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Win ME at your book club!

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Would you like to WIN an hour with ME hosting your next book club or gathering of reader friends? Tell me in 25 words or less why you’d love me to host your book club (and which of my books you’d choose to discuss) in the comments below. Then, share this post and you’re in the running to win! It’s that easy!

Also, if you’re the winner, you and each person who attends your book club event receive a signed book plate for their copy of my book. Check out the terms and conditions on my website if you’d like more info. Entries close on 12 May. I’m so excited to be part of someone’s book club – and it may be yours! Happy posting!

(Click here for T&Cs.)

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The Bees Behind the Book

 

Autan

‘You could come and see my bees if you like. I’d be happy to show you around the hives.’

The beekeeper was standing at my local market stall, his pyramids of honey for sale around him. We’d been talking for about a minute and a half when he made his offer, one I think he actually regretted the moment it came out of his mouth. But all I could think was it’s a sign!

When I begin research on a book, I look for signs. Signs that I’m going the right way. Signs that the universe/muse/creative spirit (whatever you like to call it) is onboard with what I’m doing and will support the direction my work is going.

I’d previously been researching coffee for my third foodie fiction novel, but although I was really intellectually interested in the history of coffee, particularly, I knew I didn’t have enough fire in the belly to sustain it over the course of a couple of years to get a whole novel out. So I let it go and started looking for something else, and everywhere I went I saw bees. I started reading about them in books and online and watching loads of YouTube videos on bee handling. And then I met the beekeeper and he offered to take me to his hives, which was so random that I knew I was definitely on the right path.

I took the beekeeper’s number but later thought, hmm, as nice as that offer was, maybe I shouldn’t actually be heading out into the bush with a complete stranger!

But the universe wasn’t done with me yet. I continued my research and went to the Ginger Factory’s Super Bee Show here on the Sunshine Coast. Gayle Currie, head beekeeper, conducted the show and her knowledge and enthusiasm was addictive. We got talking over a number of weeks and then she too invited me to see her bees.

What I learned while researching and writing this book is that there is no ‘one’ way to handle and keep bees. Beekeepers all do things differently (much like horse people or dog people do, I suppose). And there’s a huge range of humane, ethical and holistic ways to do this (or not). Something I loved so much about Gayle was her very obvious and real love for her bees, her exceptional reverence and respect for them, and her very ‘feminine’ way of handling them. Those values and details carried through to Maria, my main character, who treats her bees as family.

Until I started researching bees, I didn’t even realise that we had an array of native bees in Australia. I always thought bees were great, but I had no idea just how outstanding they are and how much humans depend on them and how much we need to be urgently acting to save them right now. I do hope my book inspires others to love bees, just as I fell in love with them when researching.

___________________

This post is currently featured as a guest post on ‘Love That Book’, a blog by Melissa Sargent.

Pic credit “Autan” from Flickr.

 

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The Beekeeper’s Secret has taken flight!

I am so very proud to let you know that my third foodie fiction novel, The Beekeeper’s Secret, has taken flight and is now out on the shelves around Australia and New Zealand (and will be out in the UK/Ireland in July).

I had a great time down in Sydney last week launching this book and was thrilled to be invited to Booktopia to sign a couple of hundred books (which you can order your signed copy here). And I was very blessed to have my friend, Ashley Jubinville, to accompany me, spending an extraordinary number of hours creating a stunning beehive cake for the morning tea spectacular with my publishers.

Thank you to everyone who has bought the book so far and for those who’ve sent me great feedback and/or taken the time to write reviews online. It is much appreciated.

Fly free, little book xx

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Clara, the no-longer-unsung-hero

Dear readers

 

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(Okay, it’s not actually Clara; but it could be. Image copyright ‘minoir’, Flickr)

 

This is Clara Finlay, who shall forever henceforth no longer be an unsung hero. Clara is one of the very rare breeds of professionals who work under completely unrealistic timeframes with nearly always unreasonable demands, with a near-zero error rate, who isn’t paid nearly enough and almost never gets any credit. What’s worse, it’s really difficult for these people to argue for a pay rise because when they do their work at their absolute best… No. One. Can. Tell. They leave no trace; they leave no calling card. They are the ninjas of the publishing industry. They are our editors.

How do I know this? Because I used to be an editor. A good editor, yes, one, worth her weight in salt. But Clara here is a great editor, worth her weight in saffron. I specifically asked (okay, begged) my publisher if I could work with Clara again after working with her on The Chocolate Promise and said, “She will make me work like a sled dog and eat kilos of chocolate but my book will be so much better for it.” And I’m confident to say that during the edit for The Beekeeper’s Secret, both the former and latter came true, and my book is a much, much better novel because of Clara’s nimble ninja fingers.

I’m not talking about picking up typos, spelling mistakes and punctuation errors. This is not what editors do. (Well, yes they do but it’s only a tiny portion of what they do. There is also a proofreader who comes after that who takes a last sweep for those things.) No, what a great editor does is to get inside your mind as an author and somehow know what it is you were trying to say and then help you say it better; get inside your character’s mind and help your character say it better; provide you summaries of reflection, analysing your characters and plots and then showing you what it looks like to a reader (which might be probably is totally different to what it looks like to you as a writer).

A great editor will ask literally hundreds of questions of you. Questions like:

  • Did you realise that you used the word ‘disquiet’ on page 86, 134, 257 and 301? Did you mean to do that?
  • On page 33, Alice shrugs. Why? Is she annoyed, bored, or rude? To which as an author I might think, actually I have no idea why! And then I have to have a conversation with Alice to find out why she is shrugging. And Alice might tell me she is bored, or she might tell me that she is remembering when she was five years old and … a new scene is born that gives an entirely different depth to Alice and infinitesimally more satisfaction to the reader.
  • This here, where you reference legal document XYZ and you say it means ABC… I looked it up and to me it meant XXX. Which is it? To which, I need to go and research the document again and find clarity, or I might decide to remove it altogether and rewrite the paragraph around it.
  • I think you have a timeline problem. In 1975 Mary was 6, but on page X in 1984 she is 23, and then a decade later on page XX she is 35 and her sister, who was 8 in 1974 is now… Could you check throughout? OMG, I hate these questions! There is a lot of chocolate eating over these ones as I pull out my calculator to start all over again and search the ENTIRE bloomin’ document to find EVERY instance where this could be wrong! (Cocktails may also ensue.)
  • I’m not sure you can say this? I think it might be copyright. Oops! Lucky!
  • Do you think George would say this? He seems a bit more conservative to me.
  • Do you think Marcia would think this? She seems a bit more enlightened to me.
  • And my favourite: NQR?.. which is editor shorthand for politely saying, “not quite right” or sometimes written more bluntly as, “recast?”. For a blunt interpretation, it means: I think you’ve been a bit lazy and could work a bit harder here and make this a better sentence. Having a bad day, were we? Would you like to try again?

A great editor lets you, the author, solve all the problems yourself, and be in charge of your words and intentions at every step, and yet you would never have gotten there if they hadn’t probed you and asked the difficult questions in the first place.

And on and on we go, for 100,000 words, or around 320 pages. If your editor has worked on hard copy, by the time you’ve gone through and accepted/ rejected/ changed/ added/ expanded/ explained your way through with your red pen, your pages look like a murder scene.

If it’s been done in Word with ‘track changes’, it will be so colourful you’ll think mardi gras has arrived in your document and you’ll barely be able to read the words for the highlighting, colour and added notes.

But when it’s all cleaned up and it’s sparkling white and shiny again, there will be no sign of the ninja whose swift, sharp knife had cut up those pages.

She will have done her job and disappeared once more into the night.

But I want you to know, Clara (and all editors whose diligence graces my books’ pages), that I see you. To me, you are heroes.

I know how hard you work.

I know that you are almost always the last person to touch a manuscript before it goes to print and therefore countless others before you have missed their deadline and pushed the timeframe further and further behind until someone slaps it on your desk and tells you that you can have two days to do two weeks worth of work and it has to be your best work ever, despite the fact that it might take you two days just to read the blasted manuscript, let alone touch it with a pencil!

I know that you’re financially undervalued. I know that it’s near impossible to argue for your worth when the only time someone notices you is when you’ve missed a typo on page 98 and a reader phones the publisher to complain. They didn’t see the four thousand and sixteen things you did; they just saw the one thing you missed.

I know that most people have no idea how skilled you are, how much breadth of general knowledge you need, how sensitive you are, what a great sense of humour you have, or what value you actually add other than picking up spelling mistakes.

I know that when a book does well that you might miss out on the awards and the travel and the publicity and cocktails.

But you will never miss out on my gratitude and deep love for the great work you do. Plus actual gifts. If no one else gives you gifts, I will!

From the bottom of my heart, thank you!

 

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Vale, Anastasia

Last week, I said goodbye to Anastasia.

I first met Anastasia six years ago via a Facebook page. She was in a slaughterhouse holding yard and the dogger (horse dealer) was asking $600 for her, or she’d become dog meat. From a market value perspective, $600 was crazy. But the moment I saw her photo, I started crying.

(Now, briefly, I already had five horses, most of them rescues, and I had recently founded and was running a horse rescue charity. So, seeing horses on death row was nothing unusual for me. I had made it a policy for the charity not to associate with horse dealers directly, but more fool me, I checked this site and simply knew I had to rescue this mare for myself. She even ‘told me’ her name: Anastasia. It just popped into my head so clearly, and when I looked up the meaning it meant resurrected, which seemed perfectly fitting for her situation.)

My husband and I scraped together the money, paid the dealer, and my friend Jane offered to drive over and pick up Anastasia. When she got there, Anastasia was standing in a yard and body parts of other horses lay on the ground around her.

As is the case in these situations, we didn’t know anything about her history. She appeared to be about 20 at the time, and the dealer claimed she’d been a ‘clerk of the course’ horse (those white/grey horses you see following racehorses around the track). That may or may not have been true. What was obvious immediately, after she’d shakily backed down the ramp off the float, was that she was very gentle and had had a lot of life experience, that she hadn’t eaten for quite some time (no manure for a long time and she was dehydrated), and that she had tendon issues in her back legs, and it was possibly for that reason that she’d been thrown away to the slaughter yard.

Despite her weakened back legs, she embraced her second chance at life. I had to lock her up in a yard by herself at night so she could eat (she was an excruciatingly slow eater and was so gentle that she was bullied by the other horses). But every morning, when I went to let her out, she’d be banging on the gate to get out, making a terrible commotion, whinnying and grunting at me to hurry up. She still climbed hills and took herself off on adventures through the paddocks. More than once, when she didn’t come back for dinner with the others, I set off across fields to find her and make sure she was okay, and when I found her I would tell her she had to come home, and she would walk back with me, side by side, with no halter or lead, taking her time and stopping occasionally on the steepest parts to have a rest.

After my son was born, it was Anastasia (along with my shetland pony, Sparky) who became his teacher. And she was the most most gentle, safe, patient, beautiful friend for him. What a blessing and gift she has been. With deep love and reverence, I watched him walking under her belly and between her legs, or laughing wildly as he threw hay up in the air and it landed in her hair, and more recently, going up to her as she lay on the ground and resting his body across hers, telling her that It’s okay, Anastasia. I never had a second’s fear that she would hurt him. Not one. She was trustworthy to a fault.

A couple of weeks ago, she had an eye ulcer and I had to put ointment in her eye three times a day. I didn’t even need a halter or rope on her. I would stand in front of her and lift her head and place it over my left shoulder while I opened her eyelids and squeezed in ointment. She never complained. Stoic till the end.

But it was those tendons in her back legs that were her literal downfall.

A couple of months ago I looked out to the yards at the house and she was lying down. Nothing too unusual in that, except I saw her do it three times in quick succession. I went out to check on her and she’d blown another tendon, probably having fallen down one of the hills she so loved to climb. I got the vet out and we bandaged and iced and gave her pain medication. But a couple of weeks later, just as it was starting to heal, it rained. Really rained. With mud under her feet, she had difficulty standing and the other leg (the “good leg”) suffered the same fate. Another blown tendon. Both legs went into bandages. The vet came again. She had cellulitis. We gave her antibiotics. We x-rayed to make sure nothing was broken. I realised that rain would be the ultimate undoing so in quick time we got out an earthmover to flatten earth and a hustled a builder into coming out urgently to build her a shelter. Some more rain came and she stood in her shelter knowing she couldn’t step outside on those wobbly legs. We filled the shelter with a deep pile of wood shavings so she could lie down, which she loved, and rolled in it till golden shavings filled her white mane like glitter.

My barefoot trimmer came to trim her feet, as she did every six weeks. Anastasia lay down for her to do it — a unicorn getting a pedicure.

Twice daily, I dosed her with pain medication (bute). But she wouldn’t eat it in food. She wouldn’t have it with molasses and bread. I tried honey, apple sauce, peanut paste. But she refused it all until I discovered that she loved organic brown rice syrup on fresh fluffy white bread. That was the trick. 🙂 Then I had to cut the sandwiches into rectangles so she could eat them, as she only had “three working teeth” left, according to the vet.

On we battled until ‘the good leg’ dropped further. Now, she was walking on her fetlock joint on the ground. It was a complete rupture of the suspensory ligament in that joint, one that would never recover. Still, the vet hesitated. We put her in big bandages again and waited to see.

But later that afternoon, she lay down. And barely got up again. The next morning when I checked on her, she lifted her head to greet me, before flopping it down once more. The light was gone from her eyes. She’d let go. I called the vet, he agreed it was time, and we let her go on the spot where she’d loved to sleep in the morning sun. I wove sprigs of yellow wildflowers into her mane and tail, and wedged lavender down into the bandages around her legs. And we buried her there.

I kissed her and let her go, saying, You don’t need legs when you’ve got wings.

Fly free, beautiful girl. The honour and privilege has been all ours.

__________

** I also wrote a book called Horse Rescue. It is published under the name Joanne Schoenwald. If you are interested, you will find more of Anastasia’s story in that book.**

 

 

 

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A Writer’s Year Plan

It’s been a great year for me and it hasn’t been by accident. At the end of last year, I wrote down my reflections of the year, I pinpointed the things that went wrong and wrote strategies for how to avoid them or deal with them if it happened again. I wrote down all the great things that did happen and all the things I wanted to change. And I mapped it all out, both personally and professionally and then I executed it, month by month. And I did it all in Leonie Dawson’s Create Your Shining Year workbook.550x381_AffiliateGraphics_2016

You know how they always say that when you write something down it’s more likely to come true?

That is the value in year planning.

In my last post, I introduced you to the year planner that changed my life in 2015. In this post, I want to tell you about some of the things I wrote down in my year planner that came true, even when I thought they were just fanciful, fun dreams.

The funny thing about writing these things down was that, for the most part, I completely forgot about them. And then months later, when checking in, I stopped and went, wait a minute! I just did that! Better than that, often what I wrote down came true, yes, but in a way that was even BIGGER and BETTER than what I’d written.

Here’s some:

  1. Get new author pics. I was lining up a friend or my sister to do this for me and then about two weeks after I wrote this, my publisher emailed out of then blue me asking if Allen & Unwin could organise this for me, with a professional photographer and a makeup and hair person. Whoa! Yes please! Thank you, A&U, you are generous and wonderful and make me look much better than I feel.
  2. Do yoga. I wrote this down, thinking I’d like to do a class. But you know what? We did better. My husband and I decided we needed a private yoga teacher and it was possibly one of the best things we’ve ever done for ourselves.
  3. Fly to Sydney to see my publisher and agent (for no other reason than to see them). I did this and it was great not only to catch up when things weren’t so hectic but because EXTRA things came directly out of the fact that I did that: (1) totally unexpectedly, I was invited to submit a manuscript for a children’s book that I’d been scribbling away on; (2) I got a new title for my next book, The Beekeeper’s Secret (thanks, Tom); and (3) I booked a flight to the UK! (see next point)
  4. Fly to the UK. I did it! That one was totally a ‘wish list’/ ‘in your dreams’ thing and yet… it came true!
  5. Pay off the mortgage. Okay, this one was also an ‘in your dreams’ thing. But the thing with this one is that I didn’t specify which house to pay off. In my head, I was thinking our family home. But what has happened is that our beautiful tenant has left our other property (our family home before this one), so we put it on the market and we’ve just got a contract for it and that will pay it off. So it’s all good.

I also invested in my business systems.

  • I changed my focus from social media and began a quarterly newsletter, and when I mentioned it to my publishers, they offered to help out with some prizes for some issues. (Did I mention how great they are?)
  • I made a book trailer for The Chocolate Promise / The Chocolate Apothecary.
  • I got a personal assistant. This was also an ‘in your dreams’ thing (almost laughable). But guess what? I did it! Only for a couple of hours a week, sure. But it is a great move and I’m so pleased I’ve done it.
  • I invested a lot more time into my financial bookkeeping systems, spreadsheets of what contracts are where and when reporting periods happen, actually went and found all my contracts (I know, I know). In other words, I really took the legal/financial stuff a lot more seriously and set up processes to help manage the growing correspondence about this. (Truly, I’ve no idea how authors who have ten or twenty books all published in different regions and with translation rights keep on top of it all. But since I do hope that will be me one day, I guess it’s best I try to figure it out now.)

The other great thing that happens when you start writing down not only what you want to happen, but also what does happen, and what unplanned successes came along, is that you get into the FLOW of synchronicity and more and more good things come your way.

Great surprises and beautiful blessings for the year of 2015

  • A New York agent took on The Chocolate Promise and is hopeful of selling it.
  • I have contracts for The Chocolate Promise to be translated for the German market!
  • Kim Wilkins (Kimberley Freeman) gave the most beautiful speech about me and my book at the launch of The Chocolate Promise this year and it will stay in my heart forever.
  • I received an ABIA nomination for The Tea Chest and my publishers flew me to Sydney to attend the awards.
  • I got to take my sister, nephew and Dad with me to the UK, for fantastic family support on my research trip there. Lots of gorgeous memories were made and I even got to tick off another of my year’s ‘fanciful’ things to do… play Canasta!!! (We are Canasta tragics in our house and spent many hours laughing ourselves silly over the cards in the Cotswolds).
  • I have learned so much about myself as a writer, woman, mother, creative and human being this year (and I’ll get to another post about that soon).

Leonie Dawson’s 2016 Shining Year Workbooks  are on sale now but stocks are already running low. I cannot recommend them enough. You can choose just the personal life book, or the business book, or both, and you can get them in digital and print copies. They are a small investment in what could be a huge return on your dreams.

Leonie’s books get right to the heart of what it means to live, of what it means to have a business (the big ‘why’ of why we do what we do), of what it means to be alive and have dreams, and then grounds that in real visionary activities. I can’t wait for mine to arrive and to dive into planning the next beautiful year of my life.

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Valley Bees Open Day

Some of you may now know that my third novel, due out April 2016, had a foodie fiction theme of honeybees.

(Everyone in the world needs to get passionate about bees right now!)

I’ll be heading to this event at Imbil on the Sunshine Coast, 12 September, to learn as much as I can about bees. I’ve also donated two copies of my books to their raffle. If you can make it, let me know, I’d love to meet you in person 🙂11850440_506272846203047_2254374535744187306_o

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Heavenly Retreat

** This post was first published in 2009, but I’m posting it again here because 2015 will be ‘The Year of Retreats’ on this blog **

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75323_173120436038856_3551589_n‘Welcome to Heaven.’

This is how our small cohort of writers was greeted at our DIY writing retreat over the long weekend. Five of us (four full-time participants and one part-time participant) locked ourselves in a tiny cabin at Heaven in the Hills in Maleny. We were surrounded by rain forest; were warmed by a fireplace that glowed 24-hours a day for four days; slept to the sound of silence; were without mobile phone reception; lived without television or radio; and had the most wonderful time. This is despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that we had gone with a cheap DIY option and were crammed into such a tiny cabin that left one man sleeping on the verandah in a pink ‘fairy’ bed and one man sleeping on the floor in a nest of cushions. (Sometimes there are advantages to being female.)

Locked into such a tiny space we talked and brainstormed and problem-solved our way through twelve hours of conversation at a time. And never once did we fight. On the contrary; we were bursting with enthusiasm and support and laughter.

I came up with the idea for a DIY retreat after reading an article in The Writer magazine. I wanted to go on retreat and wondered who I could convince to come with me. I cast the net wide and left it up to fate as to who turned up. It worked like a charm. I wrote a program and everyone agreed to it. I offered a choice of two locations and everyone unanimously voted for the cabin. We slept little but dreamed lots. We wrote little but received more prizes than any of us thought was possible. We solved the big questions of our writing before we headed too far down the wrong path.

I simply could not have imagined a better time. (Okay if everyone had had their own bed/bedroom it would have been better… but I still wonder if that was part of the magic of this ‘writer survivor’ experience.)

Today I am struggling to keep hold of the magic of the weekend and carry it with me like a candle throughout my day lighting up my characters and plot with every breath I take. But as the wonderland fades a little with every chore found here in the ‘real’ world I know that I only have to open my book and write a sentence in order to find it again.

*** Does a retreat sound appealing to you? ***

If you want to join me on retreat, I’ll be running a retreat on the Sunshine Coast hinterland in October 2015. Click here for details.

I’m also open to visiting you on your own self-organised retreat. You can email me to chat about that too 🙂

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The Chocolate Promise, excerpt and chocolate lavender truffle ball recipe!

My new novel, The Chocolate Promise, is in production and the book will be out in April 2015. In the meantime, here’s a lovely piece to whet your appetite, an excerpt and a divine recipe for chocolate lavender truffle balls. Oh boy!

Chocolate Promise Mag Flyer copy

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Do you want to run a bookshop?

Sisters, Lucinda and Natalie, run The River Read at Noosaville
Sisters, Lucinda and Natalie, run The River Read at Noosaville

Have you ever dreamed of chucking in your ‘real’ job and owning and running a bookstore instead? Of being surrounded by endless books to choose from? A coffee machine whirring away next to you, book launches and that irresistible smell of new books? I did, all the time when I was working in a  corporate job and trying to crack a publishing deal. My fantasy life was as a bookstore owner. So I thought it would be nice to ask a real person what that dream is actually like.

The lovely Lucinda Morley, co-owner with her sister at The River Read, answered some questions on what her day job is like.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself (and your sister) and your bookshop? 
My sister Natalie and I bought The River Read 5 years ago. For a couple of years we had been on the lookout for an opportunity to go into business together. We had grown up in Noosa and are big book lovers, so when my husbands step mother told me that she was thinking about moving on and selling The River Read it was the perfect opportunity for us. 6 months after buying the shop we added the coffee side of the business which was another great learning curve for us. We had never run a cafe OR a bookshop! We came into the business with a lot of passion and energy, and took on board a lot of advice from experts in both areas. We get told by customers all the time that the shop has a great energy, which we think is a result if it being something we put a lot of love into.

The courtyard at The River Read
The courtyard at The River Read

I think a lot of us dream of quitting our day jobs and running a bookstore. Is it really as much fun as it’s cracked up to be?
It’s pretty fun! We still get a buzz whenever new release books arrive, especially from authors we love. It’s pretty great going to a work being surrounded by books all day. It’s especially great because we do it together. Obviously there’s a serious side – paying the bills, hiring staff etc. but overall we love it.
What do you love most about your job?
Reading! It’s funny because people assume we come to work and get to read all day, but the opposite is true. We constantly have people (customers, book reps) telling us we MUST read this or that book and it can be really frustrating because you go home with a pile of books and not nearly enough time to read them.
How many books do you read a week/month? On average I’d say a book a week – sometimes more sometimes less. It depends on the size of the books and how much spare time I get (which is often not much).
What’s been the most challenging or unexpected thing that’s happened since you started? What really amazes me is that after 5 years running and working in a bookshop, there is still not a day that goes by that a customer asks about an author I’ve never heard of. There are so many books and authors out there! It used to really frustrate me but now I just listen and enjoy learning every day. You can’t read everything so we really take on board the wealth of knowledge our customers bring in.

What are your top three pieces of advice for someone who dreams of having their own bookshop?

  1. Do your numbers. Having a bookshop is wonderful but unfortunately there isn’t a lot of money to be made from them. You need to have a variety of products to be successful.
  2. Don’t try to be everything to all people – you will never win. You heed to decide what kind of bookshop you want to be, which is determined largely by your location. We are in a tourist area so we stock mainly the type of books people read or buy when they’re on holidays. We have a local customer base also, so we do cater for that too, however we don’t do for example a lot of reference books. There are literally billions of books out there and you can’t stock them all.
  3. Keep reading books you love. When we first bought the shop I felt pressure to read outside my usual genres so I could sell them but reading really started to feel like a chore. I do read lots of different types of books but I’ve gone back to reading for pleasure. You can’t know everything about every type of book and you’re better off being honest to customers and saying ‘I don’t personally read a lot of that type if book, but….’ There are lots of ways to learn about different books without forcing yourself to read it all – listen to customers, friends, family, book reps. You need to keep loving books or you loose sight if why you started doing it in the first place.

Thanks, Lucinda!