Travel Writing Interview: Ben Hatch
For any aspiring writers that think published authors can sit back, relax and occasionally pop down to the bank to cash their hefty cheques, once they have submitted to their publisher, might want to avoid Ben Hatch. The former regional journalist has seen a fair few of his stories reach the Promised Land; nevertheless life in print has been far from straightforward.
After enjoying success with two books in his early thirties, the witty wordsmith had to wait several years to get another taste of the big time. Unfortunately for the Brighton native, the London riots meant his amusing travel tome Are We Nearly There Yet? never got to find a proper audience on its 2011 summer release.
What did Ben do? Curl up in a corner and cry like some authors might or give up the ghost and move straight on to the next one in an effort to forget the pain. No, he sucked up the disappointment and used Twitter to make the book the No.1 non-fiction Kindle download and Amazon Customer Favourites in Kindle Books 2011, which boosted his bottom line in the process.
When you speak to Ben, like I did recently, you can understand why people around the world have responded to his charm. The guy is funny, humble and knows that without his newly acquired audience, he would not be in a position to write books that matter to him.
Matthew: How much of a boon has Twitter marketing been to you?
Ben: “Twitter makes a massive difference as my publisher can only commit a certain amount of resources to it. In the old days, once you had rung up all the national papers and tried to get a review then it was over. Now you have Twitter, so you can directly talk to readers which I think is amazing actually.
“You can get a message out in a completely different way, which makes it much more democratic. Even small authors can get a large audience and the Kindle helps by selling the books cheaply. You can get an awful lot of people reading your book quite quickly and gain momentum, whereas in the old days it would not have been possible.
“I was away in France when Are We Nearly There Yet? came out, which is a bit stupid as I wasn't around to do any publicity but it was embargoed to The Daily Express. Nothing happened for three or four weeks. There were people wanting to do stuff, but we couldn’t agree to it. Then the Express was supposed to run it, but that was the week of the London riots so it got pulled day after day and eventually got pulled altogether.
“It was over and the publicity team at Summersdale moved on. It was massively disappointing as they had wasted a whole month of publicity and got nothing as a result of it. You had to play catch up after that, which was quite tricky, so I got involved. I had been on Twitter, but I hadn’t really done anything with it. It slowly started building up from there.
“I got on The Wogan Show and he mentioned it. John Cleese tweeted about it. Slowly more and more started Tweeting about it, including other authors like Jenny Colgan and Lisa Jewell who had read it and Tweeted about it to their followers, and the momentum went from there. It was named the breakout book of the year on Radio 2 thanks to the Twitter efforts and that helped as well. At the start, I didn't spent much time doing it. I do more now than I did before, because I didn't have that many followers or much interaction. I couldn't really say how long I am on for each day.
“I do think it is an incredible tool to talk to your readers. The book that made me want to be a writer was Catcher in the Rye. In it, the main character Holden Caulfield laments the fact he can’t call up the author of a book he’s read and enjoyed to thank him. Now on Twitter, you can. And you get an instant reply too. I had a few letters when my first books came out, but the whole process would take about a month. My publisher is pleased that I have gone out and done my own marketing. They are not massively into Twitter as they have got so many other jobs to do. I don't see that many publishers are, to be honest. Authors tend to be much more active.”
Many writers, like myself, get into books through journalism and Ben was no different despite the fact his father, Sir David Hatch, was head of BBC radio comedy. Ben rolled his sleeves up and embarked on the traditional regional route to the top with The Bucks Herald, the Northampton Chronicle and Echo and the Leicester Mercury. How much has the years in the journalistic trenches informed his writing?
“I always wanted to be a writer as my Dad's background was in comedy. He used to perform ‘60s satire in the Cambridge Footlights. He acted alongside people like Graham Chapham and Graeme Garden. I wanted to do that, but was such a shit actor that I couldn't possibly! I wanted to be a comedy novelist instead and thought the easiest way to do that was become a journalist first.
“It comes from reading all the dust jackets off Penguin Classics where you find out that most of the writers started off as journalists. I was in Leicester writing about fetes, tall sunflowers and scout jamborees and started to realise that nobody from a major publishing house was going to ring up and say, 'We really liked your cat stuck up a tree picture caption on page 3, can we sign you up to write a trilogy of comic novels?'
“I wasn't really interested in heavy news, particularly. I liked the nutters who came down into reception. When I was at the Northampton Chronicle and Echo, some bloke would come in and claim that a bit of shrapnel in his arse that he had had since the Battle of Arnhem had started moving around 50 years to the day from when he was shot. I loved those sorts of stupid stories where you can work it up into some sort of front-page story like that. They would claim they are the Son of God. Nobody else wanted to go down, they would say, 'Oh, fuck off, I'm not doing that', whereas I always wanted to talk to the nutters.”
What spurred Ben on to turn his back on full-time journalism then? After all, once you have been in the journalistic trenches for many years, it is very hard to scramble your way out.
“My Mum died when I was about 30 and I reached a point where I thought, 'I've got to do something. I just can't carry on doing what I'm doing. I really want to be a novelist, so I have got to make a break’. So I used the fact that my Mum had died and I wanted to make her proud as a dynamo. I quit my job, took a year out and wrote my first book.
“It was a rollercoaster ride, because I went off travelling after I had finished it as I thought there is no way it was going to get published. My wife actually sent it off to a literary agency. It was about six months travelling around the world and then I finally got an email from one of them, after loads of rejections, saying, 'Do you want to meet me?' It was Curtis Brown, probably the biggest agency at the time.
“But amazingly they couldn't flog it, then they finally did and it went berserk again because the publishers really got behind it. There were posters on the Tube and I was on The Mel and Sue Show. In a two-book deal they throw everything at the first one, then the second one they don't do as much. That was my take on it anyway.
“Stupidly I thought, 'Right, the next book is going to be the best book I can possibly do'. I didn't want to have a deal and I consciously didn't submit any proposals to the publisher, because I thought I will just write this book and give it to them afterwards. I am a trained journalist and I need a fucking deadline, but I realise now it took too long to write.
“The kids were born and then, because I hadn't quite finished it, my wife went back to work and that made it even longer. I finally finished the book, submitted it and there was nobody there in fiction at the publisher that knew me anymore! 'Sorry, what book? Don't know who you are, mate. Don't know what you mean.' It got rejected. Then I started getting into doing these guide books and got back in sideways, if you like, to write the book.”
Who does Ben read when he isn’t busy wallowing in words himself?
“I am reading Dan Rhodes, a favourite contemporary of mine, and another recommendation from him called Patrick Hamilton. He has been dead quite a few years now, but he wrote a book called The West Pier about Brighton where I am based. I like American writers such as Richard Yates, Dave Eggers, Douglas Coupland and Chuck I can never pronounce his name (Palahniuk). Geoff Dyer and Mil Millington too, who used to write a column called Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About. I love Anne Tyler's books as well."
What next for Ben? Thankfully for his fans, more of the same.
“We did 10,000 miles around France in the summer, so I am going to do a follow up to Are We Nearly There Yet? The publisher hasn't pressured me into it. I am also working on a novel, so I don't know which one I will finish first. My family are pretty good with it. It's different, though, because every time you go the kids are slightly older. Charlie was one when I did the other book and he couldn't really voice a protest. It's a bit more hurtful if one of them says they are bored when they are older, because you start to feel guilty.
“I have always read travel books and I am constantly sniffing around asking myself, 'Did that actually happen or has that been exaggerated or fabricated?’ Lots of things seemed to happen to us. I don't know whether it was lucky or unlucky. Unlucky at the time but, in retrospect, it is good copy for the book. I don't speak any French at all, apart from the bog standard stuff you learnt at O-Level. That was the tricky thing.
“My wife speaks quite well, while my daughter speaks as good as French as I do. I felt like a bit of an oaf with my wife ordering my meals for me. 'Oh, he'll have the steak with the frites please', that kind of thing. She would also tend to side with the French person over me if we were getting into some sort of dispute. It often felt like people were ganging up on me. There were a few occasions when I was thinking, 'Come on, take my side!'
“There is definitely something very spiky about the French towards the British. I don't know whether they are like that towards everybody. It is more prevalent in the countryside, because there are areas in France where you still don't get that many tourists. You are looked on oddly for being there in the first place, whereas in Italy everybody is very effusive, especially with kids. They want to tweak their cheeks.
“The French are very disciplined with their kids, which is something I wasn't aware of when I went there with ours. They hit their kids a bit. I don't know whether it is the general rule or it was just unlucky in the places we went to, but we got a lot of smacking that you never really see in England that much anymore.
“Our kids were shushed all the time too. You start to think, is there something unruly about our family? Are we out of control? I wouldn't dream of shushing someone else's kid, it's stepping into someone else's territory, but the French seem to. Virtually every place we went to, we were shushed. With kids you want it to be easy. Cities were always a bit of a nightmare with traffic or bumbling around trying to get to the right place on the underground system. Normally, the countryside was the best for us.
“I suppose it will take about six months to write it, so it probably won’t come out until the Spring. My wife and I were just discussing our next trip. We want to go to somewhere exotic like Australia, because we have tended to stay quite close to home these last few years. America would be fantastic. We did lots of road trips there before we had kids and one of my novels was half based on a big road trip around America. So I would love to do that with the kids, but they might be too young.”
You can join Ben on Twitter or buy his travel sensation Are We Nearly There Yet?
