Crack of dawn tomorrow morning we’re off on an 8-day road-trip, starting in Ullapool, heading down to Glasgow, then on to London, and finally Cambridge and back home. As we’ve mentioned previously in this blog, we do occasionally do launches for seom of our books. Not always, because they don’t always serve any useful purpose, to be honest. If the launch is in a bookshop they almost always over-order on stock so as not to run out, and then the cost of handling the returned copies that go back to our distributors wipes out any potential profit from the sales at the launch. If the launch is a private one then it’s really just a party for the author and can again be quite costly by the time you’ve got a venue, wine and all the trimmings. As a small press we can’t run to that as the profit we make on each book is so tiny. But every now and again, for specific books and in specific places, it is worth our while and so off we go with a carload of books, sometimes a showcard or too, and other miscellaneous objects, depending on the nature of the launch, from jars of olives and wine glasses to a few pieces of perspex display material …
Anyway: this time it’s a real extravaganza. We start in Glasgow Thursday evening, with a launch of Cleave, our new anthology of new writing by Scottish women writers, at the flagship Borders store in Buchanan Street. 7pm, for those of you who want to come along, with readings by Margaret Elphinstone, Regi Claire, Anne Macleod, Pauline Prior-Pitt, Linda Cracknell, Gerda Stevenson and yours truly. Then we head south for a couple of days R&R before turning up in London on Monday for a one-day event on the work of Raymond Federman, in conjunction with The Holocaust Centre at the University of London and the Imperial War Museum. Then we head off to Cambridge and the big Heffers store for the launch of Susan Sellers’ Vanessa & Virginia, at 6.30pm on Wednesday June 18. Phew!
So, because we’ll be on the road and won’t have easy access to the internet, we’ve asked a few of our authors to step in and blog for us – with Lisa Glass in charge of the blog until we get back, no doubt with lots of tales from our journeys, next Friday. If we get a chance we’ll post a couple of brief blogs in between.
Oh – and one more thing: I’ll be on Radio Scotland’s Book Cafe, from 1.15pm on Monday June 16, talking about Cleave. I’ll be joining them from the BBC Portland Place studio in Londond rather than Glasgow. Hope you can find a moment to listen in!
Sharon
