State of Independents

opinions free from chains

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 [...]

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 [...]

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* [...]

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 [...]

About Us

Welcome to State of Independents. We're booksellers and publishers based in Edinburgh and this is where we'll be writing about the book trade as we see it. We write about what's going on in our businesses over at The Fidra Blog but over here we'll be expressing opinions from the independent of mind.

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