Don't worry, Roger - at least yours get out there in the first place! And don't forget - TC is a classy novel, and that's the important thing. How many sold is - as it's always been in the great scale of things - merely secondary.

A
xxx

Roger

Hear hear. I'm mightily surprised it hasn't been picked up for a bigger push, seems to me very, very marketable. I think its readership is potentially massive.

Sorry Emma, going off-thread a bit.

Pete

Don't know how excited you'd get, Emma, about being featured in the Daily Mail's New Fiction section(p69) - not as excited as myself, i suspect! But well done.

"...a convincing and involving read. A book to lose yourself in this summer."

Casey

I wasn't aware of your heritage!

Emma -

Just to say I spotted TMOL in WHS, Watford this afternoon. And in the 'Best Selling Hardbacks' rack no less!

Dave

Daily Mail - well done, Emma! Huge market there!!

)

A
xxx

Casey, and Anne, oh don't worry I'm very excited, as Headline are, and by an even longer and particularly perceptive and glowing one in the Daily Express, no less. Doing well in the women's glossies too - Marie Claire's was another goodie.

Dave, another sighting! Excellent! Thanks for letting me know.

As to heritage - a friend has just suggested that I could even get into the Sun, if I just had a boob job and posed topless with a giant tortoise and a copy of the Origin of Species! Hmmm.

Emma

Emma re: The Sun - don't tempt them!

Jim

Thanks - Anne and Pete (cholero). Actually I asked Will Atkins, the ed-in-chief at mnw, about this rumour I'd heard that bookshops only give new books 6 weeks before they decide whether or not to return their stock. I'd picked that up from some other writers' blogs - the general feeling I was getting was that bookshops are incredibly ruthless nowadays. Will said that from his experience they tend not to be so ruthless as people imagine, purely out of inefficiency. I.e., it takes them a while longer than you would think to get round to returning. Sometimes they keep books on their shelves for years. It's a funny old business, is all I can say.

Anyhow, this is Emma's thread, so I'll shut up. Talk of returns is wholly inappropriate!

Hmm, dunno about that.

But yes, my experience of booksellers is that a) they never have enough staff to spend the time it takes to be really ruthless with stock, and b) they really like books, and would rather keep them on the shelves than return them, if possible. It might only be 6 weeks before the current faux-celebrity tome gets kicked off the front table, and its trivia-on-steroids packed back to the publisher, but I bet it's more like 6 months before a book they liked and have sold some copies of finally loses its place on the shelves. I think booksellers instinctively recognise the 'long tail' nature of their business - that there are an awful lot of books for which there's a small but perfectly formed market, if they could only reach them. The beginning of reaching them, of course, is having the book on the shelves.

Emma

Emma,
just to let you know, TMOL is in the bestselling hardback section of Southport WHS as well! woohoo
Saz
x

WooHoo indeed! Thanks for that.

Emma

Emma

You're in the window of the Dartmouth Harbour Bookshop.

Pete

Pete, thank you. That's particularly pleasing, as (I think I'm right about this) that bookshop was founding by Christopher Robin Milne!

Emma

Emma

It's a good shop, whoever founded it. We were in Falmouth too over the summer and the independent bookshop on the main street there (I think it's called The Falmouth Booksellers) is everything you could wish a bookshop to be: open, bright, friendly with a fantastic Victorian inverted bay window running the width of the shopfront. Informed, young, professional, book-loving staff, no stuffiness, not a huge place but superbly laid out, the stock erudite and populist somehow at the same time, good political stuff, terrifc support for local authors, nice lot of american fiction, on and on I could go. And you had a good table spot in there, which is what I meant to say in the first place.

Pete

It sounds a great place. It may be hard for indie bookshops, but I do think reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated.

Emma