My Blog
Fads and fashion in the book business
We know how fashion works in clothes. Someone - usually one of the big fashion houses - decides that the coming season's colour will be 'ecru' or orange, or whatever. Or that women's hemlines will be high or low, trousers wide or narrow, or whatever. The new 'look' is...
Home thoughts from abroad on self-publishing
As soon as I get on a plane, this happens. In the days before actually setting off on a trip my head is full of logistical arrangements, blocking out the deeper bigger picture of what I'm doing and planning. As soon as the seat belt snaps on, the noise clears and my...
Trying -again – to find an agent; why bother?
Maybe it was thinking about my blog on the ‘fear of failure’ and how it applied to me. Maybe it was reading a post on Twitter from a literary agent, explaining her admiration for ‘commercial women’s fiction’, or CWF as she called it. Maybe it was thinking about the...
Fear of Failure
Last Saturday I led my first ever workshop on self-publishing, at the Borderlines book festival in Carlisle. Considering I've been running workshops for twenty five years, and had been thinking about this one for weeks - I blogged about it at the end of July - I was...
It’s show time!
Last weekend I went to Gosforth Show, my first and possibly my only local show of the season. The summer months here in Cumbria are stuffed with shows: from July to September there's one every Saturday and Sunday, and sometimes mid-week as well. Some are small, some...
Can you extend your books’ ‘shelf-life’?
One of my gripes about writing and selling novels based where I live, in West Cumbria, is that some booksellers insist on describing them as 'local fiction' and condemn them to an out-of-the-way corner of the shop labelled 'local books', far away from anything...