Birthdays, conferences and fugly books

Last night I went along to the Barrington Stoke 10th Birthday Party. Barrington Stoke are one of Scotland's most successful publishers, producing quality books for reluctant and dyslexic readers. Last year they won the Children's Publisher of the Year at the Independent Publishing Awards. It was a good evening, and I'm glad that they could celebrate 10 years of successful publishing. We featured Barrington Stoke on BfS.com a couple of years ago, so I'm hoping to update that soon with a new feature on their new range of books for adults with a reading age of 8. As ever, they call on respected authors such as Allan Guthrie and Stuart MacBride. Watch this space...

At the party I also had a chance to chat to Vanessa Robertson of Fidra Books and The Children's Bookshop, in Bruntsfield in Edinburgh. I love Vanessa's blog, and I hope to see more of her 'Fugly Fridays' soon. Booksellers, not necessarily publishers (and certainly not designers), are the ones who have hands-on experience of what book covers sell and what will turn a customer away from an otherwise excellent book. So, be brave Vanessa - show us your fugliest covers, and a few of your favourites too!

Having said that, I'm often surprised when we at BooksfromScotland.com sell a book without a jacket image or even a blurb. One of our best-sellers, an ASLS guide to the books of Iain Banks, has been missing a cover since day one. I don't even have a copy in the office to scan the cover myself.

Also blogging is Edinburgh sci-fi author Charles Stross, who recently complained about the e-mail interview. It takes too long to do, the questions quickly become repetitive... I'm sure he has a point. Most of the interviews we have on BfS.com have been done through email, but I do try to avoid the dullest questions. ("Where do you get your inspiration?" is probably the easiest question to ask, and the hardest to answer.) I don't think Charlie's "Antiview" is quite the right solution though.

A few days ago I went down to the 100th CILIPS conference, held at the Peebles Hydro hotel. A nice excuse to get out of the office, even if it did mean getting up an hour earlier than normal... It's a hard life!

A busy week

Well, we've been keeping ourselves busy and continue to promote Scottish authors, books and publishers. We now feature reviews and articles from the Scottish Review of Books, including an extensive interview with Douglas Dunn. We're featuring literary magazines from across Scotland - this month is Pushing out the Boat, from the North East. Our Book of the Month is Scotland Recommends - a collection of recommendations for the best restaurants, beaches and even public toilets in Scotland. These recommendations first appeared in the Scotsman.

We've a special offer on four new Scots language books from Black & White - fun books with the backing and research of Scots Language Dictionaries behind them. Dunedin Academic Press have provided us with an extract from their new book Fossils Alive! - read the piece online, or download a PDF to read later.

Congratulations to Ms Goes, from London, who won our Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency competition from last month. She has won a limited edition slip-cased edition of the first of Alexander McCall Smith's Mma Ramotswe novel. Birlinn provided us with the prize.

We're working with John Hudson, of Markings magazine, to upload some video interviews of Scottish authors like William Neill and Sian Hayton - hopefully the first of these will appear by the end of the month. Like everyone else, we're thinking a lot about digitisation, DRM, e-Books and e-Readers recently, and features like these videos are part of this.

I've got author biographies of JM Barrie, Alistair Moffat and Archie Hind under preparation, and one from début novelist J. David Simons coming soon too.

Last evening I attended the launch of Andrew Nicoll's début novel The Last Mayor, which is published by Black & White. B&W have already sold the international rights to HarperCollins in Australia, and a Norwegian publisher, before the book was even published. It's a charming tale, a love story really - it's all the more surprising to discover that Nicoll is a tough-skinned journalist for the Sun.

I'm off to Wales this weekend, for a stag party, so I won't be around on either Friday or Monday. Wish me luck - we'll be carting, and drinking, although not at the same time!

So, chin up, keep reading those Scottish books, and remember that a healthy publishing industry is a diverse publishing industry...

Is there an author in you?

They say that everyone has a novel in them. That may be true, but writing a book takes more than just putting pen to paper, and writing a successful book is harder still. At Publishing Scotland, we often field calls from would-be authors (and worse, poets) looking for advice on getting their book published. Walking into any city-centre bookstore, with their hundreds of thousands of books, may give some people the impression that getting a book published and into the shops is an easy business.

It's anything but.

There are two basic ways to get your book published these days. The first is to go down the self-published route, paying a company like lulu.com or authorhouse to convert your manuscript into book form. Some of these are quite sophisticated, offering proofreading, cover design, bibliographic services, listings on Amazon.com, print-on-demand, colour books and more. They all cost, of course. None of these services will get your book into your local branch of Waterstone's or Borders Books, no matter what they promise.

Self publishing can be very useful - if you want to share a story with family or friends, to create a family album perhaps - self publishing companies like these can simplify the process at a fair price.

If you have written book and want to see it on the shelves of your local bookstore, then you need to go to a publishing house.

Publishing houses - like those listed on the Publishing Scotland website - will never charge you for publishing books. Publishers take on the costs and the risks of publishing a book with the hope of making a profit. Publishers take the time and effort to proof and edit, design and market their books. They follow the trends, and know whether childhood memoirs or picture books are popular this season. They build relationships with authors, investing time and money in developing writers. And importantly, they build relationships with bookshops like Waterstone's, Amazon and BooksfromScotland.com, a never ending (and sometimes frustrating) task.

This process takes time, and many most manuscripts will never see the light of day. Publishers have huge "slush piles" of manuscripts from hopeful authors. So patience is essential if you send a manuscript to a publishing house.

When looking for a publisher, look for a company who have experience in publishing the sort of book you are writing. Many publishers are simply not interested in poetry, or children's books, or literary fiction, so don't waste your time or theirs submitting unsuitable books. Most publishers have websites these days, so do your research first.

Research the market as well. Have a look at the best-selling lists - what books are selling right now? Beware that if there are 5 memoirs in the current top 10, their might not be any room left in the market for more. At the risk of sounding cruel, your childhood experiences might be nice for you and your friends to remember, but the "miserable Irish/Scottish childhood" market is pretty well serviced already, and you'll have to offer something really fresh to make a success out of a book like that.

If you are writing "literary fiction" then an agent is essential. Some literary fiction houses simply don't accept any unsolicited manuscripts at all. The BooksfromScotland.com site has some information on agents in Scotland.

When you send a manuscript, make it easy for the publisher! Include a covering letter with a little biography of yourself; perhaps list other books which are like yours; make it clear that you are willing and able to help with publicity by appearing at events and giving readings. Don't go overboard though - too much information is as bad, possibly worse, than too little.

Any article on getting published inevitably ends with "be patient - and persistent". There are countless tales of authors submitting their books to 20 different publishers before finally being publishers - not least our own JK Rowling. So persistence is essential. Don't be tempted to keep "checking up" on the progress of your manuscript with a publisher, as too many nagging phonecalls and the publisher will likely return your manuscript unread. There are plenty more to choose from, after all...

Good luck!

New Year News

Happy New Year,

I trust yours started better than mine - I've been laid up with a virus and not really any better now, but I had to come in to work and keep BooksfromScotland.com updated. Please forgive me if the updates are a little slow this month though.

Later this month we hope to hold our AGM - mostly boring discussions about sales targets and publisher participation. But it's also a chance for us to really think about the future of the site, and ways to make it more useful. For instance, in our customer surveys, one of the things people complained most about was the white-on-green text in our left-hand navigation menu. Well, that's now changed, with a much clearer blue-on-white menu. We've also just revised, expanded and prettified our Links page - please, check it out. And we have something clever planned for our google maps, hopefully coming soon.

We were quite busy in the last few months of 2007, largely down to the success of Maw Broon's Cookbook. It's gone to reprint now, and we hope that more stock will arrive in early February. The book is a great example of what we at BooksfromScotland.com can offer you which Amazon and others retails can't. Did you check out our pages to download and print out? Or see some of the newspaper coverage describing the book as a "health risk"? Maw Broon has been such a success for us that we have a 6-foot cardboard cut-out of the pinny-wearing matriarch held high on a bookcase in the office, watching over us all.

Congratulations to Ann Kelley, who won the 2007 Costa Children's Book Award for her novel The Bower Bird, published by Edinburgh company Luath Press. Apparently, Kelley wasn't even aware that she had been entered for the award. I know that Luath have had a lot of faith in The Bower Bird, and the previous book The Burying Beetle, so it's great to see their faith finally pay off. The Bower Bird is our January Children's Choice (which we picked before the winners were announced!).

One of the great advantages of working for BooksfromScotland.com is the chance to see and read so many great Scottish books. One of the disadvantages is that nobody buys you any books for Christmas, because you get so many free books already. So this Christmas I've been reading Gentlemen, a Swedish novel written in the early 1980s and now published in English by Canongate. I've been re-reading Iain M Banks' Excession, purely for pleasure. And my boss and I are arguing over who gets to read James Meek's forthcoming We Are Now Beginning Our Descent first.

Finally, resolutions. I'm not a great believer in new year resolutions, but I will make one: I promise to blog more often!

Until next time,

Liam

What are you looking for?

Good afternoon,

I usually like to spend my Friday afternoons at BooksfromScotland.com thinking about the future of website, and what we can do to make it better. And equally, I like to look at the site traffic to find out what pages work and what don't.

For instance, in July the most-looked at page was, naturally, the homepage. Our features like Scottish Crime and The Publishing Cupboard followed closely behind. We also get a lot of traffic on our book category pages, like Biography & Autobiography and Humour. I didn't find any of this surprising, so I then looked at the search terms which drive traffic through to the site. Now, James Robertson scores very highly - month on month, he and his novel The Testament of Gideon Mack come top of the list. It seems, according to Google, that we're the best place to come for information on Robertson - we're not going to argue with that! What is a little unusual is that he is number 1, every month.

So what else can we find from the website traffic logs? Well, there's been a lot of interest in Alfred Noyes, who isn't even Scottish, but be inspired Nicola Morgan's novels The Highwayman's Footsteps and the forthcoming The Highwayman's Curse. Jessica Stirling also features highly, so perhaps we should prepare a biography or feature on her (or him; Stirling is a joint pseudonym for Hugh C. Rae and Margaret M Coghlan). Crime writer Aline Templeton came third; novelist Andrew Drummond was fourth. We've collected these figures in a new feature for the site, "Most Searched For... Authors". I'm also trying to present this as an "author tag cloud" - very web2.0. I'll update this at the end of August and see how it changes.

I've also done the same for books - Gideon Mack is at the top (strange, people are searching for it but we haven't sold many copies recently). Second is James Hogg's The Three Perils of Woman (so Gillian Hughes' feature on Hogg is well timed). Something completely different - Lorraine Kelly's Baby & Toddler Eating Plan came fourth, and is selling quiet well. Nothing to do with me...

There will be more of these sorts of things coming soon. I like ploughing through stats and databases. Did you know there are 99 authors on the site with more than 50 books?

So what else has been going on? Well, it's party season in Edinburgh, and in the last two weeks I've been to the launch party for the Book Festival (rather fun), a party for Pocket Shorts, from our office neighbours Teebster, and on Monday the Publishing Scotland summer party. I'm all partied out! But it's been a good chance to meet the publishers who sometimes seem just to be an email address. I'll write more about this soon.

How much did you pay for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? How much is a book worth to you? At BooksfromScotland.com we knew we could never be the cheapest, so we haven't even tried. Publisher Bloomsbury set the price of this 600 page hardback at £17.99. All the major retailers immediately set their prices at around half that; the supermarkets undercut them by a few pennies. ASDA were reportedly selling copies for just £5.00.

ASDA won't have made any money at all selling the final Harry Potter. If I were a shareholder I'd be tempted to ask why. Even the chains like Waterstone's will only really break even.

So who got it wrong? Did Bloomsbury set the price too high for children, as ASDA have claimed? How much do you think is a fair price? If everybody sold it at full price, how many genuine Harry Potter fans would have paid it?

Here's another question for you: how much did you pay for the last CD album you bought? A recent release, rather than an old favourite. I'm guessing you paid the full price, or near enough. The book industry doesn't work like that though, and does its best to sell the best new stuff as cheaply as possible, and hope that they can make the money back later.

It's a crazy world, book publishing.

Summer Publishing... and No Harry Potter please!

The Bookseller had an interesting feature last month about the best time to publish books. There are some rules of thumb for the book trade, it seems - Literary Fiction is for Spring, Hardbacks in September and October; Health and Diet in the New Year.

But July is a quiet month - The Bookseller suggests that July catches the end of the prime time for Crime Fiction (paperback), and is fine for those 3-for-2 paperbacks you find in every bookshop. But woe betide any publisher who tries to launch a new author, or publishing something meaty and thought-provoking!

So what are the Scottish publishers publishing this month?

We'll, there's a fair selection of fiction, especially crime and thrillers - Lin Anderson's fourth novel Dark Flight, Paul Johnston's The Death List, Val McDermid's The Wire in the Blood. There's some general fiction too - McCall Smith's The World According to Bertie is out in hardback.

Canongate, who are quoted in The Bookseller article, are taking risks with The End of Mr. Y by first-timer Scarlet Thomas (although it's not really a risk, as it's so good).

Polygon have some classics reissued (you can publish classics at any time of the year; according to The Bookseller début novels must come out between February and April). So look out for James Kelman's Not While The Giro and The Busconductor Hines; John Buchan's John Macnab and others.

Quite a lot of history titles - like The Medieval Castles of Skye and Lochalsh and To War With The Black Watch, for instance. I guess history books, especially local history, can be published at any time.

But it's a very quiet time for other genres - only two poetry books, only two travel guides; only three children's books.

I'd like to hear what publishers think? And readers, too - is summer only a time for mass-market paperbacks and light reading? Or would you rather take War and Peace to the beach?

~~~

Of course, the the big publishing event the summer is the last Harry Potter novel from JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. You won't be able to escape its publication on 21st July. There will be launch events across the country, midnight queues outside bookshops. Amazon have pre-orders for over a million and a half copies worldwide. It's a little bit scary, to be honest; and it's probably scaring some publishers away from July as well. So BooksfromScotland.com won't be doing anything special for Harry Potter at all. Think of us a safe haven. (Plus, we couldn't possibly afford to sell it at the sort of price Amazon or Tesco will, so we're not evening going to try.)

Happy reading!