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Too late, too late, shall be the cry...
... when the man with the prizes has passed you by. Apologies for not highlighting this earlier, but the Londonistas just ran a great review of Lisa Carver's Drugs A Nice, together with a competition to win copies. Congratulations to the winners: your copies will be with you shortly.
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Snowbooks creates new category shocker
There's a good review of Plotting for Beginners in the Times this weekend. The print edition had a colour photo of (most) of the cover, too. It reads
"It's not chick-lit, and it's not even hen-lit. This unpretentious and amusing novel belongs to a new category that could be called old-boiler-lit. Sally Howe is struggling with the menopause and trying to write a bestseller. She has lots of time, because her husband of donkey's years has gone to live in a log cabin in the Rockies. Is this the end of their marriage? Does Sally care? And how does she fend off the interest of various priapic neighbours? Think of The Diary of a Provincial Lady updated and transferred to the Peak District."
The sign of a good review is excellent usage of a phrase like "donkey's years".
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Snowbooks are built like tanks
It's Saturday night; I should be watching the Eurovision but no, I'm googling my precious company. And what do I find?
07-13-2003, 12:14 PM http://forums.macrumors.com
"Snowbooks are built like tanks... I've seen one dropped down stairs. Thunk Thunk Thunk... all while sleeping, and at the bottom of the stairs the lid popped open, and it turned right back on... no problems... they dont get much better than the Snowbooks."
You heard it here first. Built like tanks.
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Points win prizes
Now I know this is dull compared to the glamour of awards and what have you, but it's important nevertheless. Thanks in good part to our friends at Anko, Snowbooks is now fully ISBN13 compliant. If you care about that sort of thing, you'll know that's good. If you don't, you would care even less if I explained to you what it meant. This standard is in addition to our ONIX compliance status which we achieved, ooh, ages ago. If you want to know any more, shout.
Yes, we win prizes for our lovely books but our dull-yet-important efficiency is also something to be proud of.
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"If Lord Alfred Douglas had been a Romanian prostitute..."
Very pleased to see a wonderful review of The Romanian in this week's Time Out London, available online here. Thank you, Mr Burston, and may we confim that Bruce is, indeed, one hell of a charmer.
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Parp parp
Not to blow the own trumpet, but...
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/archives/2006/05/15/sno_wonder_snow.html
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Surreal
Have you seen Grosse Point Blank? Brilliant eighties reunion film. The bit where John Cusack is sitting in the car of his old friend who's now an estate agent; they're having a normal chat and suddenly the guy honks his horn and yells "Ten years, man! Ten years!" After the hangovers had worn off, it was pretty much back to normal in the Snowbooks office, except every now and again I want to shout "Small Publisher of the Year, man! Small Publisher!"
We have had some lovely coverage this week. Nic Clee in the Times today calls us 'enterprising'. In the same paper there's a mention of Sue and Jane talking about Plotting for Beginners. We should rename it the SnowTimes. Precious Clare on the Friday Project blog is the first writer to use the line 'there's no business like Snow business' (finally) (And Clare also had a letter in the Times! I never read the Times normally. I wonder if there are three or more pieces to do with people I know every week?) Publishing News printed my acceptance speech joke (which was so lame I'm not going to repeat it) and said that I define the term 'hands on'. The Literator in the Independent said we were one of several "crucial players in independent publishing [who] picked up key awards." And James (who can really write, turns out) wrote a piece which will appear on Monday's Culture Vulture blog.
I wonder what will happen next week?
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Small Publisher of the Year 2006
We are extremely pleased to announce that Snowbooks was last night named Small Publisher of the Year at the British Book Awards, in a joint award with fellow publishers Profile. Emma, Gilly, Anna and James all attended the ceremony and rushed the stage en masse to collect the award. Only Gilly fell over.
In just three years, Snowbooks has gone from a two-person start-up to a four-person team, with a growing list and over 90,000 books sold. We are passionate about all our titles and believe that our innovative approach to the publishing process shows through in our work. We are very glad and very proud that this has been recognised by our peers.
Of course, none of this would have happened without the generous support of our authors, the book retailers, the trade press, and our fellow publishers. We offer heartfelt congratulations to our fellow Small Publisher winner, Profile books, and to all the other winners and nominees.
You can find out more about this year's awards here.
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"Lush, lurid, lyrical, lacerating, sweetly unrepentant..."
Bruce Benderson was in town last weekend for a couple of great events, the launch of The Romanian at the Horse Hospital, and a well-attended reading at Gay's The Word. Big thank yous to James at the HH, Jimmy and Uli at GTW, to all who came, and to Bruce himself, who is, in case you're wondering, quite excellent company.
There was also a great review of The Romanian in The Times on Saturday:
The Romanian is Romulus, a 24-year-old street hustler picked up in Budapest by Benderson, a fiftysomething Jewish-American journalist. Both, disaffected by cultural exploitation and erotic disorientation, acquiesce in an unsafe, self-deceiving sexual relationship. Benderson's uncontrolled mid-life crisis finds romantic adventure and obsessive focus in his unrequited passion for Romulus, through whom he discovers the chaotic contradictions of a Romania struggling from gothic isolation into global opportunity. This lush, lurid, lyrical, lacerating, sweetly unrepentant memoir won the Prix de Flore.