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.
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