Author Interview with Steven Scaffardi (taken from Chris Hill's blog)

This author interview was originally posted on Chris Hill's blog on Wednesday, April 27 as part of the #LadLitBlogTour 

A warm welcome today to lad-lit author Steven Scaffardi whose new book The Flood is out right now. Steven and I have both written novels which are romantic comedies from a male perspective plus we both have a background in newspaper journalism so it’s a real pleasure to have him along here today – welcome Steven.

Tell me about your journey as a writer – how you started and how you have developed?
Hey Chris, thanks for taking the time out to chat to me. I studied journalism at university and after graduating I freelanced for a while for various football magazines and lad mags, before becoming the sports editor for a local paper in Crawley.

After three years I switched careers, working in the media and marketing sector, but continued to enjoy writing in my personal time and eventually I wrote The Drought.

In terms of how I have developed my writing skills, I’d say that I try to make sure that each character has a true identity and individual personality. It doesn’t matter if they appear in one chapter or in all of the chapters I want to know exactly how they’d react in a certain situation. The more you know about your characters the easier it is to create the world around them.

How would you describe your work – it‘s themes and the important things about it?
I like to look at love, relationships and dating from the man’s point of view because I think we get it wrong so often that it’s funny! If chick lit is the perfect ‘after’ picture then lad lit is the not-so-perfect ‘before’ picture.

I have sat with my wife on countless occasions shouting at the TV when she has made me watch another one of her romcoms. I get that it’s escapism, but those films do men no favours whatsoever! They set the bar far too high – women watch these films or read chick lit books and expect to meet the perfect man. We’re far from perfect! It’s a fairly well-known fact that when it comes to dating, we’re pretty useless! I’m bringing the bar back down and doing men everywhere a huge favour. No need to thank me – it’s my pleasure!

I know you write in the lad lit genre, can you tell me a bit about the genre and what attracted you to it?
It is indeed lad lit although I am quite happy just labeling it comedy. It tackles relationships and dating from a male perspective. For me, the most important thing is to make people laugh. I used to do stand-up comedy and being able to make people laugh is the best thing in the world.

Let’s be quite frank here – my books are not going to change the world. It’s about a guy trying to get his leg over so he can put an end to his sexual drought! But every time I get a review that says the book had them in stitches or a reader contacts me to let me know that they laughed so hard they spat their tea out on a train, it gives me a lift.

I’m not quite at the sales numbers JK Rowling has achieved yet, but I’ve had people read The Drought from the UK to the US and from Malaysia to the UAE, and knowing that somewhere in all corners of the world someone has laughed at my words is awesome! It takes on a different meaning when I tell you that The Drought was loosely based on a period in my own life, which pretty much means that people on each continent are laughing at me but that’s a different story!

Tell me about your current book – what is it about and what makes it a great read?
I am just about to publish my second novel The Flood. It is a follow-up to The Drought and part of the Sex, Love & Dating Disasters series I am writing. From my point of view it was great fun writing it as I got to ‘work’ with a lot of the same characters again as I became quite fond of them the first time round.

I’m hoping this one will be equally if not funnier than The Drought. So far it has been getting some really good feedback on Goodreads with one reader saying: “Oh my gosh, laugh out LOUD funny! My roommate ran in the room asking what was so funny and when I told her, she laughed so hard she could no longer walk!”

Tell me about your journey to publication, who is your publisher or did you decide to self-publish and why?
I self-published with a company called Acorn Independent Press. They were super helpful and they’re really cool guys too. I tried going down the traditional publishing route after I had written The Drought but I didn’t get very far. This time round I didn’t approach and literary agents or publishers, for no other reason than I couldn’t quite bring myself to write so many submission letters again!

I’ve had quite a lot of fun getting to know readers across social media and Goodreads so I just decided to stick to what I know. I got inspired by other self-published authors like Nick Spalding (who also writes lad lit) who did amazing self-publishing his own books. And the anonymous author The Bourbon Kid series – which happens to be my favourite set of books at the moment – self-published and he has just sold the film rights to Hollywood. So as that 90s diva Gabrielle said, dreams can come true!

Where can I buy a copy of your book?
You can buy my books at Amazon. The eBook is just 99p and the paperback is £8.99. The Flood will be available on the Kindle from April 30 (you can pre-order now for 99p) and the paperback will be published on May 19. However, as a special treat over the upcoming Bank Holiday weekend, I am running a giveaway from April 28 to May 2 so you can download The Drought for free!

Where can we find out more about you?
You can find my at all the usual hot spots – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Instagram and on Goodreads. Plus you can follow me on my blog, and if you want to know more about lad lit make sure you follow the #LadLitBlogTour and #LadLitSunday hashtags.

#LadLitSunday: Lad Lit explained, Chris Hill interview, and Bourbon Kid rejection letters!

Happy Easter everyone! It's been a fairly quiet week on the Lad Lit news front. From a personal point of view it's been a really busy week. At the start of the week I was invited to write a guest post on By The Letter Book Reviews about lad lit.

And then earlier on today I was talking lad lit on Linda's Book Bag. Click on either of the links to read the full articles or check out this blog post.

Lad lit stalwart Mike Gayle took to the airwaves on Friday night on Brum Radio alongside book obsessive Blake Woodham. Their book for March is the bestseller A The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett - a story about small changes making big differences for two people.

I interviewed Chris Hill yesterday, author of The Pick-Up Artist and asked him about his story of A Lad Lit Rom Com about Dating in the Digital Age. You can see the full interview here.

And I started with a bit of news about myself and I'll finish with a little bit more news (like I said, it's been a slow week in the lad lit world...). I was delighted and extremely grateful to book blog My Book File for reviewing both The Drought and The Flood.

Quick Bits

• Nick Spalding has a special Easter offer for his novella Buzzing Easter Bunnies - offering the laugh out loud comedy for just 99p this weekend.
• Next week I am interviewing Ben Adams, author of Six Lies and Six Months To Get A Life.

Tweet of the Week

Following on from JK Rowling publishing some of her rejection letters this week, the anonymous author of the best selling Bourbon Kid series posted this amazing rejection letter. Should these rejection letters give indie authors hope or make us seriously worry about the judgement of some publishers and agents?!

Seeing as how JK Rowling is sharing her rejection letters, here is my favourite rejection of The Book With No Name - pic.twitter.com/LUQqPbQdaL

— Bourbon Kid (@BourbonKid) March 25, 2016

Author Interview: Chris Hill

Hey Chris, welcome to the Lad Lit Blog. So tell me what's going on in your world right now?
Hi Steve, many thanks for inviting me along today. It’s a real pleasure. What I’m up to is the usual double life authors have of writing on the one side and the real world on the other. So I’ve got my day job, working as communications officer for the children’s charity WellChild, my family - teenagers, dog, the whole works. Then on the writing side I’m still promoting The Pick-Up Artist which has been out for about 12 months now with Magic Oxygen Publishing, plus I’ve started on another book.

You published The Pick-Up Artist last year. Tell me a bit about that book and how it has been received so far?
It’s essentially a romantic comedy, it’s about a shy young man’s attempts to find love, or sex at least, with the help of a peculiar online community called the Pick-Up Artists who claim to be able to use psychological techniques to attract women. It’s not giving much away to say it doesn’t go as smoothly for him as he might have hoped. But it’s also about the women he meets who are my favourite characters in the book I would say, they’re rude and funny and don’t take any prisoners. I’d say it’s done maybe a bit better in terms of sales than my last book which was literary fiction, but they are both with smaller publishers and that kind of puts a cap on what they are likely to sell as you don’t have the marketing machine and distribution network that the big publishing houses do. They’ve done okay though, I’m very grateful they are out at all and that I found publishers who wanted them.

It is described as 'A lad lit romcom about dating in the digital age.' Have you got any experience of dating in the digital age and how much of this novel was based on true life experiences?
No experience personally, I’ve been happily married for about a thousand years. Luckily, the beauty with fiction is that you get to make things up, or use stuff you have observed in others, I spent lots of years as a journalist which you could describe as being a professional observer, so I’m quite good at people watching. The lad lit description came from my publishers. They decided that was the way to market the book and I deferred to them on the subject as it’s their area. I was a little uneasy about it at first - the majority of my readers are women, both for my first book and for this one. I didn’t want to do anything to put them off or make them think this book wasn’t for them. Luckily I needn’t have worried, most of the readers who have contacted me about PUA are women and most of the reviews have been from women, and thankfully they seem to like it.

What is the best pick-up line you have ever used? And more importantly, what is the worst?!
I didn’t used to use pick up lines - maybe that’s where I was going wrong. The PUA people in my book are a real movement who believe you can attract women through supposed psychological techniques. A lot of their ideas sound barking mad, others sound like they have a grain of truth in them, many of them are described in the book. Do they work? I don’t know, I’ve not tried them. I’m uneasy about the whole idea really as it sounds like a recipe for using people and trying to bend them to your will. I suppose if The Pick-Up Artist has a moral position then it’s that, though it is basically a comedy.

Do you think the lad lit genre gets the praise it deserves?
If I’m honest, until the publisher told me I’d written a lad-lit novel I didn’t know I had done, or really that it was a genre. What I do believe is that the best writers, and the best books, in any given genre transcend that genre and are just appreciated as great writing.

Who is your favourite lad lit author/book and why?
I’m no expert on the genre I’m afraid. What I did with this book was try to pitch it around the area inhabited by say Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, or The Rachel Papers, which was Martin Amis’s first book. I think maybe it has a little taste of Nick Hornby, that kind of thing. But I was also influenced by the more romantic literary fiction books out there such as Love in the Time of Cholera and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. I read a lot and it all gets into the mix - I find it easier to see what has influenced me with a book when I have finished it.

You are a winner of the Bridport Prize. What can you tell me about that award?
It was years ago I won it but it still follows me around, in a good way. It’s one of the bigger short story prizes in the UK and is considered reasonably prestigious. On the one hand, winning something like that doesn’t mean very much to you as a writer, it’s not like I had agents and publishers banging my door down because of it, but on the other hand it did give me a boost of confidence and made me think I was perhaps on the right track, which was great. It’s also something which pops back up again from time to time, publishers like sticking it on blurbs and websites, and I even get the odd gig off the back of it. I’ll be at Evesham Festival of Words on July 1st giving a talk on ’Winning the Bridport Prize’ (and hopefully flogging some books) so, be there or be unfashionable.

Your first book, Song of the Sea God, is not exactly what you would call lad lit. What made you make such a jump from one genre to the other?
I basically write the books I feel compelled to write and then try to find a publisher who loves them enough to put them out. So my first book is nothing much like my second and the one I’m working on now will be different again. Wiser authors than me will say I’m doing it all wrong and that I should write in the same style every time to build up a readership, but I think what the hell? I’d rather write what I’m inspired to write and see how that goes - that’s the fun of it surely. There’s not much money in this so I might as well enjoy it. Song of the Sea God, published by Skylight Press, is a literary novel set on a small island of the coast of England where a strange figure washes up and tries to convince the local people he is a god. It’s like a kind of creepy fairytale. Some people really seemed to like it - they wrote all kinds of essays about various aspects of it, what it secretly meant and so on. PUA is a lot more straightforward but I like to think it’s just as worthwhile in its own way.

What advice would you give to an author just starting out?
Practice - nobody gets good at this straight out of the box. It’s a funny thing that people wouldn’t expect to pick up a guitar and know how to play it without having learned, or paint a great picture the first time they pick up a brush. But, perhaps because everyone can write there’s this belief that everyone is automatically a writer. Put in the work and eventually you will get good.

And finally, what is next in the pipeline for Chris Hill. Any more lad lit?
My next book will be different from either of the others but I’m not quite sure yet what it will be. It takes me two years to write a book, soup to nuts, a year for a first draft and another for rewrites, at the moment I’m right at the start of that process which is quite an exciting place to be but also quite daunting, who knows where I will end up?

Thanks Chris and good luck with that third book!

Chris Hill is an author from Gloucester in the UK whose new novel The Pick-Up Artist is published by Magic Oxygen Publishing. You can find it on Amazon here.

Chris is a social media addict with 25,000 followers on Twitter @ChilledCh he is on Facebook here, and has a popular blog where he talks about reading, writing and more at http://www.chrishillauthor.co.uk/.