Overcoming Authors’ Reticence. Or, How to Make Bookshops Love You and Your Book
A couple of weeks ago I was deeply honoured to be asked to join a panel at the Society of Authors in Scotland to discuss ways in which authors could promote themselves and how it was nothing to be frightened of. Unlike my fellow panel members the wonderful Peggy Hughes from the Scottish Poetry Library [...]
World Book Night 2011 – really a bit rubbish.
Way back when, several weeks before World Book Night (remember that?) I, along with many other booksellers and interested parties such as authors and publishers, raised concerns that, in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s, it might not be in the best interests of the trade to give away a million books. [...]
World Book Night – Am I alone? Not so much…
In the last few weeks, I’ve been told quite often that I’m wrong to be worried about World Book Night and the giving away of £9 million of stock. I’ve been told that it doesn’t further devalue the book as a purchase; that it doesn’t reinforce the notion that authors should work for free; that [...]
World Book Night – misguided and misjudged?
As you know (or may not – it’s amazing the number of people who haven’t heard of this most trumpeted event), 5th March has been declared World Book Night, emanating from an idea put forward by Jamie Byng of Canongate. Even the title is hubristic – there is nothing global about the project. 20,000 ‘givers’ [...]
Don’t let books be marginalised – save Bookstart
I could write a great deal here about the need to encourage in children the habit of reading for pleasure and the need to help parents to start reading with their children. There is masses to say about the folly of government plans to remove funding from the brilliant Bookstart scheme which has since 1992 [...]
Post at The Fidra Blog – Patti Smith
A week or so ago, we went to Oran Mor in Glasgow to handle the booksales and signing at Patti Smith’s gig to promote her new autobiography, Just Kids. It was a brilliant night in lots of ways and we were all completely star-struck at having met such a legend…
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Self Published Authors – before you send me your book bear this in mind…
Ask any bookseller about self-published books and they will groan. Depending on how many self-published books they are asked to stock they will groan and bang their heads on the table. If they are given as many as we are they will groan, bang their heads on the table and demand a stiff drink.
It’s not [...]
Me Me Myerson
Since Borders went into administration there has been a flurry of newspaper articles considering the future of bookselling. These have ranged from talking heads romanticising the Tim Waterstone days at the eponymous chain, to features about boutique-style shops in posh areas of London to trying-to-be-controversial pieces telling us that bookshops and the dead-tree media that [...]