The Bijoux List for February

Curated by Natasha Lester, the Bijoux List is full of things to inspire & things to ponder. This month we're talking todgers, McQueen, my new book title, what writers earn & the perfect jeans.

Feb 07, 2023

What’s Bijoux for February?

Canadians
$20 million worth of todgers (that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write!) … but 66% of book sell less than 1,000 copies
The title for my next book will be … (and watch the book trailer too!)
Fashion that’s arresting rather than click-baity
Rediscovering the value of wordplay (plus yet another new book)
Carrie Bradshaw’s layers
People named Carrie, plus ambitious women
The perfect jeans
Where you can find me this month
The quick list

1. Canadians

Bisous and thank you to everyone in Canada for making The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre No. 2 on the Globe & Mail historical fiction bestseller list. No. 2! You guys are the best, and that’s a milestone I won’t forget.

2. $20 Million Worth of Todgers

So, when Prince Harry saw that The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre was being published in North America on January 10, he decided it would be a great day for him to publish his book too because, obviously, everyone would be rushing into bookshops to buy my book and when they were there, they might see his and pick up a copy. And Harry was pretty smart – his strategy to piggy-back off my publication date worked and he sold more than 1.4 million copies in just one day in the US, the UK and Canada!

Jokes aside, there are a couple of things about this that I want to dive a little deeper into. The first is more serious, the second less so.

The Serious

Reports about Prince Harry’s advance are varied, but most put it in the ballpark of $20 million dollars. But his book sales in just one day alone paid back his entire advance, and left him with a few spare million in change to enjoy. That’s great for Harry.

But …

It would have been fantastic if everyone who went into a bookshop that day to buy Harry’s book had also purchased a book by a debut novelist, or by any novelist not formerly belonging to the royal family. Because there was a rather illuminating discussion over on

Counter Craft

last year about how many copies a book ordinarily sells and the statistics would make any writer or book lover weep.

Scroll down to the comments for that post and you’ll see that Kristen McLean from NPD BookScan (the people who aggregate all the book sales data each week) analysed frontlist sales from the top 10 publishers in one year to the end of August 2022 and said:

“66% of those books from the top 10 publishers sold less than 1,000 copies over 52 weeks.”

66% of authors sell less than 1,000 books in a year – sheesh!

Authors earn 10% of the cover price for each book sold. So I’m going to generalise a little here and use a standard trade paperback cover price of $15.99 for this calculation (some books cost more and some less). But if we take 10% of $15.99 and multiply it by the 1,000 copies that two-thirds of authors sell, you can see that most authors are starving. They’ll earn about $1,599 a year.

I’m very, very lucky to not be in that 66%. But I have been there, right at the start of my career. So I know what it’s like to work on a book for 5 years and then see it sell 1,500 copies. But my point is – we all love books. We need writers to keep writing those books. But at some point, many writers stop because the economics make no sense.

I want to be clear that I’m not criticising anyone for buying Prince Harry’s book. Those sales will keep bookshops going. But I would love for everyone who did buy it to consider going back to their favourite indie bookshop and choosing another book too. Perhaps one written by a writer who might be on the verge of giving up, because they have three kids and earning $1,500 a year is simply not viable.

The Not-So Serious

We’ve seen on every website around that Prince Harry calls his unmentionables the “todger”. Am I the only one who thinks this was a big missed opportunity? I mean, come on. I live in a house with three teenagers and jokes about a man’s best friend are a conversation staple. Surely the ghostwriter could have persuaded Harry to call His Royal Penis something punnier? My mind is literally exploding with ideas.

For one of the funniest round up of todger memes, check out this post from Elle.

3. And My Next Book Will be Called …

Three generations.

One chance to prove themselves.

Can the women of the Bricard fashion dynasty finally rewrite their history?

Yes, I have a book coming out in 2023 in Australia and in 2024 in both North America and the UK. And we have a title!!

You might have seen me on social media referring to a book with the working title The Legend of Astrid Bricard. Well, in the process of tossing ideas around with my Australian, American and UK publishers, that title changed a little to …

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ASTRID BRICARD

And now all the exciting things start to happen! Covers. Blurbs. Preorders. Telling you about all the real events and real people in the story. I can’t wait! In the meantime, if you’d like a little taster, check out this book trailer. Good, huh?!

4. Fashion That’s Arresting Rather Than Click-baity

I’ve said it before, but fashion can be its own worst enemy sometimes, a point it’s tried very hard to prove this month with Schiaparelli’s trophy head dresses. It’s hard not to imagine that these pieces were created with Instagram in mind, where the need to get people to stop scrolling as pictures move past at lightning speed becomes ever more important.

I was thinking about this when I attended the Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse exhibition at the NGV here in Australia a couple of weeks ago. McQueen was never far from controversy either – someone who named one of his collections Highland Rape was certain to attract a few headlines.

The thing about headlines is they’re a handful of words and it’s difficult to express the complexity of almost anything in a handful of words. In McQueen’s case, he was referring to England’s rape of Scotland and the fact that Scottish history is darker, bleaker and far more violent than its oft-romanticised portrayal would have us believe. McQueen studied the history and he found the stories that fell through the cracks, the alternate point of view, the one missing from the history books.

Obviously this resonates with me, given what I’m doing in my own novels. McQueen’s designs have always resonated with me too, not just because of the way he drew on the past, but for how he saw beyond the idea of fashion being just something we wear and to the fact that fashion is theatre – it moves on a body, is paraded every time we walk down a street, and is both armour and camouflage, fantasy and necessity, a power play and a show of conformity, and has been used to signify everything from class to gender.

I miss that kind of thought and feeling being put into fashion and fashion shows, and would like to think that should Alexander McQueen have lived, he’d still be doing this, rather than aiming to be the clickbait in a never-ending scroll.

5. Rediscovering the Value of Wordplay

At the very beginning of my writing career, I used to swear by writing exercises. Those little five or six words prompts that give you the first sentence in a scene, or ask you to write an entire paragraph without using the letter “e”. The more books I wrote though, the less I used them. Until …

By December 2022, I was feeling burnt out. Luckily I had a wonderful holiday booked on Orpheus Island on the Great Barrier Reef, which quite literally healed my soul. While I was there, I started handwriting again. Just picking up a notebook and jotting down a short scene. I tried a couple of writing exercises. And I quickly discovered why I’d loved them so much all those years ago.

You get used to writing a certain way. I think that’s part of what I like about Bijoux – I’m able to write things besides historical fiction. With writing exercises, you’re forced to step out of the familiar because you’re using a sentence starter you didn’t come up with yourself, or you’re doing something with a set of parameters.

The excellent

Story Club with George Saunders

is a great source of writing exercises and, if you’re interested, I was thinking in my paid subscriber’s thread this month that I might post what I wrote in response to this exercise. Let me know in the comments if you’re keen for that.

It was perfect timing for me to discover the joy of wordplay, of getting sentences onto the page in a fresh and playful manner. But isn’t that like so much in life? When we go somewhere new or try a new food or a new dress, we sometimes find ourselves having more fun than if we’d stuck to the usual.

The reason this was perfect timing is because I’m writing another book! Yes, after The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard, there will be another one. Hopefully you’re cheering. I can fill you in on the process of writing the first few chapters of that and how it’s pitched out to an author’s exisiting publishers in another thread if you’d like to know more. Once again, let me know in the comments!

6. Carrie’s Layers

Women are always told we need to master layering, as if it’s as essential as visiting the dentist. Unfortunately, it’s often just as painful, and you end up looking like the Michelin Man. And then Carrie Bradshaw aka SJP goes and throws this on and surely it shouldn’t work but it does! She’s nailed layering in a way that almost makes me want to go out and buy a ruffly pink shawl and a tartan blanket.

7. The Name Carrie

Carrie seems to be a theme this month – I just finished listening to Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid on audio and I have a lot of thoughts. First up – I love that she tackled the topic of ambitious women. Ambition has rarely been lauded as a positive trait for a woman, and I think this is especially true of women artists.

In general, there’s a view that to be an artist and to also want to make money from your work is seen as “selling-out”, a word I don’t really know the meaning of. Why is it assumed that if someone wishes to make a living from the thing they spend hours every day doing and have a talent for, that they’re sacrificing quality or integrity? Do we think that teachers who work really hard and want to be paid a salary for that work are less honourable? What about doctors who charge for their skills – are they compromising the virtuosity of their work?

Taylor Jenkins Reid talks a bit about this in Vanity Fair. The article skims the surface and I wish they’d gone a bit deeper. Which is telling in itself. Did they think anything more substantial might turn off a readership who still aren’t comfortable with ambitious women, or did they think it was such an unimportant topic that it deserved only a handful of lines?

I don’t know. But if you’re looking for something to read, give this a go. I think Reid could have made the ending more interesting – the grand finale was signalled early and I felt there was another version that might have had more punch, but the audio versions of her books are always excellent and this is no exception. Maybe a book discussion is something we need to start here too!

8. The Perfect Jeans

Are impossible to find, right? Well, I think I just found them.

I loathe the rigid jeans trend. Try sitting in those for a whole day of writing and I guarantee that muscles in your bum you didn’t know you possessed will hurt. But along with the demise of skinny jeans (which I’m not too sad about), any stretch whatsoever seems to have departed our denim.

Then along came the Tibi Elfie jeans. These are a winner! The perfect bit of stretch to go with the perfect straight leg. My muscles are smiling.

9. Where You Can Find Me This Month

If you like podcasts, I’m on Books Are Chic, which is a podcast made for me given the fashion/fiction theme. I’m also on Friends & Fiction chatting to Kristy Woodson-Harvey and Ron Block, and Writes 4 Women with Pamela Cook. And you can watch my fabulous launch event with the even more fabulous Marie Benedict here. If you’d prefer an article, Crime Reads talked to me about female spies.

10. The Quick List

Hilarious piece in the New Yorker about buying a candle that smells like writing.
I’ve written about how Dior’s New Look was attacked in 1947 – well, it seems that policing what women wear isn’t over. The Missouri State House voted to make female legislators cover up. Is it 2023 or did I take a step back to the dark ages?
Everyone else was looking at Harry Styles in Don’t Worry, Darling, but I was there for Florence Pugh’s mid-century wardrobe. This Nylon article talks about the vintage-hunting involved in getting the looks right – I wish it had more pics, because those costumes were perfection.
Farrah Storr tackles BuzzFeed’s announcement that it’ll use ChatGPT to write some columns and I love this quote, “We connect with songs composed by people because we feel the quintessence of who they were when they wrote it, in every single note.” Yes!

That’s a Wrap

That’s the list for February! I had so much more to add but I ran out of room. I might have to make this a bi-monthy feature. And there’s so much to talk about here! Let’s discuss in the comments, whether it be the serious stuff or the not-so-serious.