The sale of Happy Island

 

Sometimes I think that the sole purpose of government is to make life more difficult for off-mainlanders such as myself.

 

For example, one morning I was woken early by Alun in an agitated state, with news of the latest mainland council initiative.

 

“They’re selling the island, Jed,” he said.

 

“Who are?” I asked.

 

“The mainland council,” he said, waving a thick wad of papers “there’s a letter about it in this morning’s mail. It’s part of the privatisation mania that is driving mainland politics at the moment. They’ve already privatised the gardening and decorating services at Messy Hall.”

 

“Messy Hall?”

 

“The new name for the council building. It’s a complete tip now, apparently.”

 

“Well, nobody’s going to want to buy the island anyway, are they? “We hardly ever get any visitors, it’s not a fashionable touristy island like, for example, Fashionable Touristy Island.”

 

“You’d be surprised Jed. Billionaires like nothing more than buying their own private island where they can lord it up like the pretend royalty they are. I think they get the idea from watching James Bond films, they see the evil megalomaniacs in their island hideaways, planning dastardly schemes to take over and/or destroy the earth and want to emulate them.”

 

“Surely not all billionaires are evil megalomaniacs,” I said.

 

“You’ve led a sheltered life haven’t you Jed?”

 

I didn’t answer Alun’s comment, as I was busy reading through the paperwork about the sale of Happy Island. Although Alun and my families had been the sole inhabitants of the island for many centuries, the island was technically the property of the mainland council, who secured their claim to all the off-mainland isles in the seventeenth century by circulating a memo to that effect. Our ancestors, who by chance were also named Jed and Alun, refused to read new-fangled forms of literary style (they also spurned novels) and were consequently unable to protest at the piracy-inspired latest piece of officialdom.

 

The paperwork set out the details of the sale. Bidders would have two months to submit their bids, which would be scrutinised before the sale was agreed (i.e. the council would check that you actually had the money so we couldn’t just pretend). The council set a recommended selling price of 10,000 mainland pounds, though if a James-Bond-style villain had his heart set on the island as an evil retreat it could come to a lot more.  

 

“How much money do you have, Jed?” Alun asked.

 

“You mean my total life savings?”

 

“Yes, Jed, everything. We need to pool resources to make a bid to buy the island.”

 

“Just over a hundred pounds. My book sales have been slow recently. How much do you have?”

 

“Even less. About fifty pounds altogether.”

 

“Well we need a lot more if we’re going to buy the island. What’s your plan?”

“I don’t have a plan Jed. I can’t think of any way of making 10,000 pounds in a couple of months, it isn’t possible.”

 

More bad news was to come. The next day the council official contacted us to let us know that they had received their first bid, for the recommended 10,000 pounds, by a company planning to build a Coldplay CD factory on our island.

 

“This is the worst thing possible Jed. It won’t just mean we’ll be kicked out to make way for the factory, it means there’ll be even more Coldplay CDs in the world. As if there weren’t enough already.”

 

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I have a plan. I’m going to do a book-signing tour to raise money. Hopefully I’ll make enough money from book sales to cover our shortfall.” I write New York murder mysteries and have something of a following, even without having made any real effort to plug my work, because of my unwillingness to travel to the mainland.

 

Alun looked at me in a strange way. “You mean, you’re finally going to leave the island?”

 

“I can hardly plug my book here – you’d be the only customer.”

 

“So you’re going to the mainland? For the first time in your life.”

 

“Oh there’s no need for that, I hope. I thought I’d just do a book-signing tour of our archipelago.”

 

“How much do you make on each book you sell?”

 

“About 80 pence.”

 

“So how many copies would you need to sell to make 10,000 pounds.”

 

“Erm,” I did a quick calculation. “Twelve thousand five hundred pounds.” I’m good at mental arithmetic.

 

“And how many people live on the archipelago in total?”

“Seventy-four.” I knew that one. It always comes up in the Pub Island quiz.

 

“Can you see the flaw in you plan?”

 

“Well, there’s nothing else I can do.”

“Jed, the reason your publisher keep on about doing a book tour is that they want you to go to a city in the mainland where you could potentially meet thousands of potential customers.”

 

“Well …” I started to say, but Alun interrupted.

 

“If we lose the island you’ll have to move away anyway, so you might as well take your first baby steps onto the mainland when you’ll be cossetted by your publisher, they’ll arrange the itinerary, travel, hotels and the only people you’ll have to meet are your fans. If you don’t make a serious effort then we’ll be thrown off the island – in fact neither of us will ever set foot here again.”

 

I was worried by Alun’s fearful prediction, however, I wasn’t as completely naïve about sales as Alun made out. At my first signing, on Book-Launch Island, I invited along a journalist from the Off-Mainlander magazine, the main publication for residents and fans of off-mainland islanders.  With a readership of nearly 2,000 off-mainlanders I hoped to garner significant sales from the media attention.

Although named Book-Launch Island, the booklaunch industry had in fact shunned the place ever since the population dwindled in the early nineteenth century. Mine  was the first booklaunch in nearly 200 years, but there were no queues to mark the historic occasion. I spent a day sitting in an empty bookshop/cowshed, with not a single customer all day. Even the bookshop assistant was absent most of the day tending his farm and asked me to watch over the ‘shop’.

 

Eventually, at the end of a long hard day’s waiting for non-existent fans to proffer their books at me, the journalist arrived from the Off-Mainlander. In fact it wasn’t just one of the Off-Mainlander’s journalistic team, it was the new Editor himself, Chaz Sputnik.

 

“It’s a great pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I’m a big fan of the magazine, I haven’t missed a copy in twenty years.”

 

“Well, I guess there isn’t much else for you to do, stuck out on an island like that.”

 

“Erm, but you must live on an island too, don’t you?”

 

“Don’t be silly,” he said, “I run a professional magazine. I can hardly do it off some ramshackle little isle. I live on the mainland.”

 

With my dreams thus shattered, I barely noticed the rest of the interview and when the magazine arrived a week or so later I didn’t rush downstairs to grab my copy off Alun as I might have done. However, I was pleased to see that I was mentioned on the front page and there was a fair-sized article inside.

 

The Off-Mainlander article led to an opportunity I hadn’t predicted. Over a dozen off-mainland islands invited me to give book-signings. Unlike Book-launch Island many of them were inhabited, with one larger island just off a mainland city containing no less than 500 inhabitants. It was by a long margin the most populated place I’ve ever been, and I sold no less than 22 books on that island alone.

 

The boatman helped ferry me from isle to isle, taking a number of days off because he understood the importance of my project. Alun, however, remained as critical as ever.

 

“Why don’t you just go to the mainland Jed. You’ve travelled over 2,000 miles on your tour and it’s only 5 miles to the mainland.”

 

“It’s a matter of principle,” I said, “I’m not going to travel to the mainland just to make money. I’m determined to show that you can be a success without selling out.”

 

“And how many books have you sold.”

 

“Seventy-three,” I boasted proudly. For the first time in my life I felt like an author, I met fans, real people that liked my book, and actually saw them hand over money in return for my novels. It felt good. It was a moral boost of the like I’d never experienced in my life, though, as Alun pointed out, it did leave us 99,800 pounds short of the total.

 

Then one morning I was woken early by a call from my agent (who I’d forgotten existed, maybe I should have asked him to arrange the tour).  “The New Yorker want to do an interview with you?”

 

“The New Yorker?” I said, incredulously. “Why on Earth would they want to speak to me?” It all seemed highly unlikely.

 

“One of the journalists saw the article in the Off-Mainlander. They think it’s a strong story, a writer of New York crime fiction being forced off his island by an over-zealous privatisation drive. And your book tour of little islands ‘sounded cute’.”

 

Aware of the importance of media coverage, even in as obscure a journal as the New Yorker, I reluctantly agreed to the interview. I told Alun the good news when he arrived with the morning’s gossip.

 

“What’s the New Yorker, Jed?” he asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”

 

“It’s like the Off-Mainlander, but for inhabitants of Manhattan Island in New York.”

 

“That’s quite a niche market, Jed, pitching a magazine at just one island, it’ll never last, you take my word for it. Why, the Off-Mainlander struggles and it has over 150 islands amongst its potential readership.”

 

I hated to admit that I shared Alun’s scepticism, but nevertheless reassured him the Manhattan was quite a big island.

 

The interview itself was a strange affair. The journalist interviewing me seemed to know very little about life on Happy Island and the entire interview seemed to be focussed on his island, not mine, even though, as far as I knew, nobody wanted to buy Manhattan.

 

“You write New York murder mysteries,” he said. “Have you ever been to New York?”

 

“No never. But I’ve read about it in the papers, seen it on TV.”

He seemed unimpressed.

 

“Why not write murder mysteries about a city you’ve actually visited instead?”

 

“I’ve never been to a city.”

 

“A town then.”

 

“I’ve never been to a town. The biggest place I’ve been to is Three Rock Island.”

 

“Three Rocks?”

 

“Don’t be fooled by the name, it’s a big island. There are five houses in it altogether.”

 

“You’ve never been to a place with more than five houses and yet you decided to write murder mysteries set in New York. How the heck do you manage to portray life in the New York underworld so convincingly?”

 

“Google.”

 

I was sent a copy of the article the day it came out. It arrived by the early morning boat and Alun rushed it up to my house. To my surprise I was the main feature in the ‘Art and Clutter’ section (the New Yorker is apparently famous for poor spell-checking and I’m assured it should have read ‘Art and Culture’).

 

The title was enough to dismay me. ‘The most pointless book tour in history’, it read. However, the article itself was rather more sympathetic to my plight, it also mentioned all of my books, and I was hopeful that, with luck, I might come close to matching the seventy-three books I had sold in my off-mainland tour.

 

However, although the New Yorker is a local magazine for the residents of the island of Manhattan, it has a surprisingly large readership, far bigger even than that of the Off-Mainlander. Many of the readers also write for other magazines, even newspapers, and of course the web, and within no time at all my interview ‘went viral’.

 

Within a week of the New Yorker article all four of my novels were in the top 5 sales for the US book charts. Even more astonishingly I received a phone call from my agent telling me that a Hollywood film making company had offered me $150,000 for exclusive rights to films. “Should I hold on for $1/2 million?” she asked, which caused me to scream down the phone, “Sell, sell, sell,” as if I were an insane trader on the New York stock exchange (which I read about as part of my research – google really is a wonderful thing).

 

The net outcome was that I had, overnight, become a wealthy man, which was just as well. At auction the island cost a staggering 100,000 pounds, clearly there was an evil bond-type villain trying to get a piece of the action, but I was able to meet the cost, even if it took virtually every penny I had.  A council official visited the island to formerly hand over the deeds.

 

I decided to split ownership of the island equally with Alun. Although he had only contributed 50 mainland pounds to our total, we had made an informal agreement to pool resources. Besides which, on an island inhabited by just two people, it pays to keep on the good side of the other resident.  Especially when that resident is Alun.