Blogs

Lockdown diaries: the marketing executive

Hamza Jahanzeb Marketing executive at Icon Books

I usually don’t travel back to my hometown in Lancashire unless it's to visit family and friends - and that isn’t often, as I regularly catch up with them on their... Read more

Reading across the generations

Lachlan Brown Founder of Best By The Numbers

The reading habits of people in the UK can provide golden insight for publishers. But they're all too often clouded by assumptions and anecdotes rather than... Read more

Publishing the full Spectrum

Lydia Wilkins Journalist

For a long time, I felt like I had been failed by publishing. After a diagnosis of Aspergers Syndrome - now Autism Spectrum Disorder (or... Read more

Lockdown diaries: the librarian

Zoey Dixon Librarian at Lambeth Libraries

Some people are surprised when I say I didn’t find lockdown that bad. I had some practise (although less restrictive of course) when I stayed... Read more

Lockdown diaries: the book club founder

Melissa Cummings-Quarry Co-founder of Black Girls Book Club

It happened so suddenly. One moment I was at work, bleaching everything in sight, using extra splashes of Dettol - that infamous Caribbean Aunty staple with... Read more

Ignore, focus or avoid? How authors are tackling COVID-19

Gillian Harvey author

Many of us enjoy getting lost in historical novels, often set in periods of history when great change was taking place. Contemporary fiction is usually... Read more

How to promote books by black authors

Hephzibah Kwakye-Saka Senior campaigns manager at Riot Communications

As a black publicist with more than seven years in culture and entertainment publicity, I have sat in many all-white creative meetings where the genuine... Read more

How coronavirus made me fall in love with bookselling again

Katie Clapham bookseller at Storytellers, Inc.

It’s a strange thing, when you realise, you’ve fallen out of love. It’s kind of embarrassing, really. Noticing that things are messy, and that you... Read more

2020 sideswipe

By Philip Jones

Editor at The Bookseller

Future historians of the book business will have a problem when they look back on 2020. Read more

Place writing in a pandemic

David Cooper and Rachel Lichtenstein, co-directors at the Centre for Place Writing

Since the turn of the millennium, whether responding to globalisation, the rise of digital technologies, or the climate emergency, many writers have become increasingly preoccupied... Read more

We need more modesty, more money and more collaboration

David Reynolds, director at Old Street Publishing

We are in a time of major change – following the brutal, televised murder of George Floyd – and it goes without saying that the... Read more

Lockdown diaries: the education entrepreneur

By Jenny Baldwin

Founder at SHAPES

I was in the Soho Theatre last May, watching comedian Rob Auton perform ‘The Talk Show’. He told a great joke. It’s hard working from... Read more

What the Clarke Award data tells us about diversity

By Stewart Hotston

Author at Rebellion Publishing

This article has some relatively good news and then some particularly bad news. First the good news. Of 121 submissions to the Clarke Award in... Read more

Reaching for the universal

By Isabelle Dupuy

Author at Jacaranda Books

Last week I had the honour of being a panelist on a webinar about publishing values in 2020. I listened to the various publishers, both big... Read more

This may not destroy you

By Philip Jones

Editor at The Bookseller

In Michaela Coel’s excellent BBC TV series “I May Destroy You”, her character Arabella’s journey concludes in a bookshop with the launch of her self-published... Read more