Lessons from Toby

Malindi

After five years in the writing, my book The Zanzibar Chest is coming out in July. Based on the advice of my friend Toby Young, whose New York memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People has been such a success, I realised I had to make every effort to promote it myself. Toby lives in Shepherd’s Bush. I live on a ranch in Kenya’s remote Laikipia plateau, where we don’t even have a phone. I saw this was going to be difficult.

‘Think of some news hooks,’ Toby advised by email. But whereas he had stories of cocaine-snorting celebrities in Soho’s fashionable clubs to generate newspaper publicity, I had none of that. My book deals partly with nasty African wars, from Ethiopia to Rwanda. As Reuter correspondents we used to say that, in news terms, the death of one American equals ten Israelis, equals 100 Bosnians, equals 1,000 Africans. About 2 million people die in The Zanzibar Chest.

When I got to Nairobi and logged onto the Internet, to my dismay I saw that several websites advertised my story in the category ‘holidays and travel’. One website linked the book to a list of travel agents selling vacations to Indian Ocean beach destinations.

Toby had a brilliant strategy to promote his book through his email contacts. He succeeded in this to great effect. In the last year I have, therefore, assiduously collected just under 4,000 email addresses. Most of them are from round-robin emails like ‘Forward this message from the Dalai Lama to everybody you know and you will receive good luck within three days’. Another example is the email being circulated around the world, urging recipients to protest against the Japanese hobby of ‘bonsai kittens’, where cats are raised inside bottles.