A good start to the year and let's hope it carries on like this. I arrived back to my desk to find I had been elected as a fellow of The Royal Society of Arts - fantastic news! I will keep you all posted about various goings on throughout the year.
London Libraries have taken on A Blues for Shindig by our lovely author Mo Foster to promote throughout London as part of their scheme to deliver books that are either limited editions, or from smaller independent publishers, to a wider audience. We know they will love it as it is a genuine London read - total 1950s Soho at its best!
We have just set up a Squidoo lens for PaperBooks so have a look and see what we have featured over at our lens: Squidoo Lens - PaperBooks
Congrats to Jon Haylett - author of Cry of the Justice Bird for taking the plunge and setting up his own website. We are currently finding places to link this to but tell everyone you know about it and get people visiting! Jon's blog will up there as well as on PaperBooks so you can really make sure you keep up to date with Jon's blogging!
The website address is www.jonhaylett.co.uk so hop on over and have a look!
Fantastic news! One of our authors Paul Burman - The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore is getting some great publicity before his book has even hit the shelves! This is set to be a biggy so we have made it available to pre-order on Amazon already!
See the interview here on Mike French's blog!
An interesting snippet of information forwarded to me by my colleague Danielle has filled me with pride for my home county!
Essex, contrary to its dumbed-down image, now boasts more reading groups than any other county. The tastes of these small, informal gatherings are hard to gauge, because they select such a wide range of books, but there is an enormous 'word-of-mouth' effect, with partners and friends often going on to read the lesser-known choices.
Read the full Observer Article
If you are an Essex book group and you are reading this - contact us and we will provide you with free copies of exciting PaperBooks' Books!
If you are interested - I will be giving a talk at the Saffron Walden Literary Festival next week on Thursday afternoon - all about how to get published. The festival should be a huge amount of fun with some big names so please do come along if you can! More information can be found at Harts Events If you can come along it would mean a lot to independent booksellers nationwide - the reason - Harts (who organise the event) was founded in 1836 only to close down last month with WH Smith's to move onto the site. The Saffron Walden Literary Festival is a good way to show support for the bookshop - even after it has closed down. A small consolation I know.
I am not sure if there are ever any people from Borders reading this blog but I have to say that They have been absolutely fantastic. From the moment we submitted our first titles to them they have been nothing but supportive every step of the way. We have been included in their promotions and have had some fantastic feedback from our readers.
When Caroline Mileham stood up at the IPG meeting at the beginning of the year and said that she was really hoping to champion independently published books she meant exactly that and has delivered. In fact she has delivered more than we could have ever expected - thanks Borders and Caroline for sticking by the indies and your word!
Huge excitement over here at PaperBooks as Borders have just approached us to ask if they can put the Cry of the Justice Bird in to their book group for a second month running as it got such great reviews in the first!
Congrats to Jon Haylett - I am sure it isn't usually supposed to happen that way round!
Just to let you know if you are desperate to get your hands on copies of either The Angel Makers by Jessica Gregson or Cry of the Justice Bird by Jon Haylett they have both been picked by Borders as part of their Book Group Picks!
If you are in a book group and you would like copies of these books for your groups - contact us and we will see what we can do!
