What pleased him the most was the knowledge that “somewhere in the world tonight, some mum or dad is going to be reaching down a copy of a book that I wrote and reading it to the most precious thing they have in the world. For writers that’s the holy grail. And that gives me enormous pleasure.”
Sam McBratney, children’s author, was born on March 1, 1943. He died after a long illness on September 18, 2020, aged 77
Nauseating book though (assuming, from the context, he was referring to the soppy kiddies’ illustrated with the hares).
Just one of the grand ironies of the world isn’t it? There are authors of groundbreaking fiction that cast the world in a whole new light, played hitherto unseen tricks with language, introduced entirely original ideas to the human intellectual menagerie… Yet died largely unread and in poverty. Write a cringey kiddy book about some cute loving hares though, and if you’re the one in ten thousand who makes a commercial breakthrough (very intense competition in the kiddy book field) then you’ll never go hungry again.
Funny how the Amazon blurb is really underselling the book! Featured in a piece in The Daily Mail on ‘Storytime With Fergie And Friends’ where Princess Eugenie reads Guess How Much I Love You., The Daily Mail
That’s bound to get the punters queuing up. Having seen a lot of outdated blurbs at Amazon lately, I did wonder if there’s any sort of commercial opportunity in updating them. I believe someone in the ownership structure of these works (publisher? author?) has the right to improve the Amazon pages but very few seem to have done so, perhaps because their portfolio is overwhelming to manage or they’re just not very interested in marketing. Strikes me as an unusual waste though, bearing in mind the amazon page for a product is probably responsible for more sales than any other single site, and many (especially for books published pre-2000 but are perennial sellers) are utterly awful.
Black Books did it better when Bernard and Manny write about an elephant with a balloon.