Image Credits:-
Many thanks to Gill James for supplying images of books produced by the Build a Book Workshop and for her author photo. Most of the other images were created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos with one taken directly from Pixabay. Image from Bridge House Publishing celebration events was taken by me, Allison Symes.
It is with great pleasure I welcome Gill James, publisher and author, back to Chandler’s Ford Today. Gill wears many hats. She is a multi-published writer and is the driving force behind Bridge House Publishing, CafeLit, and Chapeltown Books amongst other imprints.
For more information check out the following sites.
Useful Website Links
Gill James website: http://www.gilljameswriter.com/
Bridge House Publishing: https://www.bridgehousepublishing.co.uk/
CafeLit: https://cafelit.co.uk/index.php/submission-guidelines-2
Chapeltown Publishing: http://www.chapeltownpublishing.uk/
Bridgetown Cafe Bookshop/Buy Link: http://www.thebridgetowncafebooksshop.co.uk/2021/07/build-book-workshop.html
Sharing Creative Writing With Others
Today I’m talking with Gill about getting the joy of creative writing across to others.
I learned to read young, thanks to my late mother. I’ve had a love of books all my life. So the thought of sharing the joy of creative writing with others is a wonderful idea. I mentioned in my Purposes of Creative Writing post recently some advantages to taking up the proverbial pen and creating your own works. My only regret here is not starting sooner.
Gill is seeking to rectify that with her Build a Book Workshop book. Part of the detail for this includes the benefits of the book for students and writers.
Students will:
•Improve their writing
•Write with a purpose
•Learn about commerce and enterprise
•Engage with the local and wider communityTeachers and writers will learn how to:
•Plan and organise your workshops
•Get the best writing out of your students
•Maximise the impact of your book
•Build a book with little or no financial outlay
Now a title (and benefits) like that will grab my attention so it is time to quiz Gill.
Gill, welcome back to Chandler’s Ford Today.
With your Build a Book Workshop, you are seeking to enable teachers (and writers) to produce creative writing workshops with a difference because there will be a book at the end of it. You also provide photocopiable resources. What gave you the idea for this book? In running your workshops, was it a case of seeing there was a need for this? What have you provided in your book you wished had been available for you?
I’d started doing a lot of school visits and many schools were hoping for a little more than just an author reading from their work and talking about their writing. I didn’t mind this as I was getting a generous fee that was about one and a half times the supply teacher rate. This was fair, I thought, as I was spending a whole day in a school, and spending quite some time on preparing material beforehand.
I devised the Build a Book workshop to give students – and their teachers – some insight into how the publishing industry works.
And then there are the schools that can’t afford to pay for an author visit. There is a way if you follow this method that the book can finance the workshop.
I did several of these workshops and learned a lot as I went along. I’ve now rationalised all of that and put it all into this handbook for teachers and writers.
You’ve been involved in writing in education (via the Society of Authors) for some time. Can you tell us more about that? Also are you aiming at students of all ages or, say, junior school children?
I’ve run this workshop with junior school children, secondary school students, and even did one for Aim Higher.
Aim Higher brings sixth-formers into the university for a week and then they “graduate” at the end. At the University of Salford where I was a senior lecturer before I retired, the Aim Higher students had a choice of this workshop as a module.
I shy away though from students younger than year 3. I talked to a whole school on one visit and the youngest children were at the front and insisted on tickling my toes. I couldn’t quite cope with that.
I would also probably say the workshop is suitable for year 3 and above. However I expect a talented teacher or writer somewhere may be able to adapt it for younger children.
Indeed, yes, the first works I had published were educational materials for language learning and that got me into the Society of Authors. I then became more involved in writing for children. Many children’s writers rely on school visit to pay the rent etc. Royalties are too unpredictable. And school visits boost their sales anyway.
As a former teacher, I found running workshops reasonably easy. Also, you have the luxury that the normal teacher deals with the more difficult aspects of this – they’re responsible for health and safety, they deal with any discipline issues, and they even help out if the technology lets you down. Of course they also know the students extremely well.
How has your experience as a publisher enabled you to write the book? You talk about how others can produce their own books here. Print on demand must make a huge difference to viability. What has that made possible for you to be able to do?
Print on Demand certainly helps. When I first started this, it was really only Ingrams that offered a viable POD facility. They do a great job but there is a set-up fee. Now there is also Amazon KDP (Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing) and with them there is no set up fee. There is a little less choice of formats and some say the quality isn’t as good but I’ve yet to be convinced. This is now a great choice for this type of workshop.
There is a slightly technical chapter in the book about how to type-set the text. I’ve generally found that someone in IT in the school will take this on or sometimes a skilled person on the PTA or Board of Governors. We’ll do it as well for a small fee. It is getting easier and lot of indie authors manage this very well. So, many classroom teachers or authors won’t have a problem.
Incidentally, education has used a type of Print on Demand for a long time; most school text books are not printed until they’ve been ordered by the schools.
There are alternative ways of publishing as well and I’ve often used them for the shorter workshops. One way is to create a website for the student work. This works very well. And if you’re supporting a charity, you can embed a Just Giving button into the site.
Even in a half day workshop the students experience writing, editing, selecting work, designing the book, and marketing. We try to guarantee every child’s work is used in some way. Children with learning difficulties can work in a group with a teaching assistant. Some may illustrate or design a book cover. Others may work on designing posters. In bigger workshops over several days and with older students we even have a working party on finance!
The POD model offers the free workshop: a profit margin of say £1.00 on each book is built in and the writer takes that profit until the normal fee for the workshop is covered.
I love workshops – going to them, running my own – whether in person or on Zoom. What would you say was the benefit of workshops for writers? How can teachers use workshops to their full advantage?
Creating a workshop is just as creative as writing a book. You’re using the same creative muscles but you’re giving them an alternative work-out.
If you present your own work you’re going to get some pretty direct feedback. Children tend to call a spade a spade.
You’re also not tied to the curriculum as you are as a teacher; in fact I almost think it’s part of your job to question the curriculum a little. A good example of this might be the use of adjectives and adverbs. Students have to learn about them, of course they do; they have to enrich their language.
We writers learn to use them as sparingly as possible. The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. If you write for children you’re engaging directly with your readership and get yourself more well-known.
Teachers can step back a little from the daily grind and take stock. I always leave some follow up material.
It’s good if teachers prepare their students in advance. This ensures students are buzzing with questions when the writer arrives and there is plenty to discuss afterwards.
Will your Build a Book Workshop book focus on fiction or non-fiction or is it open to either/both?
There is a real mix in the all of the books we’ve produced so far. Supporting a charity often produces a theme and students interpret that in a variety of ways.
For example Molecules of Hope came from the workshop for Aim Higher. It supports Kidscan, the University of Salford’s charity about research into cancer in children and drugs that could be given to them. We all attended a talk and demonstration on the work being done.
Then students went back to the classroom and produced poems, accounts of their own brushes with cancer, stories, scripts, and some short articles.
A lot has changed technology wise in the last few years. How has that impacted on your book, Gill? How has technology made producing a book easier? Have you had to update the book a lot?
Technology is changing at an enormous pace. For instance, Amazon has totally changed the way it produces e-books. Raspberry-Pi is turning primary schoolchildren into expert programmers. AI is changing the way we do things and I’m quite excited to be playing with CHAT next week.
Fortunately the book isn’t all that much about technology but more about creative process, but not just to do with writing but all of the business and other creative practitioner processes. It will always be that one very technical chapter that needs updating.
Gill, something like this would need beta testing, I would’ve thought. How have you done that? How have you used the feedback from that?
I’ve been very fortunate to work with an amazing school librarian. Beta testing in a way happened before we wrote the book. The workshop is tried and tested. We did a workshop with this school. We produced the book and had a book launch. We sold about 100 copies of the book and every student involved signed every copy of the book in twenty minutes flat. Then we went outside and physically launched the book with a hand-made rocket. It was a great deal of fun.
What would you like Build a Book Workshop to achieve? Is it a question of getting as many schools as possible involved with this? How does your book fit in with the National Curriculum? (English Language, Business Studies even?).
The reach of the book is wide: English Language, Business Studies, Art, Design and Technology, Maths, Science, and depending on the project, also History and Geography. There are also the transferrable skills: working collaboratively, writing for a particular audience, using digital technologies for research.
When I delivered books to a local primary school I was hauled in to meet the leader of the Ofsted inspection team. He quizzed me about what we’d been doing, flipped through the book and said, “My goodness, who would have thought it.” I’m pleased to say they got a good rating on literacy.
What do you think the main benefits of the Build a Book Workshop will be to students? You mention writing with a purpose. How does that help writers? I think every writer needs that purpose whether it is to be published or just to see if they can write a story to a theme, say. Does it matter whether the students here are writing just for themselves?
The very first thing we do in the workshop it to establish a purpose.
I’m always intrigued by the expression “creative writing”. All writing is creative. It creates something in the reader. From making the milkman leave you three pints instead of two to expressing what you hope and fear about friendship and inviting others to engage with that thought. (Friends Forever)
We are always writing for ourselves. We always write what we know. That doesn’t preclude us from exploring, through writing, what we don’t yet know. Students find their purpose and then explore it with what they know.
What do you think the main benefits of the book will be to teachers? Have you had feedback from them about this?
This is really a “how to” book! It’s a compendium of ideas. All writers and teachers are creative and the hope is they will take these ideas and run with them. It takes out some of the donkey work for them and provides plenty of practical tips.
Conclusion
Many thanks, Gill, for a wonderful interview. I love the sound of the Build a Book Workshop and hope many new authors emerge as a result of it.
Related Posts:-
Writing Historical Fiction – Interview with Gill James Part 1
The Joys and Woes of Writing Historical Fiction – Part 2 of Gill James Interview
Life as a Small Publisher: Allison Symes Talks to Gill James
Read interviews with Chandler’s Ford writer Allison Symes: Part 1 and Part 2.
Read blog posts by Allison Symes published on Chandler’s Ford Today.
Never miss out on another blog post. Subscribe here:
Thanks for that interview. I have been aware of Gill James for a while and am intrigued to know a little more of what she does. Build a book sounds a worthwhile and memorable activity for children.
Many thanks, Mike. I just love this idea for getting people into creative writing and seeing an end result.