This hasn’t really been a Disappearing Day. It’s been more
of a Jeffersonian day. Many of you will know that a little more than a year
ago, I started a business, and for reasons of not taking myself seriously
enough to have my name plastered over a business, and taking a couple of dead Americans
very much more seriously indeed, I called it Jefferson Franklin (d and I always said if
we ever had a son, we’d call him Benjamin Thomas, so it also made a perverse
kind of sense – which has become more perverse and yet more sensible as time
has gone on, and the company has taken more and more of the time that we always
took vaguely for granted as “us” time). Today’s been a truly Jeffersonian day.
As part of our business model, we offer authors a free
sample chapter edit, because these are hideous hideous economic times and we’re
asking people who may not have a
great deal of money to give us some of what they may not have, so they deserve
to know what they’re getting. Two months ago, one of the authors to whom we
gave such a sample edit wrote to a leading writing magazine about us, to praise
us to the skies. It was a good day when she shared her letter with us. It was
an even better day when another author whose work we edited wrote to tell us
she’d seen the letter in the magazine. So we used the letter in an advert,
letting the writing world know about our free sample chapter edits.
The world seems to have gone just a little Jefferson-crazy
since then. I finished a couple of sample chapter edits on the train to London
this morning, only to find another couple waiting for us. One author for whom
we did one last week came back to book us for a novel. Annnnnd then so did
another. And then a third, whose novel we finished working on just a couple of weeks
ago, wrote to say it was already published on Amazon, with the hard copy coming
next week, and that she’d added us to her acknowledgments. Always nice when
that happens, though I rather cynically maintain that “paying the invoice means
never having to say thank you.”
“Can I book my next novel in for September please?” she said.
She couldn’t, as it happened – she’s going to try and get it
to us for a cheeky August slot, because we’re already solidly booked through
September, which is a nice feeling in the second half of June.
So – very definitely a Jeffersonian kind of day. Says he,
sitting in Starbucks, Paddington Station, about to continue a Jefferson edit.
There’s something delicious about this whole thing having taken off and
resulting in people with a manuscript becoming people with a published book.
Only a few days ago, I determined to get one of my own novels into a good
enough shape to shop around to agents by new year, when it looked as though I
might have some space in the calendar that I could use in delicious
authorial self-indulgence, locking myself in a room and not coming out till I had a stack
of glowing, wonderful printed pages, my comic genius radiating gleefully off
every last one of them.
And I still intend to keep to that. But in the meantime,
it’s great to have Jeffersonian days. They make you care less about the
imminence of a frowny-faced pair of Nazi Scales on a wild Tuesday weigh-in. In
fact, they make you care less about all sorts of potentially negative Stuff.
Thanks, authors!
Not to turn this into an out-and-out advertorial, but if you
have a book and you want your first chapter edited for free, check us out at www.jefferson-franklin.co.uk
Iiiiiiithankyou.
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