Inpress Newsletter
It is now almost six months since the publication of IT'S JUST THE BEATING OF MY HEART and time to take stock of where this new novel has brought me. The highpoints have included some very nice reviews on literary blogs and in local and national newspapers, as well as seeing posters for my book at St Pancras Station in London as part of the "First Capital Connect Book Club". Less satisfying was a catty short piece by Alfred Hickling in The Guardian, who had seemingly not even bothered to read the book before writing his 'capsule review'.
What comes out of all of this - the newspaper and blog reviews, the posters, the book club, the one or two local radio interviews - is just how damned hard it is for small publishing houses with limited budgets to market and sell literary fiction. The novel was printed in an edition of just under 1,000 copies and there is still quite some way to go before this first printing is sold out.
Although an imprecise yardstick perhaps, just imagine how few copies of literary titles from small publishers must sell without such boosts? It seems that the only sure way of selling copies of books from smaller publishers who cannot afford large-scale marketing campaigns is word-of-mouth - the hardest thing of all to capture.
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Responses to TRAIN OF THOUGHT, PART EIGHT
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