Ginny Carter, experienced ghostwriter and award-winning author in her own right, discovered when judging the self-help category for the Business Book Awards that authors were consistently making the same mistakes. The answer was obvious: write a great self-help book explaining how to write a great self-help book!
In this super-practical episode, Ginny pinpoints three critical missteps often made by self-help authors, demystifies storytelling, and introduces her ingenious ‘chunking’ technique as a way of structuring your content in a way that’s more effective for the reader.
Whether you’re an aspiring self-help author or a seasoned pro, this episode not only celebrates the profound impact of self-help literature but also delivers invaluable insights to take your own writing from good to great.
Ginny’s website: https://marketingtwentyone.co.uk/
Ginny on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ginnycarter/
The 5 Principles of Writing a Self-Help Book (free course on PI-Q): https://pi-q.learnworlds.com/course/5-principles-writing-self-help-book
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: http://proposalchallenge.com/
‘Kickstart Your Writing’ Workshop January 2024: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/666359076937
WriteBrained: A 28-day exploratory writing adventure: https://pi-q.learnworlds.com/course?courseid=writebrainedcourse
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Alison Jones: I am here today with Ginny Carter, again! It’s a return visit, lovely to see you again.
Ginny is a best selling ghostwriter of 25 books, a book coach and award winning author in her own right, specialising in self help guides, business books and memoirs. She has ghostwritten books on a wide variety of topics, some of which have been taken on by major publishers.
Under her own name she has written Your Business, Your Book, which won Sales and Marketing Book of the Year at the Business Book Awards in 2020, and her latest book, How to Write a Self Help Book: The definitive guide to getting your expertise out of your head and onto the page in a way that will change your reader’s lives.
So welcome back, Ginny. It’s good to have you here again.
Ginny Carter: Oh, it’s brilliant to be back, Alison. Thank you for having me.
Alison Jones: Well, you are possibly the most sort of topical guest ever. So it’s always great because we’re talking about stuff that the people who are listening to this podcast really, really care about. And it’s really interesting as well to be talking about self help specifically, which is, you know, I don’t know how you define business books exactly, which is crazy for somebody who makes their whole career around business books, but it’s a bit of a sort of thorny phrase, but self help is a particular genre.
Tell me what you see it as, why it matters, why it’s so damn hard.
Ginny Carter: Yes, well, I mean, I see business books as a bit of a broad church really, and much like you do, I guess, and that self help books are kind of like part of it really, because business books are really written for people who want to showcase their expertise, help people to do better in their work, and self help guides, they might be more to help people in their personal lives. They often showcase the expertise of the author, who might be a therapist, a coach, a trainer, somebody who knows a lot about this area and wants to share what they know in a book.
So, I mean I don’t think there’s many of us, especially of the female variety, who haven’t read a few self help books in our time.
It seems to you be… Shelf help, yes.
And I like to think of them as being not so much about self improvement, I know people do use that phrase, but I always think, we’re all fabulous anyway, we don’t really need improving. But what self help books can do is to help us to understand ourselves better.
And to help understand how we fit in with the world, how we fit in with the other people around us, and how we can interact with them and, just generally lead happier and more fulfilling lives.
And so I just think they’ll be forever popular self help books. I mean, we’re always looking for ways to improve our feelings, our thinking, there’s never going to be an end to this desire for self help books, as far as I can see.
Alison Jones: I love that more positive spin on it as well, that it’s not about fixing you, it’s about enabling you, it’s about equipping you, it’s about helping you sort of do better and the things that you really, really care about.
Ginny Carter: Yes, exactly.
Alison Jones: It’s certainly at the very practical end of the spectrum, isn’t it? It’s very much like a how to, you are sharing expertise to do a specific thing, particularly in this book.
So what makes a good one?
Ginny Carter: Well, I think sometimes it’s easier to look at what makes a bad one and then do the opposite. That’s the way I tend to look at it. So the way I came to How to Write a Self Help Book, the thing that gave me the idea to write it, was that I was a judge in the personal development category at awards.
And I did that category, I think it was two years on the trot. So in that time, I read a lot of self help books. And in fact, I remember one of them was during lockdown. So we were judging at home and so I then had this great pile of books. I wasn’t sure what to do with it at the end.
So I ended up donating them to my nearest charity shop. And I think they must’ve thought I was some kind of self help, mad woman or something. I just gave them about 50 books. But anyway so I think that what that experience taught me was that there were three main things that self help authors tend to do wrong.
And so I thought, well, why don’t I write a book about how to do it right. So, I mean, I think the main thing that people get wrong is that they try and tell people what to do rather than persuading them. So, none of us do what we, none of us change what we do because we’re told to. I mean, any of us who’ve got kids know that.
Alison Jones: It’s actually incredibly counterproductive, isn’t it? The inner five year old starts to come out and go, well, shan’t.
Ginny Carter: Yes, exactly. And our inner shan’t comes out, essentially. But also, I think a lot of us know what we should be doing anyway. It’s just that there’s a reason why we haven’t done it already. And so what we need is for somebody to persuade us that it’s worth our while to change long ingrained habits, to actually, to make that effort to change the way we think. So you need to be a persuasive writer. You need to be thinking about yourself as… It’s almost like putting your arms around the shoulders of your readers and kind of guiding them through. It’s not a question of just telling them what they should be doing.
So that’s the kind of, I think, the biggest mistake people make. And being a persuasive writer is a skill. It’s something that we have to learn how to do. And of course, if you work with people one to one, like you are a coach for instance, you probably know this already because when you talk to your clients, you don’t just tell them what to do. You find ways to show them that this makes sense to them. But when it comes to doing it on the written page, sometimes that kind of flies out the window and people revert back to the telling. So that’s one thing.
The other thing is that ,and I think this is something that’s quite a big issue for self help authors, those who are therapists and people who are used to not really wanting to bang their own drum, because it’s all about the client and not about them, is that they don’t kind of make their expertise and their credibility clear.
So they don’t establish why they’re well qualified to write the book, which is something you need to do really early on and then throughout the book. So sometimes I was left reading a self help book in this particular scenario that I was talking about and thinking, well, why has this person written this book? Why should I listen to them? So that’s something that it’s quite a simple thing to put right. But that’s something that people need to do. And then the third thing was that people don’t always give actionable steps as how you can put this information that you’ve now learned into practice.
And that’s when it just becomes a lot more solid and how to and, you know, you can actually do something with all this new information you’ve got.
So a book, I suppose it then follows from that, that a book that does all those three things will be almost by definition a good self help book.
Alison Jones: And you’ve got such a practical approach to the last piece, particularly the structuring, which I love because you say it, and you and I have both seen it. People think, right, what do I need to say about this? And what’s the next thing I need to say? And they just sort write their whole… And there you are, there’s your book.
And you’ve got this wonderful sort of reordering principle. Just talk us through a little bit about… Well, actually, let’s back up one step. And that whole kind of… The journey that you take the reader on, and then within that, how you structure the information. Because it’s just gold.
Ginny Carter: Oh, thank you. Well, it’s funny because actually it was through the process of writing this book that I really came to much clearer thinking about all this, which of course, as we know is one of the great benefits of writing a book, is you clarify your thinking. So I hadn’t ever really thought it through as deeply as I did until I wrote it and I found that one of the most enjoyable parts of writing this book actually. So it was that a lot of people get confused between what a self-help book is and what it isn’t. And then they start off on the wrong foot because they’ve been muddled really from the word go and then they get into problems later on.
So, there’s a difference between a self help book and a memoir, for a start. There’s a difference between a self help book and a how to guide. And there’s a difference between a self help book and a thought leadership book. And the biggest confusion is between the memoir and the self help book. So, a lot of people come to the self help world because they’ve been through a like difficult and challenging experience in their life, they’ve got through it, and they now want to help other people who’ve got the same problem. And then this often evolves into a professional thing, and they build their career around it. So naturally they want to put their own story into the book, and that’s absolutely right, and indeed that’s part of the credibility of the author.
But the difference in a memoir and a self help book is a memoir is really just a story about a certain time in your life. So if you think of Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, you know, which many of us have read, that’s a story about a transformational part of her life where she had a lot of personal growth, but essentially it was a story about all the things she did.
And you can either choose to take lessons for yourself from that, or not, you know, you might just read it as a nice story, or you might want to learn something from it. But what she hasn’t done is then taught you things in the book, she hasn’t stepped to one side and said, oh, this is what you need to learn from this.
Whereas a self help book will do that. So a self help book is really very much about making teaching points, but the story is a backup to the teaching points. It’s not the whole purpose of the thing. And I think that’s what some people find really difficult is getting that balance right. And if people don’t know what kind of book they’re reading, they will find it hard to get what they need from it, because they will feel a little bit confused.
And so you just need to be clear for yourself, really, what kind of book it is that you’re writing.
Alison Jones: And that point about your own story is… You’re right, it’s a tricky one because your own story is so endlessly fascinating to you and there’s so much nuance in it and to understand this you really have to have gone a few years earlier and you know, you end up writing a sort of real time history of your life if you’re not careful.
But it’s the focus, isn’t it? If you’re focusing on your life story, that’s autobiography, it’s memoir. If you’re focusing on the reader, that’s self help and you’re using your story. But it takes a lot of discipline to use your story in the service of the reader rather than just tell your story.
Ginny Carter: I like that distinction you make, actually, yes, about focusing on the reader rather than on yourself. And both are valuable, not wanting to make any kind of moral distinction. It’s just that they’re different books with a different purpose. So, I think once you get clear on that, and you might decide, oh, it is actually a memoir. That is really what I’m after, so that’s fine. You can go and write a memoir, but once you start trying to combine the two in uneasy ways, you know, that’s where you might get into trouble. And I think also, as well, when I talked about the difference between a self help book and a how to book, of course, a self help book will include lots of elements of how to in it, because it needs to, otherwise it won’t be practical enough. But a how to book you know, you could think of, say, I don’t know, a book that teaches you how to do DIY around the house. Well, that’s not a self help book, you know, that’s teaching you practical skills.
You may then grow in confidence because you know how to do these things, and you might find it actually does make a difference to you as a person, but ultimately that wasn’t the purpose of the book. The purpose of the book was to teach you some new skills.
So again, getting clear on the distinction there is useful because it’s a very different proposition to go into a self help book where you’re asking people to go on some inner journey than it is just teaching them how to tick a box to say they can do X, Y, and Z, which isn’t really what self-help is all about.
Alison Jones: That’s a great point, isn’t it? You’re sort of going below the waterline. This is something that fundamentally challenges the person. Yes, terrific.
And that reorder, because just because I’ve mentioned it and anybody listening is going like, what was she on about with the reordering? Just talk us through that because it is so, useful, practical the little table you have where…
Ginny Carter: chunking? Oh yes, yes, yes. So, it’s kind of difficult to, it’s one of those things you actually have to look at, you have to read, you have to buy the book.
Alison Jones: .You have to buy the book, there you go.
Ginny Carter: Because it’s easier to look at it visually than it is to listen to me describe it. But it’s, essentially what a lot of people do is do exactly what you said, they write what occurs to them as they go along.
And for some people that’s not a bad way of writing. I mean, I think it’s a bit time consuming because you end up having to change quite a lot, but if that’s your bag, then fair enough.
Alison Jones: At least if gets you going, then at least got something to work with.
Ginny Carter: Exactly. And even, even the most organized person might end up with a chapter that is a bit of a hot mess, really.
None of this really flows. I’ve not got any logical sequencing here. It’s going to be confusing for people. So what do you do next? Start cutting and pasting and tearing your hair out and getting completely confused. That’s one option. Another is to do what I call chunking, which is something that I learned from another ghostwriter actually some time ago.
And basically what you do is you go through every single paragraph that you’ve written and allocate it a topic. So it could be like why you need to do a certain thing or a particular aspect of what you’re teaching people to do. And you put a little number by it and then you end up essentially with a list of maybe eight topics for your chapter and each paragraph has been allocated to one of those topics.
And you can then very easily, then when you look at your list of topics, all you’re doing is looking at a list of eight topics rather than a chapter of 3,000 words. So you can very easily then order them, reorder them to make them in a more sensible order.
And then you just simply go through and reorder the chapters in your chapter to match the order in the list. Then of course you have to do some rewriting to make it all flow nicely and work. But that has saved me a lot of grief.
Alison Jones: Yes.
Ginny Carter: I can assure you, especially when I’m ghostwriting books where, you know, people just throw stuff at me in any old order and I have to reorder it to make it work, you know, that, that is a technique that I use every single time.
Alison Jones: It’s just, as I say, pure gold. And I think, you know, for that alone, it’s worth buying this book because it’s such a… and you’re right, you have to sort of see it, the worked example you do, which is really helpful. But I think the broader point as well is that you’re giving people tools that enable them to get out of the weeds.
Because once you are deep into your 60,000 words, however many it is, it’s kind of hard to navigate through that. It’s kind of overwhelming, you feel like you’re in the jungle and everything’s above your head, but just by that process of chunking, it gives you a sort of way of elevating yourself to see the terrain and then you can make more informed decisions about what needs to go, what needs to stay, and what direction you’re traveling in.
Ginny Carter: Yes, exactly, yes, it gives you that hover, helicopter effect where you can just hover over it and see the shape of it. And it makes it just so much easier to decide what should go first, second and third. Definitely a good one.
Alison Jones: Yes, no, it’s brilliant.
And also, you talk a lot about storytelling, which we sort of touched on in the kind of, you know, the temptation to tell your own story with all its glorious nuance and technicolour and, you know, 500 pages worth of it. But storytelling doesn’t always come easily to people who are business experts or therapists or, whatever it is.
So just give us a sort of taste of the stuff in the book about storytelling.
Ginny Carter: Yes, well, the main point I want to get across about storytelling is that there is, you can’t lose when you tell stories in your book because there’s so many benefits to the story. So it’s how we remember things. And I give an example about why we forget facts and figures, but we’ll remember the story that they were embedded within.
We’re willing to sit and learn things from stories that we aren’t willing to do when people just throw information at us, because it’s interesting. We want to know what happens next, then we can remember it. And it’s really how we evolve to learn. know it’s a cliche, but you know, you go back to the caveman times that we sat around telling stories about what you mustn’t do in order to escape the Saber-tooth tiger or whatever. It’s just how we’ve evolved really as humans. So telling stories is just an absolutely essential thing for persuading people from one place to another. And if you’re telling stories of how other people have done it, those people that your readers can identify with, it’s natural that they’ll just become, they’re kind of like swept along for the ride.
It’s just a sort of beautiful way of doing it. Really, it’s actually really not that difficult. And I think what people maybe get a bit intimidated by with stories is that they think of novels or storybooks or whatever, and they think they’ve got to be some master storyteller. And actually, you know, I go through the five key elements of the story and it’s really not that difficult once you break it down, you know, you need to have one clear problem that is being solved and it needs to be really a challenging one that’s going to, people are going to think, well how could this person ever solve this problem, and so it grabs them.
Then you’ve got to show all of the barriers that people overcome in order to get to the place where they have solved it. So what we always do, it always feels unfair to us to have a problem. That problem’s got to seem unfair to the reader too. And then they’ve got to try and solve it in ways that don’t allow them outside of their comfort zone, because whenever we have a problem, we would prefer to solve it without making ourselves feel uncomfortable. But of course, that’s what we’ve been doing all of this time, which is the reason why we bought this book, to tell us how to do it differently.
And then you know, what always happens in a great story is the protagonist will always try and solve the problem again and again but in the wrong way because they’re desperate not to do this one thing that’s going to make them feel uncomfortable, then something will finally push them to the point where they do have to do that. They realize it’s not that bad after all, and then lo and behold, their problem is solved.
So really this is just a very human process that we all go through every time we, you know, we come up against something we find challenging. And if you can illustrate that in your book through stories, you’re really showing your reader that they’re in good company, you know, they’re not…
… there’s nothing wrong with them. They just need to think about it in a different way. And it’s a great, it’s really comforting for them.
Alison Jones: Yes, it’s like you’re saying about getting alongside rather than sort of standing in front of and telling. You’re showing and you’re creating empathy and that’s how we learn best, isn’t it?
Ginny Carter: Oh yes.
Alison Jones: …we’re more relaxed. And you’ve got that lovely formula about, you know, that the person, I’d love to, but you know, but if only, and I’m not going to get it right.
I’m going to mangle it, Ginny. You tell us what it should be.
Ginny Carter: Oh okay, yes, this is a really good way of honing in on your reader’s problem as they would put it. So ‘I’m sick and tired of…’ Is the kind of way it starts. So I’m sick and tired of being overweight, whatever. If I could only, and that’s obviously then, if I could only lose some weight, but I don’t know. And then the, but I don’t know how to lose the weight. That’s the answer, that’s the answer that your book is, that’s the question, sorry, that your book is answering.
So what you’re doing is you’re thinking about how they will put it in their words, which I think is really important because it’s very easy for us to kind of get a bit too high level sometimes with the things that people struggle with.
Alison Jones: Yes.
Ginny Carter: and…
Alison Jones: this is curse of knowledge, isn’t it?
Ginny Carter: Much more concrete terms themselves, you know. Yes,
Alison Jones: Yes, and I think that phrase, I’m sick and tired of, is brilliant because it makes it so immediate and it taps into the energy and if there isn’t emotion and energy behind it, somebody isn’t going to go and spend some money on a book to solve it.
So it really forces you to think, and actually if it’s not something they’re sick and tired of, they’re probably not going to buy a book to solve it.
Ginny Carter: Exactly. And I think this is where it’s helpful when a lot of people write self help books and they say, Oh, this will help everyone. And yes, in theory it would, you know, it might be about improving your communication skills. Well, I mean, heaven knows we could all do with some help with that, it’s not like any of us are perfect.
Yes, exactly. But also, it’s not taking into account the fact that the reader has to see it as a problem in their life. So while we all might want to improve our communication skills, only a certain number of us are motivated to buy a book that will help us to do that. So you’re writing your book for the person who really wants to improve their communication skills. So that kind of cuts out a whole load of people that you don’t need to worry about anymore. You just need to focus on the ones that really want to make a difference.
Alison Jones: And it’s probably more specific than that, isn’t it? I’m sick and tired of not being listened to in meetings. I’m sick and tired of not getting chosen to do a presentation. You know, whatever it is.
Ginny Carter: Exactly. Yes.
So then you are honing in on how they describe the problem to themself. So if you describe it back to them in the book, in their own words, well, you’ve got a reader right there.
Alison Jones: This is going to be, it sounds really greedy now, I’m going to ask you for your best tip. But you know I always do, and you’ve done nothing but give me really great tips for the last 20 minutes. So it’s a bit rude, really. I’m going to ask it anyway. If there’s one thing that you want someone to take away from this conversation, one thing that you’d tell somebody who was just setting out on the journey of writing their own book, what would you say to them?
Ginny Carter: Well, I think I’ll give the same tip as I probably gave the last time I spoke to you actually, which is, because it is such a, it is just so fundamental, which is just know what you want to achieve with your book before you start writing, before you write a word of it. Because if you don’t know what you want to achieve for yourself, for your readers, and for your business, then you won’t know what decisions to make about your book further down the line.
So you won’t know what to write about. You won’t know what format to use. You won’t know who to write it for. You won’t know how you want to publish it. You won’t know how you’re going to market it. Because if you don’t really understand why you’re doing it in the first place. It’s just, you just make your life so much more difficult further down the line, if you don’t get clear on that. And there’s no reason that’s a bad one. You can write your book for whatever reason you want. It’s just know what it is, really.
Alison Jones: Yes, it’s such a foundational point, as you say and I think a lot of people go, Oh, I just want to write a book. I’ve always wanted to write a book. Which is lovely, as you say, that can be a perfectly valid, but actually if you’re writing a business book or you’re writing a self help book, or you have a business to support, you could be so much smarter than that about how it works together and who it’s written for and how that fits with the people that you are serving in your business and all that good stuff.
Ginny Carter: Yes, definitely.
Alison Jones: The whole ecosystem around it. Brilliant. Great tip. Thank you.
And, I’m going to ask you for a recommendation.
So what book, I can’t remember what, we should have checked what you recommended last time. I can’t remember now.
Ginny Carter: Okay, no, it’ll be a different one. I’m not completely unoriginal. I do like to bring something new to the conversation. I’m being a bit of a cheat here, but there’s not actually a self help book I’m going to recommend. But the things I’m going to say about it are just as applicable to a self help book, as they are to a business book, which is what it is.
So, it’s No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer. It’s the story of Netflix and how became this, you know, reinvented themselves. And of course, I mean, Netflix now maybe isn’t quite the ruler of the roost in the way that it was, but I think that the lessons from the book are still just as valid.
And the reason I’ve chosen it really is, well, there’s two reasons. One is that it’s just got this beautifully clear structure. There’s three or four, I think it is, main sections, and each section mirrors the last one and gives you a step by step, it’s a step up from the section before. So you read the first section to get the basics, then you read the next section, well, that’s your next stage once you’ve done the first one. It’s just so clear, what you need to be and where, and also if you’re an entrepreneur or somebody wanting to learn from this book, you can place yourself in those sections quite easily, so you know where you’re at. So the clarity of it is great.
But also something that I think is really quite interesting and a bit innovative about it is that they’ve got these two voices within the book and a lot of books that are written by two authors, they combine the voices and that’s fine. But in this one, each author gets their own turn to speak throughout the book.
And what I think is quite clever is that at the beginning, one of the authors who was outside of Netflix was asked to contribute. She said she’s actually quite cynical about Netflix when she first started. She thought a lot of their supposedly, amazingly wacky new stuff was all a bit of a ploy to just get people to work long hours for no great reward and exploit people and actually, in a way, it was good because it gives the cynical reader a voice to think, yes, I thought that as well, you know, let’s say it’d be interesting to see what they say about this.
And then as you go through, she becomes an advocate of this way of thinking. So you can kind of see her evolution through the book but it’s quite a brave thing to do to start a book with a cynical voice at the beginning. But a very, very worthwhile and I think a very effective one in this particular book as well.
So I think it’s just a way of, seeing a book in a different way and encouraging people to just think about the approach they take and the format they take and the structure they take to their books.
Yes, it just reminded me that you could do something a bit different with it if you want.
Alison Jones: And so I love everything about that. It’s a great recommendation, really, really good book. And it’s a great illustration of what it means to read like a writer. Love that too.
Ginny Carter: Oh yes, it’s a curse, I tell you it’s a curse.
Alison Jones: I know, you could never just read a book. You have to examine it and how are they achieving that effect. And that point about the different ways that you can approach it is terrific. Yes, love that. The cynical voice, as you say, it gets alongside the reader. So it’s just getting people in and actually, when you think about it, I suppose the story of Netflix. You know, we were talking about how you use your own story in the service of the reader. In a sense, that’s what they’re doing here, isn’t it? They’re telling the story of one particular company, but then they’re extrapolating from that lessons and how tos and ideas that you can use in your own business.
Ginny Carter: Yes, you’re absolutely right. I hadn’t thought about it like that. They’re teaching you, but using the story as the foundation for the teaching points.
Alison Jones: Yes, and they’ve got the benefit that everybody knows Netflix and cares about them, which most of us, when we’re writing our memoirs, don’t have that advantage.
Ginny Carter: Yes.
Alison Jones: Nobody cares about your life, they just care about their problems, so focus on those. Yes, brilliant.
So Ginny, if people want to find out more about you, more about How to Write a Self Help Book, more about Your Business, Your Book, all the other stuff that you do, where should they go?
Ginny Carter: Yes, so there’s my website is the best place to start. So that’s marketingtwentyone.co.uk. That’s marketingtwentyone in letters. But I’m also on LinkedIn and Twitter, _GinnyCarter. So I always like to chat with people on there. You can always approach me and message me. And my blog as well is on my website.
And I always have lots of useful tips and information on there too.
Alison Jones: We should probably mention your little course for PI-Q as well.
Ginny Carter: That’s right, yes. There’s a 10 minute, really quick 10 minute course you can do on the PI-Q channel. And I mean if you’re thinking about writing a self help book and you have 10 minutes to spare, then that is a brilliant place to start because if you can’t spend 10 minutes to learn a little bit about the…
Alison Jones: …might not be the project for you. Yes.
Ginny C: …might not be the project for you.
So it will be well worth your while and it’s free.
Alison J: And it’s free. Brilliant.
So I’ll put the link for that and all the other links that you’ve just said up on the show notes at extraordinarybusinessbooks.com for those who are driving without a pen to hand.
Brilliant.
Oh, so much fun to talk to you, Ginny, as always.
Thank you for the pure gold that you have given us today.
Ginny C: Oh, well, thank you, Alison. It’s been brilliant. I’ve really enjoyed it.