Saturday, April 23, 2011

Top Ten Bestseller!

Quick - look now before it updates!



My most recent collection of poetry, Camper Van Blues, has somehow managed to creep into the Salt Publishing Top Ten Bestsellers' list. You can find the list near the bottom of the Salt front page.

Just land there and scroll down.

I may need an alcoholic drink to revive me after that shock ...

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

London Book Fair

Had an amazing day yesterday at the London Book Fair, sited at Earl's Court. Sorry this photo of the exterior is a bit thin. Taken on my iPhone.

Apologies to all those friends and acquaintances who were also there yesterday but I didn't manage to catch up with. I know many Twitter and Facebook friends were about, and I did spot some and wave or have a quick chat - such as Danuta Kean, Carol McGrath, Kate Allan, and Lyn Vernham among others - but I missed a whole bunch of that crowd by failing to make the London Book Fair Tweetup.

Not my fault, I hadn't realised events would be on so late and booked my train for 8pm, then found that to change my Advance ticket would cost over thirty quid. Which seemed a bit steep, even for the undoubted pleasure of a LBF Tweetup. So I trundled home instead, and my sore feet thanked me for it.

Had a productive day, meeting people in independent publishing and discussing Embrace Books, and my role there as editor. I took along Rachel Lyndhurst's Storm's Heart beautiful glossy print edition as a sample, and allowed people to fondle it jealously.


And as an author myself, I met up with both my editors at Transworld, and also with my lovely and fantastically talented agent, Luigi Bonomi - who is very excited about the Young Adult novel I'm currently writing.

I received back some line edits on my forthcoming novel - in paper form, no less, egad! roughly 550 pages to carry home - and met some new faces in publishing as my alter-ego, a historical novelist.

It was a brilliant day and I thoroughly enjoyed it. A massively busy place though - must have walked about ten miles just going round and round the hundreds of stalls!