As word about my novel, Don’t Make Me Laugh, starts to spread, I’ve decided it would be useful to have a place to talk about it, preview exclusive bits running up to publication date in February and also a place to discuss the frequent news stories about predatory men in the entertainment industry.
We seem to be averaging about two a week at the moment.
It isn’t necessarily always useful to have those discussions in the electronic town square (aka Twitter, FB, Insta, Bluesky, Threads etc) because you and I know that “just tell us who they are” isn’t really a useful contribution to the conversation when we’re talking about keeping women safe. We would love to shout their names out loud, but we can’t. We can still talk about the problem and better to do it somewhere a touch more secluded.
So, I’ve come up with this plan to offer cheap annual subscriptions (for life) to this newsletter in exchange for early access to extracts from the book and all sorts of other interesting things. It will (I hope) bring in enough to buy me some time every week or so to update you on book things and other stuff regarding this constantly moving subject and its frequent appearance in the news.
I WILL ALSO ANNOUNCE THE NAMES OF EVERY PREDATOR IN THE COMEDY INDUSTRY IN AN EXCLUSIVE POST.*
* I won’t do this. Lawyers tell me the rich ones will sue me and then carry on with their lives completely unaffected, being given awards, while my family and I live in the park and eat bin food.
It won’t just be a creep newsletter, updating you on blind stories about the latest exploits of the most awful men in showbiz. That would get tiring and there are already plenty of those.
But, let’s talk. Women (and allies) talking, as recently underlined by the comedian Eleanor Morton in her rather brilliant interview with The Sunday Times, make it a lot harder for some men to get away with terrible behaviour.
So if you feel like £25 is manageable (Substack won’t allow a monthly sub of less than £3.50 which is, of course, a far worse deal than £25 a year) then please do sign up. You’ll never pay more than £25 a year to read my writing, apart from if you buy the book in February or pre-order it, obviously, which would also be massively appreciated.
In addition to the hardback, it will be on audiobook (to be announced) and eBook and the paperback follows fairly swiftly towards the end of next year.
Sales pitch over. Hope to see some of you on the other side of the relatively low paywall. The first subscriber content will be me, reading the opening of the book in an indoor scarf if you please.
Click below to take up the £25 annual offer.
Julia my editor gave me an advance copy of this today and I can't wait to read x
Sold to the idiot in the niwaki cap