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...