Stage One, and a lot of shoe leather

 For the last couple of days I've been going around various bookshops in Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders, escorted by the incredibly hard-working David (the Bloomsbury sales manager (or as we used to know them in the bookselling trade, the 'rep')), handing over proof copies of my novel The Unrecovered. Day One saw us taking a long drive to St Boswalls and the wonderful Mainstreet Trading, then on to Biggar and Atkinson Pryce, then up to St Andrews and Toppings & Co., then to Linlithgow and Far From the Madding Crowd. Day Two was all the Edinburgh shops, including Argonaut, the Edinburgh Bookshop, Toppings, Waterstones, the Portobello Bookshop, Lighthouse and Blackwells. I was disappointed however to see only one quality bookshop dog (at Lighthouse Books). [Note: the only reason Edinburgh's greatest bookshop, Golden Hare, was left out of the list is because I live with the manager and it seemed a redundant stop on the itinery. I add this only because I wouldn't want the casual reader to think I had an obscure grudge against them.]

The 'proof drop' is something that's developed over the years since I last worked in a bookshop, but the idea is to personally introduce both yourself and your novel to the people who are actually going to be putting it on their shelves and (hopefully) selling the thing. It tends to be more for debut writers, and it's a strange business that doesn't quite come naturally to me. Once I'd eased into it after the first couple of visits I found it strangely enjoyable though. It's actually quite pleasant meeting the booksellers, drinking their tea and eating their biscuits (and bribing them with biscuits of your own), and getting a chance to talk about your book. I quickly developed a short pitch to explain what the novel was about, although by the end of the second day I was fairly sure I never wanted to hear about another 'gothic-historical novel set towards the end of the First World War' again, so who knows what the booksellers thought. David also took what felt like hundeds of photographs of me awkwardly posing outside these bookshops, wielding the proof like a shield, and I've promised myself not to look at them if/when they go up on Instagram.

Apart from providing a little glimpse behind the curtain of how all this works, which wasn't unexpected given how long I worked in bookselling and publishing myself, it seriously underlined for me how much basic pavement-pounding and shoe leather goes into getting a book into a reader's hand. Writing the novel began to seem like the easy part; the hard part starts when sales and marketing roll up their sleeves and get cracking.

So, Stage One is complete: the proofs have gone out, and supportive quotes are being gathered (which deserves a blog post of its own). Next up is the Raven Books showcase in London at the end of October, when I'll have to talk about the novel at scale...