Sometimes the personal is the political
A common refrain I’ve heard during the current election campaign is that none of the main parties really inspire voters – we haven’t had a “Yes We Can” moment from any of the leaders in their TV debates and with public borrowing etc at the current levels, everyone seems resigned to the fact that life’s [...]
Our trip to the London Book Fair
The LBF is huge and mostly about selling rights – UK and foreign – in books; agents are there to talk to overseas publishers, publishers want to talk to the big buyers in the UK such as book clubs and the like and so on…
However, an increasing number of seminars are being run such as [...]
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 [...]
Will Britain’s Bookstores Survive? We think so.
In this week’s Scottish edition of The Big Issue is a feature about the likely future for brick-and-mortar (as opposed to on-line) bookshops. It draws heavily on an interview with Andrew Bentley-Steed, manager of The Edinburgh Bookshop and you can read it here.
Andrew speaks for all of us when he says that he thinks that [...]
Gatekeepers of Last Resort
I read this post on Jane Smith’s excellent blog a few days ago about the roles of literary agents as gatekeepers to the publishing industry and also as a primary filter to ensure that what is submitted to publishers is actually the genre they’re interested in, that it’s of an appropriate standard, that it’s saleable* [...]
Predictions for 2010 – well one at any rate.
On Monday I shall be on BBC Radio Scotland’s Book Cafe programme (ooh – get me!) and one of the things they apparently want me to have an opinion on is what bookish trend we’ll see in 2010. I think they mean in terms of books that are published in which case I hope to [...]
Classy, really classy, Waterstone’s
This morning, savouring our Christmas break but still committed workaholics, Andrew and I met at Brown’s on George Street to spend a very pleasant hour or two over tea and toast making plans for bookshop events and choosing titles for our Book of the Week and Book of the Month promotions (the only titles we [...]