Thread 17: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

The Observer's original exposé: The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...
The 14 Observer items currently available on their online 'The real Salt Path' page: The real Salt Path | The Observer
More from The Observer:
‘Hope is extinguished’: CBD patients respond to Salt Path...
The real Salt Path | The Observer (The Slow Newscast)
Links to more Observer videos can be found in an early post of this new thread and here: Observer YouTube Channel: The Observer UK - YouTube
Working timeline and references: can be found in early posts of this new Thread 17.
Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement: Raynor Winn
Thread One ^www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5368194-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?^
Threads 2-11: Links all in the OP of Thread 12
Thread 12: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5384574-thread-12-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?
Threads 13-14: Links in the OP of Thread 15
Thread 15:Thread 15: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet
Thread 16: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5395002-thread-16-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

New posters joining us in the genuine spirit of our civil discourse are welcome. It would be helpful to get the background from at least some of the Observer items above before posting.
To all - Please be extremely cautious when it comes to naming or implicating people and addresses not in the public eye or with no direct connection to the story, and around the understandable health speculations, especially where details are unclear or still emerging. Remember, even Hollywood rabbits attract the odd flea. Please do not engage with visitors who seem to have their own agenda and seek to derail. Avoid @'ing and quoting them as - from experience - this will only encourage them back to the threads. We have done amazingly well together for sixteen very interesting, very serious and very silly threads so far. I can't be here as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion walking along in our usual reasonable and respectful fashion is very welcome.

Yes, it really is Thread 17. I'm as in need of smelling salts as the next person.

We seek them here, we seek them there, mumsnetters seek them everywhere: just where are the elusive How not to Dal dy Dir and On Winter Hill?

#handwavium #appropriation

Keep to the path. No saltiness. May the fudge be with you.

Like everyone else on these threads I do not wish poor mental health on Salray and Timoth, even though they are the authors of their own misfortune and have caused very significant pain to others like the Hemmings, the Coles and genuine sufferers of serious illness and disability.

The best indicator of a person's future behaviour is their past behaviour. What we seem to have learnt about Raymoth is that they keep reinventing themselves, keep moving forward, keep blaming others, keep using embellished and invented victimhood to gain advantage and sympathy. I think there will be a lot of defensive and righteous indignation and anger, particularly from Salray, and that is protective. They have each other. This time they also have the cushion of wealth and their offspring are very much adults.

Does anybody know when the last time a copy of HNTDDD was sold and how much it was bought for?

I imagine she would ask interviewers not to bring it up, and I entirely see why. It’s nothing to do with her or her work, and I doubt she wants to make a public pronouncement on someone else’s scam/criminal past. If anything, I imagine she’s hopping mad that her work is now associated with such a tainted brand.

Do we even know for sure that hard copies were actually printed? I know ‘Izzy W-T’ was complaining somewhere about a local bookshop refusing to stock it, and talking about shipping copies overseas, but none of that has to be true.

When it was looked into, on here, the general conclusion was that there weren't copies on hand. It would have been printed on demand.

Some of the reviews were obviously them/fake and presumably back in 2012 - but people felt one or two were genuine and more recent.

One was sold for about £9 around/after mid-May this year.

Was that the one on eBay? I think i saw that back in the mists of time. I wonder if Raymoth were the purchasers, knowing what was about to come out.

Winn explores a profound loss of faith in her connection to the natural world. But will the physical challenge and wild landscape be enough to lead her back?

Well, you'll have to wait .... with bated breath!

This is just how the commercial side of OWH happened:

Penguin Michael Joseph buys Raynor Winn's book on Coast to Coast Walk

How does one access that info - I've tried a search of completed sales but couldn't find anything.

So (we learn) that when her (possibly terminally) ill lifelong partner's health takes a turn for the worse the author assuages her heightened anxiety by embarking on a solo 200 mile walk in depth of winter, a trek that would take at least a fortnight even in summer.
As anyone might. 'No, you go off and enjoy yourself,' he probably said.
Unpredictably, perhaps, she encounters blizzards, floods and sub-zero temperatures, while carrying the emotional weight of a difficult year. At least she won't also be burdened with a radio and a copy of Heaney's Beowulf.

I hope earlier royalties have earned enough for a good nurse.

can you retrieve the identity of who bought it?

Would be curious to know whether it was a real purchase. (Does eBay have a photo of the actual book, and if not was this buyer's first and only purchase.)

Someone who was looking for HNTDDD three months ago believed that 250 copies were printed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OldBooks/comments/1m30s3p/looking_for_a_book_or_pictures_of_all_pages/

It occurs to me that:

From the financial posititon discussed in previous postings, any scheme to raffle the house free of its huge mortgage could only have worked if hundreds of thousands of copies of the book were sold in very short order. Pinting just 250 copies seems (ahem) insufficient for that plan.

Gangani said that it wanted to sell the book through local booksellers (and not Amazon - despite that not fitting with the need to sell vast numbers very quickly for the raffle to be workable). If booksellers had sold the book, then Gangani wouldn't have known the buyers' contact details. And if/when it turned out that Gangani's profits from sales were insufficiient to clear the mortgage, Gangani would have been unable to approach those buyers to make sure that they got refunds (assuming that it wanted to do so).

In short, the lottery scheme looks unworkable. The intention to sell through book sellers suggests that there was no intention to refund all buyers if/when the lottery failed. And if hard copies were sold through booksellers, I don't see how SW can know/say that all buyers were refunded.

And, of course, for any customer who bought from a bookshop, any refund by Gangani would involve Gangani paying far more to the customer than Gangani had actually received (because the bookshop would have paid substantially less than retail price). In a situation where lots of books were sold, but not quite enough, refunds would have caused Gangani large losses (which, presumably, it had no means to fund).

The one on eBay would not ship to the UK. And is no longer available.

And bearing in mind that authors who sell half a million copies in total of more than one book are lauded as being noteable (I'm approaching that figure myself and I have nearly 30 published novels, so half a million copies is an aggregate of copies sold of ALL of those books) selling hundreds of thousands of copies of a first, self published book, is a dream that was so unlikely to be realised that it would almost have been better for them to just buy loads of Lottery tickets and hope to win.

Raffling off your house can work but trying to raffle your house by writing a book and including that in the cost of the raffle ticket seems utterly bonkers. It's almost as if somebody had a hidden urge to write a book that was unleashed by the need to sell a house.... And why, having written HNTDDD to sell your house, would you then say that another book (3 Mountains and a Ceilidh) was in the pipeline for 2013? Crazy.

‘I didn’t sleep for 45 days’: the people who raffle off their homes | Homes | The Guardian

Readers of HNTDDD were not automatically entered - they had to make contact:

1. The prize is as described in the book and on the website and no entrant can select an alternative prize. Gangani reserve the right to offer a cash alternative, at their discretion. The house will be offered free of mortgage or any other legal or registered charge. Legal fees and stamp duty are included in the prize, but any other tax liabilities will be the sole responsibility of the winner.
2. All entries including postal or online must be submitted, including your name, address, and daytime telephone number. Proof of posting is not proof of receipt and no responsibility is accepted for entries damaged, lost or mislaid.
3. There is no limit to the number of postal entries from any one individual; however every postal entry must be on an original entry form cut from the book. Only original pages from the book will be considered valid. Pages found to be altered, reconstructed, forged or tampered with in any way will be void. Photocopies are not acceptable.
4. There is no limit to the number of online entries that can be made at gangani.co.uk/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.gangani.co.uk, however each entry must be supported by the purchase of either the paperback or e-book.

<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120703202203/www.ganganipublishing.co.uk/pages/prize-draw-terms-conditions" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20120703202203/www.ganganipublishing.co.uk/pages/prize-draw-terms-conditions

I mean yes, raffling your house can work, just as some self published novels become massive hits, it's just that the chances aren't great. And that's BEFORE you take into consideration that there was already money owing on the house; it wasn't as though they owned it outright anyway.

Love the blurb about HNTDDD by Ceri Shaw:

This is a stunningly powerful book by the new author Izzy Wyn-Thomas. It subtley paints a picture not only of the divisions within Wales today, but also the divisions between rural and urban/ poverty and wealth in Britain. Don't take it as a gritty book you don't want to touch, far from it, it has a dark humour that you need to keep reading.
Here's the intro - get the book and read the rest if you can, it's refreshingly different:
Every story should end, but not like this. Not squatting in the outside toilet. Not choked by flaking limewash, or stung by hailstones beating through the doorless opening. Not holding her breath, waiting for a hunk of scrap metal to become the final nail in the coffin.
The winds gusting to force eight, threatening a storm ten. Roaring in from the Irish Sea with unstoppable fury. Each pulse lifting in strength as it clears the headland, crushing down on her with dragons breath, anadl y ddraig. Driving her from this patch of land, reminding her that it should never have been theirs.
The pain, the anguish, the futility of holding on. Should she let go, lift the dirt from beneath her nails, straighten her aching limbs and give herself over to the wind? Let it lift her and carry her weightless, burdenless to come what may.
She wasnt supposed to be this person, she was a pure soul, transparent, simple. How did the grime creep in and destroy the heart of her? Picking her apart cell by cell. Truth, freedom, self-respect, a birthright squandered for a dream, for love. She strains every sinew to prevent herself uploading into the void shes become.
The grain of the wood is separating, letting in air where there has been none for a hundred years. Steel bolts squealing, clenching their teeth against the inevitable. Shes clenched with them, their fate is one. Irresistible forces about to rip their lives apart. She cant breathe, please hold on. Bloods pounding in her ears as shes braced against the stones, ancient and grasping.
Then its gone, everythings gone.

As I mentioned in a previous post, this is the main reason that I don't believe that Izzy Wyn-Thomas exists. Who would allow their book, which seemed to be getting good reviews, to be withdrawn because the publishers used it to run a prize draw which failed. How did they pay the author and why didn't she go to another publisher?

And they had a very short space of time...they knew their time was up come Feb 2013.

This intrigued me in the t&cs posted above:
Gangani reserve the right to offer a cash alternative, at their discretion

So was that actually the plan...to raise enough money to pay the debt AND pay the prize winner thereby keeping the house. Whatever the plan was, all options look bonkers.

For context...it took 18 months for TSP to sell 150k copies.

Thanks @rainytuesdaysandsunnywednesdays. Interesting terms and conditions.

I wonder what Gangani had in mind when they said that they could offer "a cash alternative, at their discretion". £250k? A tenner?

The terms don't seem to require any particular level of ticket sales to be achieved for the lottery to become effective.

I didn't understand condition 4 ("must be supported"). Whatever it means, I'd be interested to understand how this lottery was legal (there was some discussion on the smallholder website about this, and the relevant legislation, but it didn't sound very informed).

Bonkers and full of hubris, to think that a self published first novel by a complete unknown would generate enough cash for them to so much as cover some of the debt. I think a pen name was used as it would have looked even more desperate if it was clear the author was Salray, who we all suspect it was, unless there is really a hapless author as another victim (and why hasn't she/he come forward, if so?) It does make one wonder what the real angle was and what would have happened if it had worked out. I have dounts anyone new would have felt the warmth of that duck egg stove.

I'd usually sympathise with anyone faced with homelessness, but as it was a direct result of what they did to the Hemmings, I don't.

ETA to amend to she/he as I suppose Izzy could be Isadore (although it's not, it's Sally)