Sunday 1 March 2015

Emirates LitFest Sell-Out Shock Horror!


I'm on a panel at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on Friday with Orion Publishing Director Kate Mills and head of Norwich Writer's Centre Chris Gribble on 'How to make novels fly'.

It's not about taking Dorothy Parker's advice seriously* so much as creating books that people want to read. What is it that makes a book marketable, what's the 'secret sauce' that makes readers want to pick your work up and actually, you know, invest in it.

Sound interesting? Tough, bud - it's sold out.

For the first time, I'm also at the LitFest Murder Mystery Dinner vent on Friday evening, which I've never been to before. That's going to be funny, a table of unsuspecting rubes is going to be expecting someone famous and interesting and they're going to get me instead. Ha.

This, too, has sold out.

On Thursday evening, from 5pm-7pm, I'm doing a session on how to make a book - how to write one, edit one, find a publisher or DIY one. It's a sort of 'Shakespeare in 60 seconds' version of the three 2-hour workshops I usually take to cover these topics.

This, believe it or not, has also sold out.

However, it's not all bad news. I have complimentary tickets to the latter, so if you have great need and have been denied the seat you wanted to be raved at for two hours by a clearly unstable person, hit me up at @alexandermcnabb and we can arrange a ticket for you. 

It's going to be a busy end to the week. I got a radio interview Wednesday, a school appearance at Wesgreen School in Sharjah on Thursday (undoubtedly resulting in the usual scared kids and shocked faculty. Hey ho!) and I'm keynoting at Amman's Disrupt!/Books!/ workshop/conference/hackathon event Thursday evening too. 

I almost feel like a real author...

*"This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly, but thrown with great force."

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