Friday, March 27, 2009

I've said it before and i'll say it again

Apologies in advance for the generalization i'm about to make, but here goes anyway.
We do events in ths shop. We love doing events in the shop. We want the shop to be buzzing with exciting stuff all the time.
So, I phone up publicity or a marketing departments in big publishing houses and say to them, 'hello, i'm Simon from the Mighty Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green and we'd love to host an event in our shop for author A.', and they say 'oh yeah, if you email me with all the details, i'll get back to you', or 'oh yeah, i'll speak to author A. about in the next week or so and let you know', or 'i'll pass on the details to the person who's looking after Author A. and get them to call you'....
WELL I'M STILL WAITING FOR YOU TO ACTUALLY CALL ME BACK.

I've been in touch (for example) with well over a dozen publicity people in the last month about arranging author events, and only 3 of them have actually got back to me. Thankyou Joe Pickering and thankyou Henry Jeffreys and thankyou Kat Jocelyn.
I don't mind if you phone me back or email me to say no, or even to say you haven't heard anything yet, but you'll keep me informed. But if you say you'll call me back, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE CALL ME BACK.

Grrrr.

In other news, aren't there some gorgeous books coming out at the moment;

and let's not forget..
as if we were able to.
ps one of these books is not one we'll be keeping.

I wonder if this will be as contoversial as me calling Boris Johnson a dickhead.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't run a bookshop. I blog. But trying to contact some people can be a problem. In the children's publishing world I find most people are both helpful and friendly, but I'm building a list of people not to bother with in future, and that goes for the books/authors they look after, too.

If it's the last book in your blog, then yes, probably.

Anonymous said...

Not controversial, but shows a lack of commercial sense. Beanworld does, indeed, rock, but last time I looked only about three people in the UK had ever heard of Larry Marder, and you and I are two of them, whereas Jade was a tad better known. Surely the likelihood is that, even in cerebral Wood Green, someone will want to buy a new book about her?

Andrea said...

I suppose that depends on how much the chains will have it discounted.
If it's by more than 30%, then it's not worth stocking it.
Now that's commercial sense.
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