PaperBooks - What's Going On!

Fantastic Guardian Interview!!

A fantastic article/interview with one of our authors to accompany a fantastic book - if you haven't already rushed out and bought a copy of this book I really would recommend it.

See the article here and buy your copy here! (it's only £5.27 - you couldn't even buy a couple of pints for that !) If you have read the book and enjoyed it - let me know and we will put your review/thoughts on to the website. It would be great if you spread the word to anyone else you think might like the book too...every little helps...

Myspace

After a little bit of deliberation we finally decided to add ourselves to myspace - so if you are feeling particularly geeky today you can visit us here! Think you can add your own comments to the site and everything - or you could just be our friend...we will be giving away special offers to our myspace friends and possibly even sneak previews to our upcoming titles!

Happy Myspacing...

Random House Sells Direct

So Random House plan to start selling their own books direct from their website next month, a bit of a risk, but something we have thought about doing. At the moment, on our site if you would like to buy books, you are directed through to Amazon. We do have our own bookshop which sells all kinds of books (of course we put our own on the front page!) but we could never compete with Amazon so direct people through to a brand they know to buy our books. Would people buy books from us and trust our unknown brand enough to do so? Or would we lose sales from this? I know everyone always feels secure buying books from Amazon so if it ain't broken don't try and fix it goes the saying! However, this brings us back to the question of giving the indies the chances - does this still count on-line?

I digress however - Random House are selling books direct, we could do this, and we want to do this, we want to be in control of the discounts we offer and the BOGOF deals we can do, but we can't. This is for the simple reason that Nielsen - the lovely people who record every sale and compile the best seller charts won't record sales from a publisher selling it's own books direct. Random House are taking a bit of a risk with this - possibly only a small one as there non-direct sales will probably still be enough to get them up into the best seller charts, but for us it is a problem. How do we dictate how and at what price and with what offers we can sell our books but risk the sales not being accounted for? After all it isn't all about the income (granted a lot of it is!) but I know authors that would much rather see themselves in bestseller lists than just making a good income from their books. A Problem.

A Huge Apology...

This blog is actually a huge apology.

I have to apologise to everyone out there who has: submitted work, sent me emails, letters, called, sent smoke signals, pigeons. I haven't got back to you yet and I am sorry. Yes You. I have been very swamped - very swamped with admin - in fact you could say that, due to lack of assistance and terribly poor time management, in that there actually aren't 24 working hours in one day and I can't stay here until the next morning until I get everything EVERYTHING on my to do list done, I have been too busy to do business. Phew. So here I am with a) a new assistant and b) a ridiculously organised new fangled schedule. At the moment, it feels a bit like when you study for exams and you spend endless hours devising the timetable in pretty colours - something I ought to perhaps get some further advice from my two new and fantastic authors Paul Burman  and Jon Haylett - (of the teaching calibre!) about. Hmmph. Will it help if I persevere?

By the way - you can Pre-order Jon Haylett's debut thriller at Amazon already! (We will understand if in memory of your school days you would like to mark it with red pen and give it a mark out of ten with a possible 'see me'. We might even provide the red pens...)

Is it Ethical?

I'm worried. Very Worried. To give you a bit of background about myself, I left my job at Curtis Brown in about 2004 to set up Writing Ltd. Literary Consultancy which is now run by other people but overseen by me.

People pay for their appraisals at Writing and receive back a report - usually between 7 and 10 pages of feedback. We get clients from agents, from already published authors, from people who have been rejected or people who haven't submitted yet and want to do everything they can to try not to receive rejections and so on. If Writing alert us and let us know that something has come in and may be right up our street - we jump at the chance of looking at it and will follow up. But I am worried that people will think this means people have to pay to be seen by us - no one has mentioned this yet -  am I just being paranoid? Forgive me if I am but it does worry me.

It just occured to me that I always say at all of my talks make sure you avoid agents or publishers that make you pay reading fees as they probably aren't members of The Association of Authors' Agents etc. and then I thought - my god what if people are wondering about us...so - in case you are - we don't charge! (AND I am only 29 and set everything up when I was 25 - sorry had to get that out too - there seems to be a lot of press at the moment about the young publishers and I had a self-indulgent urge).

Anyway I feel better now, much much better...

School Reunions

I have done a fair few talks in my time and have never really had a problem with nerves but last Sunday was a little different - I had been asked to come back to my old school's centenary reunion and give a talk. I had a great time at school but I went to a convent and going to an old girls reunion can be a little daunting - particularly as we were described by our old English teacher as being the naughtiest group she had taught - I do seem to remember a lot of antics, naked pictues of Kate Moss on one of the crucifixes, (one of the nuns had to spend a day in the chapel praying about this), goodness those were the days! It was nice to be back though - up on the stage I felt like I was doing the sixth form play and wanted to break in to the school song - although I knew if I did I would probably get sent to the library after the talk. If you get the chance to go back to school I would recommend - it really makes you think about where you are in life.

Blogging Away

I am so excited to see the PaperBooks authors blogging away! I briefly mentioned it to each of them and now they are all blogging and with some great thoughts! So if you are out there and you are reading this it would be great if you could give them a bit of support and let them know you are reading their blog and that there is someone out there! Keep going guys - loving the insight!