Silence

Simon;

it's been a while, hasn't it?

So after a week of furious voting, the decision is that music is bad on the blog. Whaddyaknow....

Sorry if you enjoyed it, but the public has spoken and that's that.

We've sold some books this week. We've also started to advertise our first Reading Group book. It is 'The Crowded Bed' by Mary Cavanagh

we're selling it for a fiver, and it's going very nicely. I've reviewed this book on this here blog before, and I think it'll make for interesting discusion at the group.

We also have a suggestion box in the shop (I suspect you've guessed it's labelled The Big Green Suggestion Box) and we've had a few ideas already. The main one is to have a poetry section. At the moment we've got poetry, essays and plays in with fiction. The reason for this was that we hoped people would be doing the usual thing of looking through fiction and would find a book of poetry 'by mistake'. It's worked well on some occasions, and I doubt we'd have sold 3 copies of Tarantula by Bob Dylan, if it had been in the poetry section, but at the same time we've uncovered a large population of local poets who are up in arms (exageration) about this. So we've caved in. And now we've arranged for an evening of poetry to be performed in the shop! What a turnaround.

Talking of events, we have 2 book launches arranged for the end of April and the beginning of May, and also we've got 3 more author events sorted out for the next couple of months. We have our first newsletter going out at the end of the week, so i'm going to try and get a couple more sorted by the time that goes to print.

I had every intention of taking some snaps of the shop for the blog, but the batteries in my camera have given up, so I must sort that out soon. The shop still smells new, but it's beginning to look a bit more lived in.

I wish the weather had given us a bit of a break recently. Since we opened the temperature has been hovering between 1 and 6 degrees, and we've had howling gales, pouring rain, sleet and snow. It was lovely yesterday (of course we were closed that day).

I'll try and keep this a bit more regular, but I hope you understand we've been a bit focussed on the shop'n'stuff.

Laters