, the poor little girl has had a couple of days in hospital and is home. She needed an operation to put all the bits together, supposed to take an hour and took between 3 and 4 hours, they had trouble getting it all together. So she has a plaster from shoulder to fingers.

One of the nice things is that she has been having lots of visitors and all the goodies such visitors bring. One nice thing was this photo of some of her cousins.  Not wanting Isabelle to feel too bad, they have all  put their arms in paper 'plaster casts' and sent her this photo.

How cute is that!

Day one in Melbourne

We have had our first day in Melbourne. After a short delay, we had a smooth trip down, landing  just on dusk. It was cold, brrr...about 16 degrees, much colder than home. Everyone is all rugged up with coats and hats and scarves. I had warm clothes, but Peter left the plane in shorts and t-shirt.

Today we had a lazy day, but went to Victoria Markets. This is a terrific place. We will go back and have a full day there. Its a bit like Ladies Market in Hong Kong, or the main market places along the main street in Phuket. Just the sort of place we like to meander around.

We went there for the meat, fish and veges. I wish we had something like this on the Gold Coast! The quality of the meat and fish is obvious, and the prices much cheaper than the supermarket.

It was easy to see the freshness of the fish on sale.

A large area of butchery shops are all together, with the shop owners yelling out their specials. Its a really noisy place.

Melbourne is a very multicultural city, people from all over the world live here, and lots of them come here for their food. Outside there were food stalls with authentic food from counties all over the world.

My daughter lives right in the CBD, so instead of having photos of suburban homes, little green gardens and driveways full of cars, from her place on the 5th floor, we get to see the backs of lots of shops.

This view from the spare room shows many fire escapes from the backs of buildings. The fronts of these buildings are mostly shops and restaurants and are probably about 100 to 120 years old, pretty old for Australia.

My daughter, like most of our family is an avid reader and she has some terrific books. I have started on a book called 'The time traveler's wife' by Audrey Niffenegger. Its the most unusual story. Apparently it has been made into a movie, and it must be the most confusing movie to watch until you really get into the story.

The book is about a guy who has some genetic problem that means he suddenly, without control, moves from one time zone to another, mostly into the past, but sometimes into the future. He flits from time zone to time zone, always turning up naked, and having to find food and clothes etc until he flips back to his 'now' time. In the movie 'Back to the future,' Marty McFly sort of did a similar thing, but he was never allowed to come face to face with himself. In this book, Henry often meets up with himself in different time zones, so he, as a 30 year old may zip back to be with himself as a 9 year old.

The basics of the story is how he met Clare and fell in love with her and married her over an extended life time. I am about three quarters of the way through so far so don't know how it will end, but it must have been a terrible job writing it, keeping track of not only everything that happened, but constantly in and out of time zones.

Tomorrow is a busier day, on the bus and trams, going around the city and trying to sell some books.

Off to Melbourne.....

One of the drawbacks of house sitting is that you can't take a few days and wander off for a bit of a break. If you have pets to care for, then you must be home morning and night at the least. We often do day trips if we have pets to care for, but you have to be here for the feeding and watering etc.

However, our present house sit is pet free. Even so, we need to be here, so we don't get to have weekends away. If one of us wants to go somewhere, the other one stays home. Still, this weekend we are going away. With the home owners permission we have asked a friend to come in for the days we are away. We are off to Melbourne to stay with one of our daughters. After two years of full time study and passing all the exams, I go down for my Masters Degree graduation at Swinburne University. I'll put up a picture once its over. The thesis, or in this case as it was a writing degree, what they call 'The artifact', or in lay-mens terms 'the end result' of all this work was my book recently published called China or Bust, the story about Peter and I going to China to teach English and our life there.

I use the English version of my Chinese name for writing.


So we are both looking forward to a few days away, some time with our daughter, doing some sightseeing around Melbourne, and unfortunately, we are going to have some cold weather.....brrrrr....we have to take our winter woollies.

I'll keep you posted.

Break a leg....no...break an arm.

Well, its been one of those weeks! We are on the mend, have finally lost the cough but still feeling quite weak with low energy levels.

For a family that normally has few health issues we got the lot this week. Apart from us trying to get over our bugs, one of our sons, whose partner is pregnant has been told the baby is not well, so they are stressed to the max. Another daughter has unexpectedly found she is pregnant with number 3. And my little granddaughter, Izzie has had a terrible fall and broken her arm and hurt her shoulder.

This is no fracture, as you can see from the Xray here, it is a massive break. I have just had a message to say the 1 hour operation to put her back together took almost four hours, so they have been up all night and, to use my daughters words, they were freaking out after the op was taking so long.

I can't imagine the pain poor Izzie had, I think the bone was coming through the skin. Fortunately she is young and I guess the bones will heal well, and fortunately it is her left arm and she is right handed, but it's right at the beginning of summer, when swimming is one of the best things in the afternoons, and she won't be able to swim til she gets the cast off.

Poor little Izzie!