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