State of Independents

opinions free from chains

Rights and Copyright

This is a post for the lovely Jane Smith’s Copyright Day (she writes How Publishing Really Works, but I’m sure you know that already).
As both publishers and booksellers we get a lot of books (or to be frank, “books”) that people would like us either to publish or sell. The quality varies (understatement), but what [...]

An Education

[Advance warning: rant ahead...]
Since early February I have been organising the Scottish book launch for a new title by an award-winning and very popular author who writes books for teenagers. It’s going to be a schools event and when the publisher phoned us up to talk about it we were extremely excited. We were asked [...]

Entitlement

Most of our customers are a pleasure to chat to; I would even go out for a glass of wine with quite a few of them. However, Vanessa and I have both commented recently that there are a few customers you want to take aside and point out that they have just been quite rude [...]

About Us

Welcome to State of Independents. I'm Vanessa Robertson. I live in Edinburgh and my husband and I own a bookshop and tiny publishing house. This is where I write about the book trade as I see it and I'm not always as diplomatic as I should be... We write about what's going on in our businesses over at The Fidra Blog

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