Three days at Bruntsfield Primary in Edinburgh, you say? Yes please. This was a delightful booking that came up as a result of my very first flurry of cold emails at the very start of the year. I got a response straight back from the wonderful Ingrid at the school who promptly signed me up for three days. Even better, when I suggested we might give the kids a chance to buy my books, she put the word straight out there and got a record breaking number of orders, see below.
I worked with the three Primary 4 classes (that's Year 3 in England) and the three Primary 6 classes (Year 5) across the three days and they came up with some brilliant titles and some excellent comic strips inside. I never show you their comic strips, do I? I must start doing that some time. That's a drawing of the school itself, in the background of The Bwooo, now you ask, a classic Victorian school building, with the classrooms for this lot up at the top of three flights of stairs.
Primary 6C came up with the most ominous title of the week, lending itself to a particularly creepy cover. Indeed I managed to get the time to make all of these covers as good as I could, which is sometimes harder when I'm feeling a bit rushed.
Oh yes, I mentioned Ingrid had managed to get the kids to order books. They only went and ordered 54 of the blooming things, all Richard The Thirds. I had 49 in my bag with me (which cost me £60 for an extra hold bag) and the remaining five I was able to sign and post the next day. Tragically, the cost of that hold bag, and the fact that these are now costing me £4.70 a copy as Lulu print on demand books (rather than the £2 a copy they cost when I commission a full size print run) means I'm not really making much of a profit on the books at the moment, but I'm looking into sorting that out. The point is, I just sold 54 books in one school, and I think that's a pretty bloody good start to the year.
As always, the kids go away with an A5 photocopied comic containing their strips and their caricatures, and these are the covers. Their copy is in black and white, then I email this coloured version back to them when I've done it (in these cases in my hotel room later that night, and in the airport in the case of the couple above). And the one thing that made these comics a tiny bit harder than usual was the school's photocopier.
I'm given to believe all the schools in Edinburgh have this particular brand of copier and by god I pity them. Having worked with 1000s of copies over the years, it is the single most frustrating I've come across. It's an HP (Hewlett Packard), I didn't make a note of the number. But it has the most unhelpful interface, it makes it really difficult to find where the various instructions are. And then, when you've punched in your instructions and done the first copy (in my case it's a matter of setting it to 'Text' rather than 'Mixed', then selecting 4 to a page) it then instantly forgets the instructions you've put in! There's no way of making it remember them! This multiplies the length of time every job takes. Then it makes it mind-numbingly difficult to just reduce A3 to A4 (which, to be fair, a lot of machines make a meal out of for some reason - oh the number of times I've had to move the A4 paper 90 degrees in the tray, don't get me started). Then of course the damn machine freezes, half way through your copies, and won't tell you why.
I felt vindicated in my frustration on the third day when the service engineer was there, having just done some work on it. And while I was starting to do my copies and chat about what a problematic machine it was (he agreed, and was just as perplexed that Edinburgh City Council have rolled these dreadful machines out citywide) it then went wrong. A couple of things it had done wrong for me during the week, it did wrong in front of him. Then it froze, and even he couldn't make it start again. (Luckily there was a smaller one in the office, different model, that was able to do the finishing off).
Gosh, I really needed to vent about a photocopier, didn't I? Welcome to my world.
The celebrities these six groups chose to appear in my demonstration strip were Mr Beast (twice), Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, and (best suggestion so far this year) James Hetfield out of Metallica.
My Books And Where To Find Them...
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Richard The Third | Findlay Macbeth | Prince of Denmark Street | Midsummer Night's Dream Team |
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Shakespeare Omnibus
| Comic Tales From The Bible
| Joseph, Ruth & Other Stories
| Space Elain
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Colouring Books: Hollywood Legends, Punk, Cult TV, Eurovision Vol 1, Eurovision Vol 2, Eurovision Best Of British & Irish, 1960s Pop, 1970s Pop, 1980s Pop, 1990s Pop, 2020s Pop, Bowie, Scottish Pop, Doctors Who, Royalty, Rom Coms
