tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84192280567327563752011-11-27T23:56:00.660ZThe blog of the BooksfromScotland.com Editor.Liamnoreply@blogger.comBlogger151100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-57520977185539841512008-06-06T14:45:00.007+01:002008-06-06T15:57:16.127+01:00

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

Liamnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-86955538897666607132008-05-08T10:04:00.007+01:002008-05-08T11:55:49.826+01:00

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

Liamnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-10760787894367243862008-03-06T15:24:00.001Z2008-03-06T15:25:00.674Z

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

Liamnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-24005986145889547382008-01-07T15:47:00.000Z2008-01-07T16:34:42.741Z

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

Liamnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-60536142258457384252007-08-22T16:04:00.000+01:002007-08-22T16:49:49.658+01:00

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

Liamnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-32840249054340771352007-07-27T14:44:00.000+01:002007-07-27T15:09:35.210+01:00

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

Liamnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-52323036723873765012007-07-11T13:47:00.000+01:002007-07-11T15:04:47.127+01:00

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

Liamnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-31967957380324929822007-06-26T13:37:00.000+01:002007-06-26T14:32:45.566+01:00

I thought I'd follow up on something Anna Nicholson talked about in her post last month, on choosing Scottish literature for High School reading. I'm afraid that I didn't study any Scottish books or poetry at High School, except Macbeth, and that doesn't really count. Instead, I read Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare, Seamus Heaney and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Philip Larkin and Rona Munro. English and

Liamnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-73673292407106622292007-06-07T15:25:00.000+01:002007-06-07T15:32:58.992+01:00

Last night we upgraded the BooksfromScotland.com website. There aren't many user-visible changes, but we have laid the groundwork for future work. The main upgrade was switching our systems over from the old 10-digit ISBNs to the new 13-digit ISBNs. If you have linked to BooksfromScotland.com books from your own website you may have to update your links because some filenames have changed.We've

Liamnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-20343123724917982872007-05-17T14:46:00.000+01:002007-05-17T15:07:36.384+01:00

I've just finished reading Alan Spence's The Pure Land, which I thought was fantastic. I'm trying to arrange an interview with him (well timed, as the paperback is just about to be published). While reading the book I realised we were missing a biography page for Spence, so I fixed that today. Usually, we interview authors by email for speed and simplicity, but sometimes I think that face-to-face

Liamnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-40786118279023211852007-04-13T12:01:00.000+01:002007-04-13T12:13:03.904+01:00

Hello there,BooksfromScotland.com will be visiting the London Book Fair this year. It's the first time I've ever attended a major book fair, and I'm looking forward to it. Not so keen on the 5am start however; I'm flying down first thing on Monday morning.I'll be hovering around the stand of Publishing Scotland, our parent organisation and the new name for the Scottish Publishers Association. If

Liamnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-78501148221677088402007-03-29T11:11:00.000+01:002007-03-29T16:00:21.513+01:00

The Edinburgh International Science Festival starts on Monday 2nd April, so I thought I'd take a look at Scottish contributions to science and engineering - there are hundreds of them, after all. Sometimes it's not so simple, of course - John Logie Baird invented the television, but so did American Philo Taylor Farnsworth and Russian Vladimir Zworykin; Alexander Graham Bell invented and patented

Liamnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-66268126762346176572007-03-07T15:06:00.000Z2007-07-05T16:10:10.284+01:00

Good afternoon!I'm going having a long weekend this weekend, so will be away from the office from Thursday. One of the reasons I decided to start this Editor's Blog is because it's an easy way of asking for feedback about the work we do on BooksfromScotland.com. What features do you enjoy reading on BooksfromScotland.com? What did you think of our recent article on Scottish Travel Writing? Or

Liamnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-62944881616584793202007-02-21T14:03:00.000Z2007-07-05T16:07:31.873+01:00

It's a tricky question, and one that lies at the heart of BooksfromScotland.com. We had to come up with our own definitions, to ensure that we were as comprehensive as possible, without diluting our unique selling points. For our perspective, a book is from Scotland if it is:Published in ScotlandIs significantly about Scotland, her people, landscape, history or languageIs written by a Scottish

Liamnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8419228056732756375.post-62512627574854725012007-02-21T10:55:00.000Z2007-07-05T16:06:27.851+01:00

Hello!BooksfromScotland.com has been running for over a year now, and over that time we've seen interest in our site growing month-on-month, and book sales rising every month. We thought it was about time to open up BooksfromScotland.com a little, so that our readers can feed back their thoughts and ideas. We also want to be able to discuss our plans for the future of BooksfromScotland.com.So,

Liamnoreply@blogger.com0