My grand scheming...

Hello world! I've been scheming behind the scenes for the latest development in the Literary Den. I've sent four emails to four seperate parties independant of the Den, and received only one reply so far, which led to a phone call. However, it's the first and most vital step and I'm glad to report that it was a resounding success, even if no one knows about it.

The emails all concern the Den and it's members, although I won't specify which ones. That would be giving away the secret, and I'd prefer to torture the various members that keep an eye on me so that when the news gets out they'll be happy I didn't spoil the surprise. If the three remaining recipients of my emails all reply positively, then I'm one more phone call away from getting another thing organised. I won't say who I have to call until it all begins. It's big though, trust me on that one.

In the time I've been gone from this blog, I've been overly active on Twitter. Follow me, you know you want to.

I've also stumbled across a number of very interesting details, all of which affect the Den's campaign. Now, forgive the copy and paste job here, but this is what I've said on the forum:

The Espresso Book Machine

Hey Gang!

There's been a revolution in book printing I wanted to share with you. Thanks to a certain Mr Niall Kelly at work, I found out about a machine that can print and bind books in five minutes. It's amazing!

Now, I don't know what titles are available, as I've been too busy to check... but the Guardian and a blog (I think it is) each had something to report on this fabulous creation. I suggest reading them!

Loyalty Schemes

Hi!

Hughes & Hughes, my humble place of work have launched two loyalty schemes since around April 24th. One is a Kids' Club. Every five euro spent on kids books gets one sticker. Six stickers gets five euro off the next transaction of kids books. Easy as pie.

The adult one is very similar. Launched last weekend, either the 9th or the 10th. Every ten euro, you get a stamp. A card of eight stamps gets the purchaser ten euro off anything, including book tokens. Easy peezy, lemon squeezy!

Both of these loyalty schemes (although I just mean systems, not implying there's anything sinister about them) give readers more incentive to buy more. They encourage book sales to go up, and, as such, encourage more people to read. This is good news for us! It basically gives us one place to send people who think books are too expensive, although it's unfortunately limited to Ireland at the moment.

Classic Reprints and the associated offer

Right, so Oxford have taken advantage of the fact that booksellers are looking to sell lots of books, and they've only gone and reprinted everything! All the world classics are now in new bound forms, some with the old text (James Joyce's Ulysses in the 1922 text!) but most with the new.

It's a great refreshment on the old books, and they're cheaper than before too. Then there's an added bonus. For a limited time, Hughes & Hughes (sorry, I can't report for other shops, as I don't work in them and therefore don't see them every week) are offering a 3 for 2 deal on the Classics, with mix and match on everything else too to make sure it's not just the Classics. Great stuff for us if we decide to suggest a load of Classic titles. The reprint and sales offers are also more encouraging to readers.

Irish Book Awards and Others

Every year, the Irish Book Awards are held to celebrate bookselling and other such things. The short listed titles were put on the 3 for 2 offer in (yes, you guessed it, if you've been following my other threads) Hughes and Hughes. They're still there, although the awards have been announced.

The Irish Book Awards are really prestigious. Win one and your set for sales. The winning titles are favourites, and even though it's a public vote, the winning books always sell more after they've won!

Back when Sebastian Barry won the Costa Book Award for The Secret Scripture, everyone was buying it! It's a surprise we still had copies left for the customers we'd never seen before! It was the same when Anne Enright won the Irish Book Award for The Gathering. Her sales went mad!

As a group promoting reading, we need to focus in on these awards, and the others like them. I'll see if I can get more info on the really big ones, and I suggest you do the same in the UK. Pinpointing the titles and encouraging people to take advantage of the offers on them is a great way to get more people actually reading them.

(the winners of the Irish Book Awards can be found here)

"Important News From The Bookseller @ April 17th 2009

Okay, I've had this info for too long without sharing. Some headlines I thought were interesting to us:

Sainsbury's steps up space for books.

Big changes here! I'll bullet-point them for convenience.

• A top 15 chart in children's books in 214 branches.
• 2 books for £5 in 183 stores (paperback books)
• Books sold in 408 of their stores, with an increase of staff on the book team from 2 to 8I was impressed!

Sales of hardbacks down 14.3% in the first quarter of 2009

Printers considering more Print on Demand to remove the Warehouse costs

Anderson Press releasing e-books

The publisher are introducing 23 young adult titles in e-book format. 8 books are already on the list of e-books as of this month.The article also mentions how the main publishers all have around 100 e-books available, with Puffin leading with 150 titles. In 2009, Puffin will release 10-20 e-books a month.

Waterstones offers 10,000 e-books through it's website. It's also helpful to note, though The Bookseller doesn't say this, that Hughes & Hughes are now attempting to match this with the introduction of the Sony Reader to stores, offering 100 free classic titles to begin with, and when the website is done, a free e-book from the wide selection they hope to offer. From my knowledge of the situation, Eason are the only ones not doing this now... (correct me if I'm wrong, but remember that I can't get out much due to exams)

Amnesty Anthology released

The Amnesty Anthology has been released. It focuses on stories of freedom from well known authors. Likely to cause a stir if it's promoted properly. This could mean more people will be reading, specifically if the money goes to charity.

JK Rowling Book Day Books released again

In July, Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Wear to Find Them are being released for £5 each, a mark up of 100% on their initial releases for Comic Relief. Not sure where the money goes this time."

With all that to digest, I bid you farewell, until next time! Thanks for reading

It's been a while, etc...

Hello, valuable and non-existant readers!

I have been vanished for a good long while from this blog. I missed it a few minutes ago, and decided to give one massive update on it.... I've just checked my last post, and I discovered I used the term vanished then too.... righto!

Well, I completed NaNoWriMo. That was easy, and way back in November. I wrote a novel called Meet Sam, which I will get back to in a little while. I will tell you that it was super fun to write and came in at 50,074 words according to the NaNoWriMo drones. Following that, I was very lazy at writing, but managed to get Geneticide finished in January. Hurray for me! Since then, I've had Mocks (I did rather poorly in them), an oral Irish exam, and have had a huge number of writing related things happening. But let's do this properly - chronologically!

Meet Sam is a fantastic novel (for me) following a helplessly poor writer through one day of his otherwise dull life. He's single, and miserably so, and decides to invent a narrator for himself. Sam Richards is in fact a wee bit crazy. His narrator abuses him at every opportunity, but in the 24 hours that she exists, his life changes dramatically. The book is that story! As part of the deal for completing NaNoWriMo, I got to get a free proof copy of Meet Sam from a group of people called CreateSpace. They even covered the postage. That was nice of them. The book is a delightful addition to my collection, and has caught the attention of my mother's friends at work.

Geneticide finished with a much higher word count. I don't even know what it is, only that it's rather good. The story went exactly as planned, which I'm happy about. It took very long to write, but I think it'll do well if it ever goes anywhere.

In February, I turned 18. Normally, I don't celebrate my birthday with such excitedness, but this was the February midterm break too. This called for celebration. I threw a house party. It was a delightful gathering of my friends, during which there was a movie and a giant personality test. I'll expand on that now! The movie was in fact a home movie of sorts - Meet Sam, as done by my friends Karl, Andrew, Ciarán and Conor. They gave up a few afternoons to do it. Karl has since failed to upload it onto Youtube a dozen times, so I cannot share it with you. The personality test was the BBC one. It was rather fun, and had my friends bashing against each other in my kitchen. It was not built to hold 14 people in a tiny square.

Then came March, this month. I can tell you that things really changed this month. It's almost at an end too, so if there was nothing to report, there would be a problem. Now, I can't remember what happened first in all this, so I'll just ramble on about the various different things that have happened.

Let's start with dear old Patricia Scanlan! She did a book signing a couple of weeks ago to promote her new book Happily Ever After? at my shop. It was a great experience in itself to watch it and help out, btu then something really fun happened! She found out that I'm a writer, and told me to give her a call when my novel (Meet Sam) was editted, so that she could give it to her publishers! I was utterly gobsmacked!! Imagine me, a published author! With Transworld Ireland!!!

Then there's Battlefront. This is a Channel Four television show that encourages a whole set of campaigns from young people to help change the world. I submitted The Literary Den Campaign to them... and we're second in the voting stages. In a few days, voting stops and it goes to the "judges." If they pick my campaign, I may be on television!! That would be amazing!

The campaign is all about making reading and writing cool again. People seem to get bored with them ratehr easily these days. They abandon the thoughts of them for a TV show or a movie, or for mindless internet games. It's an awful shame, because they really are valuable skills for both work and life. Writing is a way of ridding oneself of the weird little ideas in their heads that can cause us troubles. I have not heard of any dangerous writers out there, so I must be right.

The campaign also sets out to start a mentoring system to help younger writers with their stuff. I'm one of the mentors, although we are without mentorees. I'm hoping to convince my good friend Sam to do it. He started writing a book way back in the summer and since stopped doing it. If I can spark his interest in writing again, and be his mentor to guide him along the way, then I'm doing something right. From there I'd like to see what the group can do. We may even be able to organise talks at schools! That would be sweet!

So, there's my campaign. Some of it, at least. If you wish to support us, you can vote at: http://battlefront.co.uk/campaign/the-literary-den-campaign Thanks a million in advance!!

Moving on now, I've subscribed to a magazine called The Stinging Fly. I've also submitted to them. By the end of the month, or in early April, I should hear from them to see how my submission of a short story and two poems went down. I imagine the story, called The Wounded Angel, stands a better chance than the poems, but who am I to judge? Fingers crossed anyway!

Now here's another big thing! The Literary Den Book of New Fiction 2009 is underway! We're putting the stories together as I type. Well, I mean people are writing them. If they're anywhere near as uncomfortable as I am right now, they might just be finishing them. This year, we're still supporting the Laura Crane Trust, but we have a few fresh faces! Brendan McLoughlan has joined our ranks from Howth, and Lisa Sills has returned to submit this year (she vanished just before it was announced last year, and arrived when the deadline passed). Jonathon Bell from Bermuda (living in Dublin) has submitted, and his wife, my good friend Liz, is due to submit too. It's a wonderful group of Irish writers joining the fray! I'm delighted with it.

The 08 Anthology is still on sale. I do hope you'll consider purchasing a copy. All the money goes to the charity. We're not greedy or anything. But we do like to bring it up a lot. For instance, today I had to tell a teacher in charge of my school's awards system about it for Charity and Public Service. If I win.... well I'll be well chuffed!! Purchase the book here: http://www.lulu.com/content/2619890

I may also be up for Best All-Round Student, but that's still in doubt. A teacher, the one in charge of the school magazine, said she'd nominate me for it. I've been a "one man army" in the computer room trying to get the 09 issue under wraps. Then I'm done with that establishment for good. That'll be weird! But I can't wait. Fingers crossed for the awards!

So, I think that's it for now. I've been extremely boring I bet, but I don't mind all that much. I've just needed to get all that out at once. Hopefully I'll be back. Whatever happens, always remember that the pen is mightier than the sword - violence is not the way forward. Books are!

Honest Reviews, Honest Awards

Honest the Book Reviewer took Bebo Authors by storm. Honest, impartial reviews are offered to give authors a chance to improve on their own work. She has already provided the service to many authors, and has a long list lined up currently. Her hard work and dedication are what make her so unique on Bebo, and she doesn't just review, oh no. She runs a group called Honest Book Awards that help further to promote her name and give writers the praise, recognition and esteem they deserve.

Honest has had the awards going for just over a month now. She has, since then, awarded 10 Honest Awards, some being Members' Choice Awards, and an additional 2 Super Shorts - awards that are given to commend short stories of merit. Every bit of feedback she has received has been appreciative, regardless of what she said in the review. This is largely down to two reasons. One is that the author requested the review, so he/she should not be unhappy when they receive it. Beggars can't be choosers and all that jazz. The second contributing factor is that for once, a review on Bebo is telling authors how to improve, not what the reviewer thinks the author wants to hear or simply telling the author off.

I myself have applied for an Honest review... still on the waiting list that hasn't shifted in a week or so... or more. Still, Honest must have some excuse lined up!

And guess what, that's not all! Honest Book Award Competition aims to help authors improve a certain skill, from what i've interpretted. This time around, Honest has decided on a setting. I've entered a place known as the Crystal Wood... though I don't think I'll win. Ellie Dyer has better fitted into the rules. Hopefully Honest won't be too harsh in her judging.