Spotlight on... Basildon Writers’ Group
It’s not often that two branches of the arts get to work together on a fund-raising drive for NHS volunteers but in October 2020 Basildon Writers’ Group released a book to help raise much needed funds for Basildon Hospital Radio, BHR 87.7FM, writes Dawn Knox.
Recently, the volunteers at the radio station had to leave their studio when the hospital went into lockdown with Covid-19. They usually broadcast to staff and patients 24/7, but with no studio nor access to their equipment, they had to reinvent themselves within weeks, and get a licence to broadcast on a local FM frequency and the internet.
But, they could no longer raise much needed funds to pay the bills. In stepped Basildon Writers’ Group with an offer to donate all their royalties from their new book.
Basildon Writers’ Group is a small affair, with a limited membership of ten people and restricted by one single rule. Everyone attending has to bring along some writing; fiction, poetry, non-fiction, even scripts for plays or television, to read out. Since Covid we meet every month by Zoom – not as good as meeting in person but better than not meeting at all.
We decided to write an anthology during 2019 but other commitments meant we had to postpone it until later this year as we wanted to try for the Christmas market. We knew other groups had published their own books but had no idea how successful they’d been. We made several decisions early on, as Covid became a factor. Firstly, distribution was going to be difficult through shops. Even if we could persuade some of them to stock our book, many of them had to close, and we couldn’t risk that being the situation when the book came out.
Amazingly, we hit the scheduled date for publication with only two weeks slippage, having gone through many editing iterations, including on the day the first ebook was available.
We didn’t launch the book for three weeks after publication as we had a marketing plan which involved getting local personalities on board with quotes and photos, the Basildon mayor, a local MP and a previous MP, now Baroness Smith of Basildon. We then tried for well known names with connections to Essex. We were lucky to get an immediate response from Richard Madeley:
‘Basildon Writers’ Group and Basildon Hospital Radio are one of the good things to come out of the Covid crisis – as an Essex man myself, I’m proud of them.’
As yet, no response from anyone else we’d approached, but we had enough to launch, which we did with our first video on Sunday 18 October. We’d also limited the first published book sales to authors and selected people who guaranteed to review on Amazon so we could aim to hit the highest placing on Amazon charts when we launched. By launch day we had seven good reviews, mostly fivestar. And we hit our target 100 copies sold within a week of the launch.
Website: http://mybook.to/ItHappenedInEssex