Good morning. I’m delighted to have been asked to join you today to talk about how authors can promote themselves to bookshops. It’s a sad fact that just as publishers’ lists are shrinking, so are budgets for marketing and promotion and so are the teams of sales reps who tell bookshops about new titles. It is essential that authors are willing to market their books to some degree, whether on-line or in person. And I do know that that’s hard for some people – being a writer is about having time and space and solitude and when your book comes out you’re suddenly expected to become an extrovert willing to talk about all aspects of writing and your life as well as the actual book and to devote time to blogging and Tweeting and maintaining your Facebook page etc.

I do sympathise with anyone who is horrified by the prospect of promoting themselves to bookshops and readers but I’m here today to tell you what bookshops need from you in order to sell your book and to share a few of the awful encounters I’ve had with authors – names have been changed to protect the guilty though, so don’t worry. What you have to bear in mind, more than anything, is that finding good books to sell is as essential for bookshops as breathing is to you and I and that we need to work together to do that.

Publishers big and small have fewer reps out on the road talking to booksellers and I know that there will be thousands of books that simply pass under my radar, so we need authors to bring their books to our attention. One of my raisons d’etre is to discover great books – it’s a wonderful feeling to have someone come back to the shop to tell me that the book I pressed into their hand changed their lives. It’s why I’m a bookseller.

Lovely books and lovely authors make bookselling a great way to make a living. And books and their authors are not inseparable – there are books that I only take one copy of or ignore altogether because the author is vile and there are books whose authors are so talented and charming that we take multiple copies and put them face-out, on the table, in the window etc. We’ve often joked about having a Lovely-O-Meter and where authors sit along it, but joking aside, being nice gets you an awfully long way. Never, ever forget that, whether you’re the top of the best-seller charts or just dreaming of when you can give up your day job to write full-time.  I know that I have a reputation myself for being fairly sharp-tongued at times but many people will tell you that I’m quite nice really and always willing to chat to people about their books and to see whether it’s a title that could work in our shop.

So, why would I choose your book? Roughly 135,000 books are published in the UK each year. My shop stocks around 3,500 titles, depending on the time of year. Even if we ignore the truly awful books that are published, that still means that I don’t have space for all the books that are worth stocking. Therefore, I have to be really picky. Every single title in our shop is hand-picked. I know my customers and their tastes and I’m always looking for lesser-known titles to surprise them with. Books that are half-price in the supermarkets or cheap-as-chips on Amazon aren’t, with some exceptions, particularly attractive to me. My customers typically buy a lot of books but few buy exclusively from me and so my stock has to be unpredictable, comforting, challenging, entertaining, quirky and reliably high quality. And I like to be able to recommend books that they may not have seen elsewhere. But my aim is to sell books – if I can’t sell a book then it isn’t worth wasting space in the shop on it and I don’t stock books just to be nice to writers. It’s a harsh economic world out there and every book in the shop has to earn its place on the shelf.

A good example of the mid-list, not-especially-well-known book that I love to stock is Diamond Star Halo by Tiffany Murray. This book was read and enjoyed by a bookseller friend of mine, who hand-sold it to a mutual friend of ours, who in turn passed it onto me, telling me how much she loved it. I read it and I’m now selling it to masses of our customers. That I mentioned on Twitter how much I was enjoying it and Tiffany popped up to say hi didn’t hurt. She was friendly but not pushy and that’s nice. It’s a mid-list title, by a fairly new author, from a small publisher, Portobello, and although they have an excellent sales team, it had passed me by. It’s a lovely novel but without a hefty publicity budget to buy space in promotions or advertising it was dependent on word-of-mouth to build awareness. If you extrapolate the sales seen in our bookshop and my friend’s bookshop and can replicate that across say 50 bookshops, that could be around 1,000 or so sales in a year. And our shop’s best-selling fiction title has sold over a hundred copies since it came out in February. Imagine that extrapolated across a few dozen shops…

If you’re a mid-list author you need to befriend your local bookshop because if your publisher isn’t paying for you to be in promotions, your book will be shelved in the back of big bookshops or languishing on Amazon where it will be relying on people going to look specifically for it. Or you’re relying that their ‘you might like this’ algorithms are working in your favour. Given the random stuff they’ve suggested to me, I wouldn’t place too much hope on that.

When you befriend one bookshop you befriend many, because booksellers are among the gossipiest people on earth. We love to talk about books – after all, none of us are in this game for the money or the glamour – and when we get together we talk about books we’ve loved, books we’ve hated, books that that came out of left-field and pleasantly surprised us and authors who’ve been a joy or a disaster to work with. Seriously, when it comes to the last of those, half a dozen of us can spend a riotously cheery hour and several glasses of wine swapping horror stories.

So, how do you make a bookshop love you and your book? How do you give your book a chance to make our hearts sing and how do you establish yourself on the Lovely-O-Meter? I should point out that I’m not speaking for all booksellers, just myself. Although I think many of my points would be echoed by others…

Firstly, tell us about your book. But not a couple of weeks before Christmas when I am running around like a headless chicken; not when I’ve got a shopful of customers and never, ever on a Saturday because I’m just too busy selling books. Drop a copy of your book off, marked for my attention, and if you want it back, enclose a padded envelope with enough stamps. I don’t like having to keep lots of books hanging around as we don’t have the space so if there’s no envelope I will assume that you don’t want it back and it will end up in the charity box or the recycling bin.

I’m actually quite a nice person and I know how much you love your book and how proud of it you are and I don’t want to trample on your dreams. However, when you ask me what I thought and I say something vague about it not really being right for our market or whatever, please understand that I might be trying to let you down gently. Of course, it might just be that I don’t think your book’s right for our customers so don’t over-analyse it.

Don’t tell me that you know better than I what my customers want to read. Especially if you’re not actually one of our customers.

Don’t nag me. My husband and our accountant will tell you that doesn’t work. I have a business to run, I am busy and I have a to be read pile by my bed that looks like one of Waterstone’s unlamented 3 for 2 tables. There’s some fantastic stuff in there that I’m looking forward to reading and some stuff that’s probably dross. But if you ask us to consider your book and drop one off, I will read as much of it as possible and if I like it then I’ll order it in. If you really want to know what I thought, emailing is hugely preferable to ringing me or rocking up at the shop. If I didn’t like the book then the latter two put me on the spot a bit and I would rather tell you the bad news by email rather than face to face. You’ll look downcast and I’ll feel as though I’ve kicked a puppy and that’s not nice for either of us. Just because you haven’t heard from me doesn’t mean that I didn’t like your book though – it might well have been ordered and be just waiting for the right customer.

Don’t pitch your book to me on Twitter or Facebook or our blog or wherever. Be professional – send me information and don’t harrass me.

Love your local bookshop. Don’t do all your shopping on Amazon or wherever and then try to play up the fact that you love our shop so much and you’ve written a book that you think I should stock. If you buy a book now and again and are friendly and chatty then when you tell me about your book I’m already predisposed to give it a go.

Don’t do what one author did recently when he called in on a Saturday and wanted to talk to me about his new novel.  His wife cheerfully pointed out that they’d never been in before because they lived in the New Town. I live in Stockbridge and those of you that know Edinburgh will know that the cross-town ride on the number 23 isn’t the most arduous of journeys. Geography alone is not a reason for me to stock your book. Being local and an occasional customer will ensure that I at least read it though. No-one is too big to concern themselves with their local bookshop – you can ask some of my customers who have sales most writers only dream of.

And when you make it big, and if your work is good then I hope you do, remember the people at the independent bookshops who championed your work. They are the people who made sure that the big old world out there actually read your book by actually putting it into people’s hands and telling them how good it was.

If you were at my talk you’ll see that I’ve tweaked this a little just to make it more coherent for those who weren’t at the conference.  I hope it’s of interest/useful and thank you to everyone who has said such nice things about my talk.

You might also find this blog post I wrote a couple of years ago about how not to sell your book to a bookshop interesting.  Almost all of it is completely true although it will take wine or chocolate to persuade me to tell you which bits…

Many of us felt that however much we agreed with the essence of World Book Night; that it was to be a celebration of reading and the joy of books, it would be damaging to the book trade at a point in the economic cycle where we needed to be promoting the idea of book-buying – after all, we might be cutting back on holidays and socialising and shoe-shopping but a book is comparatively cheap at about the same price as a cinema ticket and yet has the potential to be life-changing. Much as I love a new pair of shoes, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that even a new pair of Manolos could change my life.

When I first wrote about our concerns re World Book Night I was unprepared for the opprobrium that was unleashed – although I was far from a lone voice, those of us who were sceptical about WBN were derided as narrow-minded, reactionary, grumpy or even anti-reading. Suggesting that giving away so much product would actually devalue books and that it gave ammunition to the idea that authors were unreasonable to expect to be paid for their work, was seen as almost heretical. The organisers continually dismissed our concerns as the moaning of a small but vocal minority but the support that us naysayers received was significant – I received dozens and dozens of emails from authors, publishers, retailers and readers agreeing that I was right to be concerned.  There was also a lot of criticism from givers hurled at those of us who queried the wisdom of giving away so much stock although that was to be expected – but our argument was with this as a trade initiative and not with those who had really imaginative and worthwhile plans to distribute the books.

In the end, having made my own suggestions as to how World Book Night could be improved for next year and having become quite tired of discussing it, I decided to keep my own counsel and see what happened.  Jamie Byng had enthused to me about how this was going to be an annual event but one which would in future involve and take into account the concerns of booksellers. Although I – and many others – feared that the book trade would see a fall in sales following WBN and worried about the implications for many of us who were trying to cope with trading through a recession, I really hoped that we sceptics were wrong.  I had my fingers crossed so tight that they squeaked that we wouldn’t see a fall in sales following the distribution of the free books, that the much-hyped evening of book programming on BB2 (two documentaries and a showing of the recent film of Brideshead Revisited) would indeed stimulate the masses to rush out and visit libraries and bookshops.  I didn’t want to be right but I did want booksellers to be listened to and not marginalised and had every hope that this would be the case if it was to run in 2012.

Sales figures however were what would define the success or otherwise of World Book Night.  Although The Bookseller gushed about a boost in sales for the books featured in WBN this was not experienced across the wider market.  Way before book sales figures were released by Nielsen Bookscan which collects data from most retailers – around 90% of all books sold are recorded by Bookscan – I knew that sales were down in our shop. Sales in the week immediately after WBN were almost 30% down on the previous week. Over subsequent weeks, we’ve managed to pull this back, but it’s hard not to assume there’s a link between a drop in sales and a few thousand free books being dumped into our local area.  Other booksellers told me of similar drops in sales in their shops.  Later, Bookscan released figures showing that UK bookshops saw takings of £103 million in the four weeks to 2^nd April; some £8.98 million less than the same period in 2010 and the worst March since 2005.  Volume sales were down 12.2% to 14.2 million.  At the same time, the Office of National Statistics released figures showing that overall retail sales in March 2011 were 1.3% UP on March 2010, contrasting with the experience of bookshops.

It gives me no pleasure to be right and to have called it correctly, but I can’t see any factor other than WBN that could have triggered these sharp falls, especially given that the figures for the wider retail sector were comparatively positive.  But sales figures are what WBN has to be judged on and they aren’t good.  So it depresses me to see that another World Book Night is planned for 2012.

I’m pleased that former Foyles marketing manager Julia Kingsford is taking over as chief executive; I have every faith that she will organise things better than the chaos that was this year’s event. However, I was promised that booksellers’ concerns would be listened to and was hopeful that we would see a mechanism introduced to promote sales. But it seems that that was just an attempt to shut the dissenters up rather than a genuine attempt to listen to our concerns and try to work with us. It has to be pointed out though that the press release outlining next year’s scheme wasn’t exactly met with excitement – the Bookseller article received a dozen or so comments, mostly from this year’s givers and a search on Google news for “World Book Night 2012” shows that the story was only picked up by the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Hardly setting the world on fire.

What is planned for next year is little better than this year’s effort – an edition of 25 Shakespeare sonnets will be despatched to 10 million households but bookshops will be able to stock a special £9.99 hardback edition. I do question whether Shakespeare is the right choice to appeal to such a large number of people, and I’m curious as to how these 10 million households will be selected. I’d also be surprised if that edition is very popular in bookshops given that the country’s going to be knee-deep in the free paperback edition.  But other than that, it’s nothing new – book groups will be asked to suggest books; top 100 will be announced and the 25 selected titles announced later. As far as we know at the moment, there will be no incentive to encourage customers into bookshops other than with this hardback edition of the sonnets (which is mere tokenism), no commitment to promoting new writers and nothing has been said about how the distribution process will be improved to avoid bookshops having to double as parcel depots.

We came up with a number of suggestions as to how next year’s project could be run, and Nicola Morgan suggested (and did an amazing job of promoting in such a short space of time) an alternative or complement to World Book Night based more on the Spanish tradition of men giving women a rose and women giving a book. Despite that though, and despite all the other suggestions made by other people in the discussions on this blog and Nicola’s, no-one at World Book Night has listened and the fervent promises of consultation and wanting to listen to booksellers and authors have been empty.

So. We’ve come up with a better plan. One which can promote an unlimited range of authors; will give away masses of books without publishers having to pay for additional print costs; doesn’t require any public funding; won’t require authors to forgo royalties and can include absolutely any in-print title; which will draw customers into bookshops; which can give away a virtually unlimited number of books and which is – importantly – local and sustainable and inclusive.  It also has the possibility of becoming truly global without losing sight of those three factors although if it’s just our bookshop involved that’s fine.

My next blog post – probably in a day or two, have to sort some coding on a website out first – will tell all, but until then think about the book you would choose to give away…

NB: To clarify, World Book DAY is different and I’m a huge supporter of that – it introduces children to books by introducing them to short novels/long short stories by marvellous writers and really promotes sales of books by those authors. For the children who choose not to read one of the free WBD books, they can use their voucher to get £1 off any other book. Those who criticise booksellers as being mean-spirited when they’re less than ethusiastic about WBN are clearly ignorant of the fact that we pay for the World Book Day books, we organise schools events and that £1 discount is given by us out of our takings, not reimbursed by anyone. And we don’t mind – partly because any initiative to get children reading is worth supporting, but also because, from a business point-of-view, there is an obvious benefit in introducing children and their parents/carers to the fun experience that is visiting a bookshop.

But – with a few exceptions – I haven’t been told this by people at the frontline of the booktrade.  I’ve been told this mainly by the Booksellers Association.  And told this in an incredibly patronising manner when I queried whether this was something they should be upporting and raising my own worries about the future implications of WBN.

So, aware that it might just be me and that I was missing something, I emailed half a dozen booksellers who I know and respect and asked what they thought.  In the main they shared my uneasiness. One agreed with me but took comfort in the fact that the list of books were the sort “chosen by people who read for people who read and by the middle class for the middle class. I’m going to hope that it doesn’t impact on sales as these are exactly the sort of Guardian readers who see shopping local and in ‘real’ shops as a political movement”.  Which is very true and one which probably (I hope) applies to our shop in leafy south Edinburgh as well.

Another – more forthright – bookseller said: “my main issue is that it is such a tremendous missed opportunity.   Byng et al are great at getting the publicity, but the idea itself is only marginally better than the … ‘bookaholic’ wank.”  Yes, ‘bookaholism‘ – remember that?  It was kicked into the long grass after the trade made it clear what a lousy idea that was…That same bookseller was fairly blunt in his views of the BA too and I have to agree.

Someone else, after making the point that WBN seems to promote the idea that it doesn’t really cost anything to write, publish or retail a book and that they’re not really worth paying for, said: “At best, it seems like some kind of industry-wide loss leader / giant marketing campaign which might be perfectly normal business practice for the chains and large publishers, but unfortunately it’s not really something I can afford my customers to become accustomed to just yet … but at worst, it seems to be cutting me and my shop out of the book scene in the town completely – why bother with the bookshop when WBN / publishers are giving the books away free?”

Others had similar thoughts although a couple did say that they would have a think about how they could get involved if they thought it might get some new people through the shop doors but they didn’t seem to think that was likely, given that it seems to be mostly about readers giving books to other readers rather than trying to recruit more people to the joy of reading.  These are not head-in-the-sand, Luddites who are negative about every new initiative that is mooted.  These are knowledgeable, experienced booksellers who are regularly lauded as some of the best in the country.  People with years of experience as booksellers but also – crucially – as people who run their own businesses.

So, having established that I am far from alone in the trade in my worries, I started asking our reps what responses to WBN they were hearing as they travelled highways and byways bringing news of forthcoming titles.  Without exception they told me that my feelings seemed to be universal among independent booksellers and that even in the chains the response was generally negative and at best disinterested.

And that’s before we even get to the comments on my last blog post where the pro-WBN lobby were so spectacularly outnumbered by the anti-WBN brigade.  And the emails I’ve received from publishers, booksellers, readers and authors in the last couple of days almost all of which agreed that WBN is pure folly.  That Amazon will have even more books priced at 1 penny by 6th March and that many books will end up languishing in boxes, undonated, as suggested by Tim and The Bigooner, is highly likely.

We are not stupid and nor are we mean-spirited – we give a lot of books to charities, we run book groups for adults and children, take authors to schools and The Edinburgh Bookshop will soon be launching our big new charity project.  and like us, most booksellers I know also run a shedload of charity and not-for-profit activities.

But we still don’t see why giving away so much stock is the best way to spread the love of good books and to promote reading.  And we don’t like being condescended to by our own trade body, or publishing lackeys who have no idea of the stress and responsibility of running your own business and can’t even begin to comprehend the fury some of us feel at being screwed over in this way.  Publishers, booksellers, authors and readers have a symbiotic relationship and to alienate booksellers by effectively cutting them out of the supply chain is foolish.  We all need each other.

Next blog post – how World Book Night could have been run in way which would promote reading, promote book sales and to reach even more people…

The public (those who are aware of it) think it’s a great idea and quite understandably so – it’s getting something for free and we all love a freebie, especially some of the book bloggers who’ve been so breathlessly excited about WBN.  Less excited are some authors – the writers of the 25 selected books will not receive royalties and given that most authors earn a very small income from their writing it sets a worrying precedent for those further down the ladder from these best-sellers.

Much less excited too are booksellers: while some are cautiously positive, most of the people I’ve spoken to are horrified; when we’re already being undercut by supermarkets who can wrestle bigger discounts from publishers and Amazon and Tesco etc are even selling books as loss-leaders, to further erode our market and the perceived value of books is foolish in the extreme.  And that’s the problem: not that this will necessarily undermine sales but that it’s another way of eroding the public’s perception of the value – and cost – of books.  As one hugely well-respected bookseller said to me “people will think that if the trade can afford to give away so much, our margins must be enormous and our profits vast…”.  It’s hard to think of another industry which has given so much product away.  Or indeed one which would want to.

When I contacted the Booksellers Association – our trade body – and raised my concerns I was very patronisingly put in my place.  That I don’t see the wonder of Jamie Byng’s grand idea is down to the fact that I’m a Luddite and a flat-earther who refuses to appreciate the amazing surge in reading that will result from World Book Night.  A surge which is unproven, unresearched and even the Hon Jamie – a man of many ideas, some genius and others utterly ridiculous – can only claim that “everything in my experience and instincts say its [sic] going to do something really amazing for books”.  I’m not a fan of market research – much of it has a flawed methodology and makes unjustified claims (although that’s probably because I come from an academic background where every assertion has to be have substance), but surely before the booktrade gives away £9 million of stock there should have been some sort of research?  I’m finding hard to see how the instincts of Jamie’s intestines should be grounds for this sort of giveaway.

Tim Godfray, Chief Executive of the BA, tells me that the BA Council see World Book Night as an opportunity for bookshops to “Reboot their Reading Communities”.  WTF?  That’s one of the problems with projects like this – slogans that at best mean nothing and at worst are merely spin intended to distract from the poor thinking behind them.  He also pointed out to me that booksellers are not being asked to make any financial contribution, implying that that means we’re not entitled to any opinion.  Which is wrong – the activities of the BA are funded by subs paid by members and so the time he and the rest of the staff are spending on this is in fact funded by booksellers and we should be able to question whether this is the best use of their time and our money.

Tim informed me that most of the funding, whether in kind or in cold hard cash, is coming from publishers and others in the trade.  That publishers are happy to forgo such a chunk of profit on some of their best-selling books is indeed surprising, but given the discounting they indulge in, endlessly eroding profit in the quest to sell just a few more books in the supermarkets, even if it’s at a loss, logic does seem to be in short supply in the boardrooms.  And I suspect that in order to get these books printed for free, the printers have tied those publishers into contracts regarding the amount of business they’ll put their way in the next few years, thereby covering their costs.  I’d be amazed if that’s not the case.  And of course, the authors concerned are losing out.  Those whose books have been chosen might be selling enough to not miss the royalties – authors such as Lee Child, Marian Keyes and Margaret Atwood are probably not too fussed and have no doubt been spun a line about how this giveaway will do (completely unquantified and unknown) wonders for their backlist sales.  But for many authors WBN merely reinforces the public’s suspicion that all authors are minted and can afford to work for free and that they certainly shouldn’t expect to get paid.

World Book Night means that booksellers, already working hard to make customers realise why indies don’t discount in the same way and why Amazon can afford to knock our cookbooks at less than half price (because they don’t have to have shops, or trained staff etc) will have to work even harder now to reinforce the idea that there is a cost involved in producing and selling books.  After all, if you’re a punter and there is a charity shop full of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie that were given away aren’t you going to wonder why Muriel Spark’s other books are being sold at £8.99 in the bookshop up the road?

Next blog post – Not just me – reactions from others in the trade

Blog post after that – how this could have been done in a way that promoted reading AND book sales

An army of Bookstart coordinators run activities such as reading groups in community centres, promote library membership, advise childminders and nurseries and generally work tirelessly to build on the basic premise of giving children their very own books from an early age.  And the inclusive nature of the scheme which gives books to all pre-schoolers rather than just those who are means-tested or specially selected by some other means as needing additional help promotes the idea of reading as an activity for everyone.  It doesn’t feel like charity or ‘intervention’ and thus has no stigma.

My own experience with young people who haven’t developed the habit of reading possibly points up the need for the Bookstart scheme rather well.

I have a PGCE and worked for some time with teenagers who were drifting into further education following undistinguished school careers.  This was in the mid to late ’90s and these teenagers were too old to have benefitted from Bookstart.  The common factor that linked all of them was that they didn’t read for pleasure.  I found that if I could get them to start reading it helped their attainment levels in the subjects they were studying.  What they read might not have been directly related to their courses but it was part of a process that made visiting the college library less of a chore, helped them to realise that the knowledge it held could help them to achieve the jobs and careers that they aspired to but which they felt were impossible to grasp, that books were not dusty and irrelevant.  Would they have passed more exams if they and their parents or carers had benefitted from Bookstart?  Maybe not.  But it wouldn’t have hindered them and it might have improved their attainment levels.

It is not over-dramatic to say that losing Bookstart would be a tragedy.  Books can change lives.  Establishing and maintaining the habit of reading can dramatically alter the life chances of children and young people.  Books are one of the foundation stones of our culture and to erode the importance of reading will undoubtedly undermine much of our country’s literary, artistic, scientific and business standing.

That picture book about a penguin or a patchwork elephant or a cat or a digger is the beginning of an imaginative adventure which can change lives. Don’t let that adventure be stifled at the very beginning.  Bookstart’s £13 million of funding is the equivalent of a second-class stamp for every person in the country.  Not even peanuts; cheaper than peanuts.

You can sign the petition to keep Bookstart’s funding here.  Please do.

Read more

It’s not that we look down on self-published authors, it’s just that generally speaking if someone is a good writer and professional in their approach and believes in what they’re writing and listens to constructive feedback their work will find a home with a ‘traditional’ publisher (ie one which doesn’t expect the writer to pick up the tab and which spends time and money editing, typesetting, designing and marketing the book).  There is no great conspiracy that stops people becoming published authors.  Really – agents and publishers need to turn a profit and are looking for great books and if no-one wants yours then you need to look at the reasons you’re getting knocked back and address them.

The perils of self-publishing is something I’ve written about before about a year ago: here, here and here and other people who are much more authoriative than me such as Nicola “crabbit old bat” Morgan and the marvellous Jane Smith at How Publishing Really Works have written lots on the subject.  But despite the increasing number of people warning against self-publishing – even if you don’t get ripped off it’s unlikely that you’ll end up with anything a bookshop wants on their shelves – the number of self-pubbed titles arriving on our desk is increasing exponentially.

In the last few weeks we’ve received children’s picture books with illustrations described as ‘naive’ but which were actually just dreadful; books with grammatical errors in the blurb*; memoirs of people that no-one – barely even Google – has heard of; soft porn which managed to be neither erotic or literary despite the enthusiastic claims in the blurb; books with covers so ugly only their creators could love them; books with glowing endorsements from the people who run the self-publishing outfit (to paraphrase Mandy Rice Davies ‘well, they would say that, that wouldn’t they?); poetry which wasn’t even emo-6th form level and there seems to be a never-ending supply of would-be literary fiction, YA books about vampires and children’s books about anthropomorphic toys, including a bear named after a domestic airport (I mean, WTF?).  And there’s one libellous joy which wasn’t sent directly to me by the author but which the temptation to rip apart here is almost too great… for the moment I’ll wait until his on-line rantings get too personal and then the gloves will be off.

So, if you have self-published your book and want to send it to us do make sure that it will stand up to our (very) critical scrutiny, that there’s nothing on the outside which will make us chuck it straight in the recycling box and that you accept that the chances of us stocking it, based on past experience, is about 1 in 75.  We’re so short of space that we don’t have room for the complete canon of Jane Austen so your book is going to have to be seriously good for me to shoehorn it onto our shelves instead of finding space for Mansfield Park.

* and please don’t jump in here to criticise any grammatical or punctuation errors I may have made – this is a blog post, not a book I’m publishing and which I expect to stand on its own merits alongside professional published titles.

But one thing leapt out. In the Observer print edition, accompanying that second article about the Lutyens and Rubinstein bookshop in West London was a sidebar in which Julie Myerson was quoted as saying:

“I buy all books on Amaz*n now because of the huge price difference. But I still use bookshops as places to go to first – to remind me of what’s out there and to look at and touch the books.”

This is Julie Myerson - Guardian columnist of the ‘all about me’ type, Newsnight Review contributor – writer of lit-fic novels which generally don’t get masses of attention beyond positive broadsheet reviews and being long-listed for various awards.  Not that a Booker long-listing is to be sneered at, but it doesn’t usually translate into masses of sales.  No, Myerson’s books are the type which usually rely on word-of-mouth and hand-selling by booksellers who are passionate about them.

Until her last book.  The Lost Child is a lightly fictionalised account of her son’s drug-taking and subsequent ejection from the family home aged 17 and garnered many column inches (accompanied by pics of JM looking meaningful and some interviews with her understandably pissed off son) due to the dubious morality of exploiting one’s family situation for financial gain – is it really any different to Katie Price’s apparent inability to conduct her life without a film crew on hand?  This publicity meant a huge increase in sales and Myerson probably feels that she doesn’t need to concern herself with independent bookshops any more.

I don’t mind people buying books from Amazon if they’re cheaper – it’s one of the reasons why we don’t waste space on glossy sleb chef cookbooks and we skip on much best-selling hardback fiction with its over-inflated RRP (to allow for the massive discounting that goes on), but I do object to people using us as Amazon’s shop window as Myerson is advocating.  Come, browse, pick up the new Dan Brown on-line or in Asda if you wish (because they’ll be selling it for less than we can buy it in for), but spend some money with us and don’t just pay lip service to the fluffy, romantic idea of having a local independent bookshop.  Especially if you’re a writer of less than entirely commercial fiction such as Myerson’s because you really should appreciate what the word of mouth of booksellers can do for sales – not for nothing is Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses our best-selling fiction title. 

Myerson would have done well to remember is that when she’s no longer able to promote her books by prostituting her family circumstances she’ll be hoping that us indies are going to support her and embrace her efforts.  Right.  Think you might have shot yourself in the foot on that one Jules.