Hardbacks, paperbacks and e-books ...

There has been much written about the current question vexing the publishing world - is the age of the hardback over? Should we be publishing our books straight into paperback, with e-books coming swiftly behind (or alongside)? I know of one author who is of the (somewhat alarmist) view that a hardback publication will 'kill' a book ... I couldn't agree less.

Each publisher looks at their list and their sales expectations of a book. Here at A&B, I'm happy to sell a modest 1500 hardbacks, but I'm sure that is just a fraction of what a large publisher like Macmillan would consider viable. We're not Macmillan, though. We're a small independent publisher, and hardbacks are our lifeblood. We publish all our genre fiction in that format and are fortunate to have a vibrant (and growing) collectors market for our handsome first editions, as well as a loyal and vital library audience. There's still a valued customer-base for our hardbacks, and I don't see that disappearing in the immediate future. Eroding a bit, yes, but not becoming extinct. Thankfully, it seems I'm not alone in that view -Michael Skapinker writing in today's FT tells of his love of hardbacks, something that he discovered after central heating and sunlight took their toll on his paperback collection.

I must confess that if I was an author I'd much rather give my friends and family a beautifully produced hardback when my book was published, than a small format (rather disposable)paperback. But that's just me.

Home Sweet Home

For the past few months I have been house hunting. Which means that I have met everyone’s worst idea of an estate agent, a breed that can’t tie ties properly, (so says my other half), tend to lie whenever their lips move and not listen to a word you say.

There, that was a cathartic rant.

And during that time we have been in some lovely homes, some bomb sites and some downright smelly hovels. And though the second house we have offered for has turned out to be a non-starter, I have not yet lost all hope. Because, apart from the prospect of having a proper home, I will soon be able to make a start on my life’s ambition: a library that could well take over the house (sshhh, don’t tell him indoors). No longer will I have to curb my natural book-hording tendencies, I will be able to become the kind of person that has to (tearfully) offload van loads of books at their local Oxfam bookshop. I will have to learn how to reinforce shelving. And I will have an uninterrupted half hour or more every morning to read on the train ride in. Bliss.

Christmas wishlist

I can’t quite believe it’s December next week. The Christmas lights have been up for weeks already and I haven’t even begun my Christmas shopping.
Working in the book industry means I feel a bit odd about giving books at Christmas time (and I don't mean A&B titles!) It’s like working for Cadbury’s and giving the grannies boxes of chocolates. Or having a job at Maybelline and giving your friends make-up. But before I got myself into this pickle, books were my favourite (at times, my only!) choice in gift-giving. Christmas time is an especially good time for catching up on reading with a few days of holiday and the weather keeping you indoors. Browsing through our shelves downstairs, I found a suitable title for just about everyone on my list.
If things were different, my father-in-law would be getting GUNS AND GANGS. He’s a detective and I think this fascinating and quite frightening expose on black gun crime would be just up his street. My brother would have to get the new Jack Ludlow historical epic, THE PILLARS OF ROME. For my gran, THE AFFAIR OF THE BLOODSTAINED EGG COSY - classic whodunit, with Jeeves and Wooster-ish humour – would be perfect. And my best friend would get WHERE THE TRUTH LIES by the brilliant Rupert Holmes (sassy Hollywood glitz and glamour with a bit of a thriller element).
Oh well, thank goodness for all those voucher codes doing the rounds – scarves it is instead then.

Spread the word!

Oh joy oh joy! Our book A Changed Man, by Francine Prose has been selected as one of the 100 Books to Talk About in a new initiative set up by those lovely people behind World Book Day and Spread the Word. Every single UK publisher was asked to submit their choice titles for consideration - books we loved but that hadn't yet got the recognition they deserved. I knew immediately I wanted to submit A Changed Man. It's the title I instinctively blurt out when anyone asks me to recommend book to read. It's practically a reflex reaction.

It has to be said, the book holds a bit of a special place in my heart - it was the first book I picked up when I joined Allison & Busby three years ago (sheesh, has it really been three years?) and I remember getting a thrill, like it was a really good omen, that I adored the first novel I read on the new job.

Then, I actually got to meet the author at the Edinburgh International Book Festival - another thrill for me. Francine Prose is relatively unknown here in the UK, but she is a HUGE name in her native U.S.A, and I couldn't help being pretty much in awe of her. In fact, I distinctly remember losing all sense of professional decorum as her Publicity Manager and found myself gushing "I'm sooo delighted to meet you in person, I absolutely looooooved A Changed Man". I think I came close to blurting out the stereotypical "Really, I mean it, I'm your BIGGEST fan!" but I checked myself just in time.

To top it off, when it came to designing a completely new cover for the paperback, I suggested the idea of the butterfly with the swastika pattern on the wings. When our designer managed to turn my idea into something concrete and it actually made the final cover... well, there you have it: thrill number 3.

So, now that it's been selected for the Books to Talk About initiative, well we're up to four thrills now!

You can see the full list of 100 books being championed on the Spread the Word Books to Talk About Website. (A Changed Man is top of the list under the Contemporary Life section.) Every book-lover is invited to read, comment on and vote for the book they think would make for good discussion at a reading group. The 10 books that get the most votes will go on to be promoted throughout bookshops and specially set up reading groups, and eventually one book will be named the winner on World Book Day in March.

Now I'm not trying to bend anyone's arm here (okay, who am I trying to kid, maybe I am...) but if you suddenly find yourself drawn to voting for A Changed Man, well, don't let me stop you... In fact, I'll make it really easy for you - click here to vote for A Changed Man now!

But seriously, most of all, tell people about the list and support this initiative. Talking about books - any books - is a good thing, so help spread the word!

Happy Birthday Susie's Mum

My darling Mum is 80 tomorrow and this weekend we celebrated her forthcoming milestone with a lavish dinner party for, you've guessed it, 80 friends and family. It was a fantastic evening, full of food, wine, Mummers and catching up with people who haven't seen me since I was this high. Inevitably, conversation always turns to 'and what are you doing now?', and I must admit I love telling people that I'm a publisher. So grand. And then a lovely thing happens - the floodgates open and we talk endlessly about books. What I'm reading, what they're reading, how much they loved/hated the new Martina Cole/John Grisham/Richard & Judy bestseller (delete as applicable).

One of my Mum's friends is Maureen Coston who, with her husband Rob, runs the post office in the village. Maureen is a fantastic reader - she buys books, she borrows books, she loves books. We always end up nattering for ages about what we're reading, and Saturday was no different. We agreed how fantastic Under the Skin by Michel Faber is; how Maureen loves the No1 Ladies Detective Agency Series (I quite like it ...). And how hard it is running a village post office given Royal Mail want to close everything down, but that's another story.

And here's a gorgeous picture of my parents on their wedding day - Mum complete with fag, booze and cake. All a girl needs!

Always judge a book by its cover

In a previous life, I used to be a bookseller. And there is nothing quite like life on the shopfloor to quickly dispel two particular myths passed down from the primeval dawn of bookselling:

1 - the customer is always right

2 - never judge a book by its cover

I will wax lyrical over the former - some customers may not even occasionally be right, but without the buying public there would be no bookselling nor publishing and what would we do then? So let's leave it at that.

But book jackets... ALWAYS judge a book by its cover. Book covers and book buying go together like speed dating and shoes - if in doubt, look no further. Call me shallow, but in 90% of cases they will tell you all you need to know about what's inside.

Today I finished designing my first book cover and, after hours of grappling with embedded text frame gremlins, font issues and an increasingly pixillated author photo I gathered a new insight: the book cover equivalent of a pair of Jimmy Choos may well be hard to come by.

Girls of Tender Age

Anyone who knows me will have been surprised by how long it's taken me to write about Mary-Ann Tirone Smith's mesmerising memoir, Girls of Tender Age. I'm quite surprised myself, to be honest. I read this book over a year ago and I simply couldn't put the book down. Now, I know how hackneyed "unputdownable" has become (I use it far too often myself), but hand on heart, Mary-Ann's book was just that. We published it in hardback in January this year to whole-page raves in the papers (Val Hennessy in the Mail and Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday come to mind straight away) and suddenly I realised that I wasn't alone in my passion for this book.

Mary-Ann is coming to visit us in February next year and we're looking at all sorts of ideas for getting her out and about to promote the paperback edition. In her native Connecticut, she packed out town halls when she was talking about her book - in once case, the town quite literally came to a standstill as the police cordoned off the roads round the library which was hosting Mary-Ann's talk, as more than 250 people showed up. I hope we can match that ... or at least come half way close!

A helping hand, from one blogger to another...

I'm enjoying this adventure into the online world of blogging - it really is amazing what you can discover with a click. Just today I learned from the Material Witness blog about the Love of Reading Online Book Fair running from today, 14 November, to 16 November, filled with online events such as author readings, interviews, books extracts and author forum discussions. What a fabulous idea! More to the point, why did I not know of this before? Answer: Because, yes, I am essentially an online virgin and have only recently started exploring this wonderful online world for readers. There's so much I still need to discover, but am slowly but surely learning from the many devoted bloggers out there. (Cue: imitation of a Wayne's World style "We're not worthy" sequence) . In fact, feel free to point out any online gems we might be missing here - I'm all ears. For now, I've made a note-to-self: Allison & Busby MUST support the Love of Reading Online Book Fair next year and get our authors involved. Although you could say we did have a tiny presence...I came across a competition where visitors could vote for their favourite cover and Boomsday was one of the choices! And to think I never would have known... Material Witness, I thank you.

Thesauruses at the ready

Following on from Lara’s post which mentioned the very funny, very readable Boomsday, I got to thinking about some of the language that is used / abused in Buckley’s vision of Washington politics. With the backdrop of the culture of spin that the heroine Cassandra has a black belt in, the cream of the crop has to be the outrageously euphemistic ‘transitioning’: her sanitised term for the idea of voluntary euthanasia which catches on even with the people at which it is aimed.

Which reminds me, over the weekend, I discovered a fabulous website that made me feel as erudite as Stephen Fry while also making the world just a slightly better place. And it has to be better than minesweeper. www.freerice.com has a clever, and addictive, vocabulary test which donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program for each word you get correct (all done through the companies that advertise on the site). Now, I’m a big fan of ‘wordy’ words (if I can pronounce them, that is), words which roll off the tongue after jiving around your mouth. Like indelible. Or malodorous. And I now have a bunch of new favourites, such as hornswoggle (vb. to Con) and hoosegow (n. jail). My record at the moment is vocab level 42 – beat that.

Apologies to Chiara for having nabbed this blogging topic!

Jaws in the night

One of our printers came in today with a book sample. It’s a hugely popular children’s title with a rather scary snake’s head looking directly at you with beady red eyes. A few weeks' back another printer showed me a sample with a huge toothy jaw on the front cover which – wait for it – glowed in the dark. Now, I don’t know about you but I do not like the idea of waking up in the middle of the night to see a terrifying jaw glowing at me from across the room. And these are children’s books!

I do understand that books with a special design feature are more likely to grab readers’ attention. I loved the finished package of the Bret Easton Ellis’s book Lunar Park for example and our cut-out special effect on Christopher Buckley’s Boomsday makes for an eye-catching design too. And clever packaging aside, Boomsday has got to be one of the funniest and most though-provoking books I’ve read in a long time. As a former vice-president’s chief speechwriter, Buckley has his finger on the pulse of social and political issues and his heroine’s wacky and perhaps not completely farfetched notion of how to combat the mounting social security crisis (if you must know, she suggests 75-year-olds commit voluntary suicide) is totally inspired. It was the perfect accompaniment to the pina coladas on the beach on honeymoon. Even my new husband (that sounds strange, I don’t have any old ones by the way) got hooked on it and he's very picky about what he reads - especially if he's on honeymoon and it's not a cocktail menu.

Bedside reading - and rubbish Champions League

It has taken me two days to get over Chelsea's disastrous return match against Schalke 04 in the Champions League (what does the 04 stand for? memo to self to google it straight after posting this). I despair. My husband despairs. Grant at Turnaround (our nice distributors) despairs. So bad were we that I spent much of the second half of the game playing Sudoku on Brain Training for Nintendo DS. There was a time when I'd have sat there with a book but now I seem to have relegated my reading to the bedroom.

It occurs to me that if a fervent and passionate reader like myself can be easily distracted in this age of Facebook, PSP and iTunes, then no wonder it's proving a struggle to get the younger generation reading. There are lots of initiatives to entice people to read, from Richard & Judy's Book Club to the World Book Day events, and that's heartening indeed, but it is something I think about every day - how to get more people to read our books. And I do mean read, rather than buy, as we are fortunate enough to have great support from the libraries in the UK.

I am one of those lucky people in that I get to do a job I love and look forward to every day .. well, almost every day. I have four books on the go at the moment - two 'work' ones (Sister by Manette Ansay which we're re-issuing next year; Tim Lebbon's new fantasy/horror which I'm considering for our list) and two 'home' ones (Harry Potter 7 - sorry; Susan Fletcher's second novel Oystercatchers. I loved her debut Eve Green and am anxious to see if her new one captures me in the same way). But I'm not going to put a pic of any of them on today's post. Instead you can have John Terry - the lynch pin of our team!

The wanderer returns...to a big surprise

This is my first attempt at blogging, so please bear with me while I find my feet…

As many of you will know, our lovely Lara has been away the past few weeks, getting married and jetting off on a dream of a honeymoon. We’re all dying to see photos of her big day – especially of Lara in her gorgeous dress – and are eagerly waiting for her to come back and tell us all about it. There’s nothing an office full of women enjoys more than gossiping about weddings! (How girly are we?!)

But poor Lara is going to have a surprise in store when she returns. One of our printers, CPD, has unfortunately gone into administration. It’s very sad for us as we have dealt with them for several years now and know many of the people who work there. I know Lara will be shocked when she hears about what has happened. Our thoughts and best wishes go out to all those that have been made redundant. Good luck to you.

Now the search is on to find someone to replace them… It's the start of a new 'printing' chapter at A&B, and hopefully the start of a new relationship that will prove to be just as successful as the last.

Americanisms

It's Prasana the Work Experience here ( not to be confused with Louise whose log in I've pirated). Part of my lovely job here at A&B is to ferret out the Americanisms from our manuscripts--policing the border between British English and it's progeny across the Atlantic.

Ironically, my life is one big Americanism. You see I am one--an American. Even my title threw me off at first ( in the States I'd be an intern) as did the computer keyboard (the @ is not in the normal place). But here I am, an American working in a British publishing house, hunting down Americanism. Sounds a bit traitorous. It's like I'm an cyborg programmed to track down my own kind and destroy them. Creepy.

But I remind myself it's for the good of the British public. You'll never have to worry about Monsieur Pamplemousse ordering french fries for Pommes Frites (not that he would deign to chips anyway) or your favorite London DI boarding the subway rather than the underground. Just imagine the confusion if mobiles became cell phones and trousers became pants and American pop culture icons like Regis and Kelly ( you don't want to know) became series regulars. Horrifying, but don't panic. You've got the right American on the job--Prasana the Work Experience, Conqueror of Americanisms, Preserver of the British Lexicon.

Books and baking

It’s a Monday in the A&B office. It's no different from any other Monday except for one thing. Today there is a pecan cinnamon sponge cake in the kitchen. Well, there is half a pecan cinnamon sponge cake in the kitchen. I’ll admit to having scoffed the other half this weekend…that’s what one trip to the Wholefoods in High Street Kensington does to you. (Allow me to introduce myself as the food loving, permanently salivating and culinary adventurous member of the Allison & Busby team.)
So, whilst I could pretend that offering this treat to the Allison & Busby girls was a purely altruistic act on my part – a desire to satisfy the sugar cravings of five hard-working women – it was, in reality, a gesture brought about by necessity. It hit me on Sunday, as I reached for my umpteenth slice of cake, that I was getting perilously close to resembling the photo of screen legend Roscoe Arbuckle on the cover of Jerry Stahl’s book I, Fatty. Not that I'd really mind (I absolutely adore this book, so I’d be more than happy to play the poster-girl for it) but I fear I’d be a poor representative. 'Fatty' Arbuckle's life as the fat-boy of 1920s Hollywood was all about onscreen pie-fights, celebrity parties and heroin; mine is more off-screen pie-scoffing, celebrity magazines and herbal tea. Much less fascinating.
But one thing has come of all this: this Monday I'm inspired to get back into baking on a regular basis, with a view to sharing the results (and calorific content) with all at A&B. Because truly, there's nothing like enjoying a cup of tea, a slice of pie and a good book (or manuscript). Sure, there’s more to life than books and baking, but come to think of it, there really needn’t be.

Do you judge a book by its cover?

We spend a huge amount of time talking about cover designs for our books - as we should, given it's such an important ingredient in a book's success. Dare I say, in many cases, it is the key ingredient. At A&B we are lucky enough to have two excellent freelance designers who work with us: Ben from Brighton Studios based in .... Hove, actually. And Emma from Snowbooks Design, part of the marvellous Snowbooks publishing house. We've even been known to do a few covers ourselves in-house, and plan to do more in the future.

Yesterday, it was Ben's turn on the rack. One of the things we talked about was a new look for a classic that we publish at A&B, Iris Origo's haunting memoir War in Val d'Orcia. I am not exaggerating when I say this is my favourite book on our list. I first read it 20 years ago when my Mum gave me a copy, and since then it's remained a desert-island book for me. Origo, an Englishwoman by birth was married to the Marchese of La Foce, a stunning estate in the heart of Tuscany. Her memoir centres on two years during WWII when the family found themselves in the thick of the war, with partisans hiding in the hills, Germans at their door, and looking after a host of children who had been evacuated from the cities.

But I digress. What to do? Do we have a lovely Tuscan photo on the front, complete with sunflowers and idyllic villa? Or a shot of the German tanks thundering down the cypress tree-lined roads around La Foce? Or one of Iris with the children she housed during the War? Decisions, decisions. I'll let you know what we go with ...

Elizabethan tug-of-war

The ‘wondrous Lesley’ makes her debut blog appearance. Please ladies and gents, restrain your urge to applaud and throw bouquets.

The thing I look forward to most at A&B is the arrival of lovely, fresh-from-the-printers, terribly good for you, books. That story that you’ve read perhaps a year ago, have agonised over its cover design, have talked up to people up and down the land, lands on your desk as a finished product. Unfortunately, the latest title I was not so patiently expecting, Margaret Irwin’s Elizabeth & the Prince of Spain, is being held to ransom by some burly, book-hating, philistines [or not, but allow a girl some creative licence]. Particularly painful is the fact that I helped to choose the costume for this shoot from the BBC costume department. It was so gorgeous I was ‘this’ close to dying my hair red and regally demanding that I grace the cover…

So, until we work out that tug of war and get the books, I will content myself with seeing Cate Blanchett at the cinema this weekend and with this picture. *Sigh*

Today we're mostly thinking about nuns and moth balls

We've just taken delivery of the new manuscript from Alison Joseph, creator of Sister Agnes - the only nun I know who likes lipstick and cashmere (not that she's allowed to wear either). Alison is busy adapting Agnes for a Radio 4 drama (ooh, I hope that's not a secret ...) which will be fantastic, and fingers crossed will be on a wireless near you in time for those lazy summer days. As is always the way, Alison and I end up talking about absolutely everything except work. Today's topics included how much we love John Lewis, the home of moth balls, coat hangers and lovely charcoal 60-denier tights. Highly recommended.