On the 8th December I was admitted into Great Ormond Street Hospital for a spinal fusion due to my scoliosis.

I had already had the MAGEC rods put in by GOSH for three years and because I had stopped growing it was time to go under the knife again. Over the three years I have been back to GOSH regularly to have my rods extended. This is a fascinating procedure because it is not invasive. The rods have small motors in them, and one of the staff uses magnets on the skin of my back to move the rods to keep up with my growth.

We got to the ward pretty early in the morning, but I wasn’t put to sleep until about 11 o’clock. I was pretty nervous about the anaesthetic, but I was on a heated mattress, the height of luxury. I just shut my eyes as if I was going to sleep.

We had been told the operation would be 7 – 10 hours but it was much quicker than that in the end. When I got out of theatre I was put into HDU which was nice and quiet and I wasn’t in much pain. The staff were amazing and looked after me so well.

When I was moved to the main ward things only got better. I was standing up after a day and I felt pretty good. One day a therapy dog came round, and it was so cute and reminded me of Grandma’s cockerpoo, Rosie, and cavachon, Polly – who is pretty naughty I have to say. I also met Snow White and Dopey, which definitely made my stay at the hospital a bit more special.

My friends from school were really great and travelled into London to see me, bringing lots of presents, and even an advent calendar they had made. I was overwhelmed. I have now been at home, back from hospital, for about a week and it feels so good. Although the hospital was amazing, it’s always nice to be at home and after a year I should be able to do practically anything I want – except bouncing about on a trampoline.

Incidentally, did you know that J M Barrie gave all the Peter Pan rights to Great Ormond Street Hospital in 1929. I think that’s wonderful.

Or perhaps it should be called, a cry from the heart. We at Frost love this view from the other queue, the one the women love to hate – the blokes’ public loo. A hilarious review.

Karma is indeed unforgiving, and so as a gentleman of a certain age I now realises that I should not have found my late father’s google map like knowledge of the location of public conveniences quite so amusing. Of course my father lived in an age when these were indeed conveniently located. Not so today.

It was also euphemistically called spending a penny. Oh for those bygone days when use of the urinal was free and the cubicle cost a mere penny. I accept that inflation has required the price to rise, but why so much discrepancy? At the Baker Street Underground it is free and though the soap dispenser isn’t filled with the most expensive of unguents – when you have an hour on the Metropolitan line in front of you, such free access comes, literally, as a relief.

A mere five minutes away and the charge at Marylebone Station rises 30p, similarly Paddington Station Kings Cross, St Pancras and Euston Stations. Travel to Charing Cross though and the cost rises to 50p.

If you haven’t the correct change a helpful machine will dispense what you need usually in the smallest denomination known to man, ensuring that your pockets bulge and you list alarmingly to Port .

Machine fed coins release the turn-style unless of course you haven’t noted the direction of the arrows and try to barge your way through using the fleshy part just above the knee and thigh, oblivious to the toilet attendant who is practicing his semaphore from behind a thick glass window, telling you graphically that you are going ‘in’ through the ‘out’.

It might be thought that at this point all obstacles have been overcome and would that this were so. But no, for now one is faced with a row of urinals and the etiquette has to be observed. Unfortunately no one teaches you the code (unless somehow I missed that lesson) but worse no one speaks of it either. It is the urination equivalent of Fight Club.

If the urinals are all vacant the first man there must stand on the furthest left so that the second may stand at the far right. In this game of urinal chess the next takes the middle and the rest fill in the spaces in between. The main rule is not to stand next to anyone unless there is absolutely no alternative. All eye contact is to be avoided, elbows should not touch and any speaking must cease unless you are returning from a match and the conversation is about football.

The space saving layout of some lavatories can lead to a nasty surprise especially when the hot air hand dryer blows down your ear whilst you are otherwise engaged. Looking round sharply at the cause can lead to rule breaking eye contact, not to mention, wet shoes.

Recently the architects of such edifices can be found trying to satisfy customers old and young which can cause confusion for the less observant. Some urinal stalls are set lower to accommodate boys who have yet to reach their full height. Those of us that have not only reached such height but also exceeded it, can find ourselves directing everything other than our attention to a lowered stall which alters what I suppose I should call the fall out zone, leaving one to come up with a plausible explanation for dampened trousers. Kings Cross Station has resolved this by lowering all the urinals. I say no more.

If one has managed to navigate the various perils of ‘spending a Penny’ including working out where the automatic sensors are for the soap and water one might imagine that one (if lucky) is home and, particularly, dry but there is one more and possibly the most difficult challenge still to be met.

On leaving, one is almost bound to be met by the malevolent glares from those in the queue for the ladies, at which point it is advisable to remember the golden rule.

No eye contact.

 At Frost we’re particularly fond of Troubador Publishing – a self publishing organization, one that is hugely successful. Apart from being hugely successful and professional we’re fond of it because it helps Words for the Wounded publicise its fundraising Independent Author Book Award. Indeed, WforW’s inaugural winner, Jane Cable, was published by them. Jane has now been taken by Endeavour Press and Another You has just been published.

We were really pleased when we  asked the marketing team to take us behind the scenes, and they readily agreed.  We will be publishing their Day in the Life in four sections over four weeks. But let’s hear it in the Troubador team’s own words.

………..

Alexa Davies drafts an Advance Information (Al) sheet

For a new title, the route to market – and customer – is multi-faceted, and it’s vital to undertake each important step within the process. Many authors only think about marketing once they’ve signed off their print files and approved their book for print, but it’s crucial to start thinking about this much earlier on. Marketing, and distribution, are key parts of the publication process – and parts that a book depends upon in order to make sales, as well as media coverage – which in turn leads back to sales.

To highlight the different steps within the marketing of a title – and the importance of doing them all at the right time – we’ve broken down the process into four distinct steps, which all happen at different stages of the production process. These are all things that happen every day in the marketing department of Matador, the high-quality self-publishing imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd.

Jasmin Elliott, Alice Graham, Alexa Davies and Sarah Taylor from Matador’s marketing team each take a turn to explain exactly what happens – and when.

3-6 months pre-publication: Trade Marketing. This involves notifying retailers and libraries of an upcoming book in order to generate sales.

Trade marketing begins with drafting Advance Information (AI) sheets once an author signs up to publish with us. Once they’ve been approved and updated with a finalised cover, copies are sent out to relevant local and national bookshops. Every AI contains all the information that a buyer needs to know when deciding whether or not to stock a book. Quite often there is a lot of information, which we need to condense into a single page – while still providing all the relevant detail! Writing AIs is one of the more fun parts of trade marketing – it involves being creative with the information that our authors have given us and turning them into professional, industry-standard documents that will result in book sales.

When the first draft of the AI has been completed, from the information that the author provides at the beginning of the publication process, we then send this on to the author. It’s important to us that our authors are happy with the way their book is represented, and so we strive to work with their suggestions as much as possible, but we also provide guidance where we feel that something won’t work or has been omitted.

Once the author has approved their AI drafts, we add the information to a central book listing, which then gets sent out to a data aggregator called Nielsen – who then send this information on to recipients within the trade. This is a crucial point in the process, as it’s the only way that a title is discoverable/orderable – and we ensure that we keep this updated moving forward. We also update the book page on our own Troubador website (as we sell books directly to both customers and retailers) to entice buyers to purchase.

Once we have been sent a final, approved cover from the production department, we add it to the sheet (it’s important to include a cover, as most buyers make or finalise their stocking decisions based on what the book will look like) and then send it out. Each sheet is sent out to a highly targeted local and national mailing list, which is created according to the subject and interest area of a book, as well as the author’s own local area. This includes both the key outlets that we send information all of our titles to – like Waterstones and WHSmiths – as well as independents and chain branches. Once we have our list of appropriate booksellers, the final stage of envelope stuffing begins! Though some buyers prefer information by email, a lot still goes out by post – which has close to a 100% open rate.

See the next instalment in a week.

http://www.troubador.co.uk

About us…

Matador offers a bespoke, comprehensive and high-quality self-publishing service. (www.troubador.co.uk/matador). We also offer standalone marketing and distribution services for authors who publish elsewhere (http://www.troubador.co.uk/distribution.asp) and standalone design and editorial services via our sister company, Indie-Go (http://www.indie-go.co.uk).

Our annual Self-Publishing Conference, held on 22^nd April 2017, offers sessions on all aspects of the publishing process and can be tailored to each delegate’s requirements – registration is open now for £65 per person: (http://www.selfpublishingconference.org.uk).