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One of a series of guest blogs by booksellers who work with children’s authors in different ways. These guest blogs are designed to show life behind the scenes of a crucial but neglected relationship – the one between a writer and a bookseller. These days, such relationships are more intense and more important, as increasing numbers of authors go on the road to promote and sell children’s books – a goal shared by the booksellers who will contribute to this series.

Tamara’s first book, Amazing Esme, is just out with Hodder & Stoughton.

My own first author event – as an author – passed recently in a blur. I have yet to recall a word I said, as all that passed through my head for the entire session was, repeatedly, ‘It’s just an hour of my life. If I’m still alive at the end of it, how bad can it be?’

I had taken all the necessary precautions and a few extra ones. I had guaranteed myself a full and willing audience: it was an hour out of lessons and school. I would have to be really bad to stop those advantages winning the children over. I had learnt how to use prezi.com and I’d created what I thought was a really impressive presentation. I had rehearsed, collected props, remembered a few golden rules from my four years of teacher training and seven years in the classroom. And then I had gone one step further and enlisted the help of one of the best children’s entertainers in town, Gilbert Giggles.

A little over the top perhaps, but having been in the fortunate position of being a children’s bookshop owner, one who had organised and seen numerous fantastic author events, I of all people knew that the stakes were high. I had observed giant bogies being bounced around auditoriums, been fascinated by virtual tours of exotic places, been entertained by re enactments of bloody battles, seen fake sick in a bag and watched countless teachers climb into wigs and giant pairs of knickers.

I have also, perhaps just as importantly, seen some terrifyingly dull events, the kind where you mourn desperately for the hour of your life that you’ve just had stolen from you, the kind where you daydream of piercing your own ear drums with a couple of HB pencils and you start wondering why the children haven’t realised that they’ve got the advantage in terms of numbers, and, if they got organised, they could overthrow the dull event that’s torturing them. Having resisted the urge to rally the children to arms, on the basis that it would be unprofessional, I resigned myself to using the time to work out how to avoid falling into the same trap.

At Tales on Moon Lane, author events are a vital part of what we do. Done well, they offer a rare kind of symbiotic magic where all involved parties come away happier people. They genuinely offer children an open door into literature by opening the book for them, showing them the way in and enough of the workings to create questions. They make the possibilities tangible and offer the idea that the hard work (that reading is for many children) might just offer them a genuine return of pleasure and interest.

For a generation of children, many of whom arrive at school without having ever owned a book, this experience isn’t just an escape from death by phonics. It is essential.

At the shop we also have a cosy little room at the back where we run a small after-school book club for especially keen readers. These lucky children are often addressed by the authors of the books they are reading. And we have been known to supply cupcakes with book illustratio

Surprising numbers of children have eaten dog food.

This was the unexpected finding of my first bookshop signing. Determined to have plenty of interesting things for kids to do (and to avoid ending up behind a table bleating “Please buy my book!”) I had compiled a quiz on childhood misdoings. A sort of survey, if you like. As the heroine of my book, Martha, is a real “little stinker” I thought it would be fun to find out how many other little stinkers there are out there. So I compiled a list and handed it out.

Well, it turned out they were a pretty well-behaved bunch in Waterstone’s. However much they enjoyed reading about naughty characters, and chuckling at their exploits (they were good enough to chuckle loudly at Martha’s) they scored low on the naughtiness index. A more polite, obedient, considerate bunch I have seldom met. Maybe this is a sign that reading books makes for a well-behaved child? (And is yet one more reason to reverse those library cuts?)

Except when it came to eating dog food. Then it was a different story.

A little girl came up to me. Did cat food count, she wanted to know?

Certainly, I replied.

Include cat food, and everyone seemed to have tucked into their pet’s dinner, one time or another. One parent revealed that the family cat could only be fed when her son was elsewhere; another waxed nostalgic about the childhood joys of nibbling Whiskas.

Hmm. I grew up with a family dog – and somehow I never once felt like sharing his supper.

Anyhow, it certainly broke the ice, and the signing went with a swing. There were ups and downs, of course. I had brought too few colouring sheets. A friend of mine went dashing onto the street in search of photocopiers: thank you, Thomas Cook, who gallantly responded to his plea and ran off extra copies! Thank you everyone who did so much to help in different ways.

So here you go (be honest now):

• Have you ever flushed your sister’s homework down the toilet?
• Have you sneaked food from fridge, cupboard or biscuit tin?
• Have you ever tried to sell your brother?
• Have you eaten dog food?
• Have you ever made a cake from dog food and served it to your family?

Bookshops appeared to have been largely unaffected by the rioting that swept across London and other cities last night, causing tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage.

As London shopowners began the clean-up this morning, spokespeople for both Waterstone's and W H Smith said they were unaware of any damage to their store portfolio. Both retailers' management were meeting this morning to discuss the violence, which was largely targeted at electronics retailers.

read more

Last Saturday I had a great time. I was able to sit through three sessions by illustrator Lynne Chapman. I've always really enjoyed the energy and colour in her work, and have a special fondness for the books she's done with SAS writer friends such as Julia Jarman and Damian Harvey.

So it was an almost total pleasure seeing Lynne working with children small and big and hear her talk to adults about her work.

Almost total. Because I'd also been involved with setting up the day.

It was a useful reminder of the work behind such events. The visitor - Lynne - and the date were easy choices once I'd made sure to avoid Wimbledon finals weekend. There was all the publicity - local press, radio, and flyers and display materials for the library. There was arranging the times on the day, the travel and the pick-up.

There'd also been several long meetings and emails about the venue with the other organisations involved and the people who'd be there - or not be there - to help and when, and small emergencies. All important stuff.

I mustn't forget the collecting of materials for the workshop, the lunch for Lynne, the evalustion forms & photo permissions, the books for the booksales (not forgetting the float), the refreshments and so on. There has been more and there is still more to do to finish the event off completely.

The day was joyous, and I didn't mind a bit (though may have muttered darkly at times) but it did consume so much of my time.

No sympathy needed here for me, though.

I just want to raise a huge huge cheer of thanks for all the people, especially librarians, teachers, festival arrangers and bookshop owners who so often do all this work for US!

By the way, if you are interested in illustration, look up Lynne's website and the images on her amazing blog, An Illustrator's Life For Me!


A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E out in paperback this August
www.pennydolan.com

View We Heart Books children’s bookshop world tour in a larger map

Needless to say, we love a good children’s bookshop here at We Heart Books. And since overseas travel is more of a dream than a realistic proposition for me at the moment, I’ve been pondering a round-the-world trip of the world’s greatest children’s bookshops… Wouldn’t that be decadent and cool?!

Here’s your chance to help compile a list of the best children’s bookshops in the world. Nominate your favourite children’s bookshops anywhere in the world… and spread the word if you know others who might like to have a say too…

How to take part…
In the comments of this post, nominate a bookshop to be included on the itinerary of a world tour of the most amazing children’s bookshops. Include the address and website, and a short description or review of it – your reasons for the nomination. If you know of a good child-friendly cafe or restaurant nearby, feel free to mention that too, and we’ll include it on the itinerary, all this travelling is going to be hungry work…

Guidelines…
Any nominations taken, but we’ll lean towards specialist children’s bookshops, rather than generalist stores. It needs to be worth going out of your way for. Children’s bookshops attached to museums are OK too, as long as they stock a wide range of children’s books and fulfill the above. You don’t need to have actually been to the shop either (I haven’t been to any of the ones below…)

To chart the book tour, I’ve started a Google My Maps – pop over and take a look. I’ll be adding to it as we receive nominations and when we’ve finished we’ll have a Google Map charting an itinerary for a tour of the Greatest Children’s Bookshops in the world!

Here’s a few to start us off…

1) Books of Wonder, New York, USA

Billed as the children’s bookshop of all bookshops, this shop has been called the real life (and bigger) version of ‘The Shop Around the Corner’ from the movie ‘You’ve Got Mail’. It’s known for its amazing range of children’s books, as well as a unique selection of rare and collectible signed and first editions. Check out the post from Vintage Kids Books My Kid Loves when they visited. You can read more about it here and here.

2) La Soupe de l’Espace, Hyeres, France

I first heard about this bookshop via Adolie Day,

Don’t tell anyone I work with but I don’t actually buy that many books. I used to, when I worked in Waterstone’s, as I a) was constantly surrounded by lots I wanted, b) had a staff discount, and, most crucially of all, c) couldn’t get them for free like I can often do now. 

When I do buy books, though, I like to try and do it from an independent. Yes, it’s more expensive as you usually pay full price but I find the experience quite edifying, mainly for the fact that it feels like everyone else in the transaction is getting maximum benefit: writer, publisher and, of course and perhaps most importantly, the bookseller. But to a few people I’ve told this to, including many friends, it seems a confusing choice: apart from 

feeling like a good egg/self-important, what do I get out of it? Call me starry-eyed but nothing less than a lovely, life-affirming experience, an experience typified by two brilliant independent bookshops in Bath: Topping & Co and Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. I visited them both with Nick Hornby recently, who read at Topping, and they both manage to be utterly charming yet completely different. Topping does fantastic events and the shop is full-to-bursting with signed first editions; they think of themselves as being a ‘year-round literary festival’ and Nick’s event, in the shop itself, was gloriously old-fashioned: people peering out from behind bookshelves, crammed into corners and surrounded by books of all kinds. Between listening to Nick read I found myself browsing the shelves and making mental notes of books I wanted.

Mr B’s takes the idea of browsing and shopping in comfort to a whole new level for bookshops. They have a ‘reading booth’, within which are a comfy armchair, some biscuits and a ledge to hold your cup of tea. You shut the door and just sit there and read. Imagine! A man apparently shut his dog in there recently and couldn’t get it out, so I guess it’s not quite fool-proof. But they have also started what I think is a brilliant initiative. It’s called a Reading Spa: for £55 a person gets an hour of undivided attention from one of their extremely nice and knowledgeable booksellers. You sit and have tea and cake and talk about what you like, what you don’t like; they talk about what’s come out recently, what’s selling well. Based on this, they then go away and come back with a pile of books. £40 of that £55 goes towards these books, plus of course any extra you want to spend. So far they’re doing at least one a week and one chap spent an extra £400 a couple of weeks ago.

Great independents don’t exist everywhere, of course, and you can’t always get to one, but if you do happen to have one near you, I urge you to go in and have a browse. It’s the best atmosphere for book-buying, in my opinion.

Do you have a favourite independent bookshop? Why don’t you write them a little puff-piece in the comments below and provide a link to their website? They’ll thank you for it, and you’ll sleep well because of it.

Joe The Publicist

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We took a lovely trip to the beach this weekend and enjoyed the sunshine while it lasted, walking along the pier, spotting whales, running in the park and buying too many gorgeous things at Lorne Beach Books!

Ned really enjoyed having the three of us sitting in the sun on Saturday afternoon and reading one of his favorites Imagine by Alison Lester.

My mum has just got back from a month in the USA and Canada - and she took the opportunity to visit some bookshops wherever she went. Lucky us! She wrote this post for We Heart Books towards the end of her time there…

Rivendell Books, Montpelier, Vermont

For those who don’t know me, I should confess that I am a self-confessed ‘collect-a-holic’ so it has been a delight to have something to search for whilst here in North America and it should be no surprise that I have been looking for bookshops - and irresistible children‘s books! But what can I say? … It has not been such an easy quest. The ‘real’ bookshop seems to be a disappearing entity.

Our first stop was New York which provided an excellent serve of cultural enrichment, however, in spite of the recession, alas, no specials in the museum and gallery shops which are magnets that draw me to them before I even look at their collections! Those of MOMA and the Met proved no exception. The fact that we already have large numbers of books which encourage art appreciation in children was no reason not to carefully shift through their shelves for more treasures. I have added three more titles including one for children about the work of Austrian architect, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose wonderful museum in Vienna I visited last year.

Outside FAO Schwartz, New York (with Curious George wooden toy in hand)

But, my most pressing quest was to find a Curious George soft toy and game to augment Rowan’s next birthday present, the collector’s edition of Curious George stories by Margaret and HA Rey. I couldn’t believe that neither America’s largest toy store, FAO Swartz in New York nor Borders in Boston could produce a single cuddly Curious George. The kind lady in Borders was somewhat despondent about the level of sales of any children’s books and said special toys like the one I was after were only brought in for Christmas.

However, not all was lost as I found a cloth-bound and cased copy of Dr Seuss’ Oh The Places You’ll Go. This was purchased for daughter Clare - about to graduate from Harvard Masters of Public Health. From the relatively large numbers of this book in stock, I gather it is commonly given as a parental gift at commencement (graduation). A bit corny but … well heck!

The Curious George Store, Harvard

As for Curious George, he did turn up - in Harvard Square of all places, where there is a bookshop named after him. An hour or more later, the cases were well stocked with children’s books and the next book stop, a few days later, at Rivendell Books in Montpelier, Vermont was for a look only. But it had a great feel - I really like bookshops that are peppered with interesting comfortable chairs which encourage lingering.

Interior of Jade W Bookshop, Halifax

Katie was encouraged to send a list of desirable authors/illustrators and this guided my selections at Dustjacket and The Jade W in Halifax and as a result, there are now two large boxes of books on their way back to Melbourne; some are second-hand, others new and most are from US and Canadian publishers, ones I don’t think make the usual bookshop shelves in Australia. I am still not sure which of these are gifts for Katie and Rowan and which will join the library at Nanou’s, but I am sure you’ll be hearing more about at least some of them.

Some titles were too precious to trust to the boxes…

The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey is an adults’ ABC which starts:
A is for AMY who fell down the stairs;
B is for BASIL assaulted by bears;
C is for CLARA who wasted away;
D is for DESMOND thrown out of a sleigh.
Great detailed black and white fine line illustrations.

My Little Hen by Alice and Martin Provensen, which I love for its illustrations alone.

And a couple of books ‘just for’: Henry’s Important Date by Robert Quackenbush and a well-loved 1960 copy of Maurice Sendak’s The Sign on Rosie’s Door.

Renee at Dustjacket and Sydney at The Jade W were both incredibly helpful and both obviously love books. Whether it be the idiosyncratic filing system at Dustjacket or the more orderly library arrangement at The Jade W, both provided wonderful book experiences … and there were so many titles that had to be left behind for someone else to discover and love.

Thanks Mum for this post and all the treasures you brought back - look forward to sharing them in future Borrowed and Thrifted posts…

Last year, Lou and I took our boys to Victoria’s annual Booktown event in Clunes (you can find our posts on it here and here).

At the last minute, I made it back again this year. I didn’t bump into any We Heart Books readers this year… but did meet a new kindred spirit over a few bins of picture books.

The weather was beautiful and the atmosphere very lovely. This year, I made an early stop at the CFA ‘nothing over $5′ hall, in a new venue at the town’s Bottle Museum. With kids’ books priced at 6 for $1, you could hardly go wrong. And it was nice for Rowan to be able to pick out whatever took his fancy and hardly be able to refuse… The books had been donated from local school libraries so they were mostly very worn and damaged. But I picked up a few gems - and will post on some of them shortly.

To balance out my thiftiness, I then went on and indulged in a handful of picture books at $6-$10 each… All in beautiful condition though, and the stall owners are apparently opening a bookshop in Northcote here in Melbourne in June - called Brown & Bunting. It should be a good source of secondhand books in fine condition.

I have to confess I don't do a lot of book signings. It's at least two hours drive to my nearest book shop, and so the opportunity only arises when I travel to present at a festival or such. Still, I know many children's writers DO do book signings, with varying degrees of success. This week author Simon Rose, in his blog Simon Says has an interesting piece full of tips for successful book

This just came in, and I thought it deserved a long reply...

Hello Mr. Gaiman:
As a bookseller, I am a bit surprised by your recent comment about free books and the HarperCollins download. When you say, "the problem isn't that books are given away or that people read books they haven't paid for. The problem is that the majority of people don't read for pleasure," you seem to miss the point that all of us booksellers are hoping to sell your book to READERS as well as non-readers. Our situation improves as more non-readers become readers, but we can't survive when the readers go elsewhere. I am not at all against free literature--I firmly believe that the more people read the more people read--but somehow, if we independents are to survive, we need to be included somewhere in the formula. I also believe that we independents have no RIGHT to exist, that our time may have passed or be passing, but it would be nice if we could survive; I believe we can--and do--serve a very important purpose.Thanks. I don't sense that you have anything against booksellers--I do want to let you know how your comment might be interpreted by some.
Don Muller
Old Harbor Books
201 Lincoln Street
Sitka, Alaska 99835

Hi Don,

I don't see this as either they get it for free or they come and buy it from you. I see it as Where do you get the people who come in and buy the books that keep you in business from?

The books you sell have "pass-along" rates. They get bought by one person. Then they get passed along to other people. The other people find an author they like, or they don't.

When they do, some of them may come in to your book store and buy some paperback backlist titles, or buy the book they read and liked so that they can read it again. You want this to happen.

Just as a bookseller who regards a library as the enemy, because people can go there and read -- for free! -- what he sells, is missing that the library is creating a pool of people who like and take pleasure in books, will be his customer base, and are out there spreading the word about authors and books they like to other people, some of whom will simply go out and buy it.

If readers find (for free -- in a library, or on-line, or by borrowing from a friend, or on a window-sill) an author they really like, and that author has a nice spanking new hardback coming out, they are quite likely to come in to your shop and buy the nice spanking new hardback. You want that to happen. You really want that to happen a lot, because you'll make more in profit on each of the nice spanking new hardbacks than you will on the paperbacks (or, probably, on anything else in the shop).

I don't believe that anybody out there who can afford a copy of American Gods is going to not buy it (or another of my books) because it's available out there on line for nothing. (Not at this point, anyway.) I think it's a lot more likely that some of the people who read it will find an author they like, and buy more books. Which is good news for people who run bookshops.

(Remember: one in four adults read no books last year. Among those who said they had read books, the median figure — with half reading more, half fewer — was nine books for women and five for men. The figures also indicated that those with college degrees read the most, and people aged 50 and up read more than those who are younger. Which means you need to find ways to get young readers to read books. And means that if someone likes American Gods and goes out and buys my entire backlist from you, that's more books than most Americans read in a year.)

I think it's very likely that someone who reads American Gods online and likes it may decide, come the 30th of September, to go out to your shop or somewhere else like it and plonk down their $17.99 for The Graveyard Book in hardcover.

I don't see it as taking money from the pockets of booksellers.

(To steal a metaphor from Cory Doctorow, it's dandelion seeds rather than mammals. A mammal produces a few offspring that take a lot of resources. A dandelion produces an awful lot of seeds because the cost in resources to the dandelion is small, but those that sprout, sprout.)

Then again, I do not always understand the ways of booksellers.

Old Harbor Books looks marvellous -- http://litsite.alaska.edu/akbooksellers/oldharbor.html -- and looks like somewhere that's involved in creating readers and a reading community. My local bookshop (now deceased) was physically arranged so that finding a book and then buying it was harder than walking around around the shop and going back out again; the bookseller mostly sat at the cash register in the middle of the shop playing online chess, and he tended to be unhelpful, vaguely grumpy and to treat people who wanted to buy things as nuisances (he was nice to me, because I was me, but still); he didn't stock paperback bestsellers because "people could always go to Wal-Mart for those" and when the she shop closed its doors the final time they put up a note on the door saying that it was Amazon.com that had driven them out of business, when it manifestly wasn't -- it seemed to me that they didn't work to entice people into the bookshop (which is what those paperback bestsellers were for), and didn't give them a pleasant experience when they were there...

But I digress...

Anyway (it probably bears reiterating) this is an experiment. Harper Collins are going to be looking at the figures over the next month and longer. If sales of American Gods crash in bookshops -- or if sales of all my other books crash -- they won't be doing it again. If American Gods sells more, if my other titles sell more, on actual Bookscan sales, then I think we'll all agree that you and your fellow booksellers will be selling more books, and will thus have nothing to worry about.

Remember, publishers aren't making their money from free downloads or from free online books. Like you (and like me), they make their money from books sold.

What we all want to do is sell more books. To readers, to non-readers, to people who thought they didn't like that sort of thing.

Also, there are also a lot of posts coming in like this:

No question - just wanted to let you know, after getting your "American Gods" online for free and reading about 200 pages, I had to go out and buy the book. Great read!

which may make you feel a little better....

...


Dear Neil
You should be able to listen again on the BBC website. all the radio programmes have a seven day period of grace and you can hear them again. If I remember rightly, I thnk I caught the Lovecraft show this way. The Beeb are also doing their shows throught the iplayer (not yet Mac compatbale). I watched the Worlds of Fantasy series about child heroes, only two days to go. Two more in the series and I think worth watching.
Kind regards
Philip

Not Desert Island Discs or Pick of the Week though.

Mr. Gaiman - Congratulations on finishing "The Graveyard Book." Can't wait to add it to my collection. I have two questions, that are both tied together.

1) You grew up in England, but have moved to the US. How difficult / time consuming was the process (paperwork, etc.) at the time, and what prompted your decision to move here?

2) If someone wanted to reverse that, and move from the US to England, any suggestions on what websites would be good to start researching?I know you are a busy man, but I thank you for any advice you could provide.

1) Fairly time consuming, not that difficult. I think the fact that we had two kids made it fairly obvious that I hadn't married my wife to get to America, and the fact that I earned the majority of my income from DC Comics (at the time) meant that it wasn't like I was about to become a drain on the US economy. I still wonder why I had to get the X-Ray of my lungs and bring it to the US in my handbaggage, and still remember fondly the lady at the US embassy who called me back and told me, quietly, that I'd left originals with her when I should have given her the copies, and when I thanked her told me to shut up because if it was known that she'd been helpful she could be fired.

2) It's nice to think that I could do more than you with a quick Google, but I don't think I can. http://www.uk-yankee.com/ looks like it might be a fine place to start looking though.

...

Mr. Gaiman,

Since your love of libraries has been well documented on your blog I'm sure I'm not the first to alert you to the marvelous www.deweydonationsystem.org (tagline: helping books find libraries since 2003). Their efforts this year are aimed at the Children's Institute in Los Angeles which helps out abused children in a myriad of ways both large and small and the Rockhouse Foundation in Jamaica which serves impoverished children in Negril. The Dewey Donation System (which I'm not affiliated with except as a donor)is a grassroots campaign run simply for the love of books and with the sure knowlege that books change lives. As a librarian and veritable eater of books (yours and many, many, many others), I know that much is true.Thanks for your time and thanks for your much-loved books,
Stephanie Betts

Oddly enough, you were the first -- but thanks...

And this made me smile: http://cjsd.blogspot.com/2008/02/ten-simple-rules-for-graduate-students.html

This fascinated me: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080214114517.htm

This (via Cabinet of Wonders) is a Google Map of the American Gods-style holy places of America.

And for those of you currently reading American Gods, it's worth pointing you to http://www.frowl.org/gods/gods.html, and on Neilgaiman.com to http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/Books/American+Gods/in/183/ (the astonishingly incomplete bibliography).

Today I want to share some statistics gathered at the WA SCWBI Conference which give pause for thought – or perhaps just leave one better informed. (I can’t resist reporting not just the statistics but also my reaction to them) . 1. There are 3000 books published in the world each day. I wrote this down, circled it, and then sat and wondered if I’d heard right. So, today, I did some googling,