Signing Books

I'm in the UK doing publicity for Live Fire, which basically means visiting bookshops and signing stock! On Friday I was in Winchester, Bournmouth, Southampton and Poole.... mainly dropping into Borders and Waterstones stores to sign any books they have. Bookshops can return any unsold copies to pubishers, but not if they've been signed - so there's a saying in the business that 'a signed copy is a sold copy'. In fact, if sales are sluggish it would be worth sneaking into shops and signing all their stock without them knowing!

Everywhere I went on Friday I saw the Twilight series, High school vampire erotic fiction I guess you could call it. Twilight seems to be the new Dan Brown, a book that everyone is going to read, sooner or later! The movie has helped push the book, but as with Dan Brown most of the sales are down to word of mouth!

So, on Monday I'm getting the train to Stockport and will be visiting bookshops in the north of England, then on Tuesday I'm flying from Manchester to Edinburgh and will spend the day in Scotland. I get a car down to Newcastle on Wednesday and in the afternoon I'll be in Durham Young Offenders Institution talking to inmates about writing. I'm very well borrowed in prison libraries and over the years I have visited most of the large prisons in the country.

On Thursday I'll be back in London and will probably be exhausted - my publisher works ne very hard during these publicity tours, often more than twelve hours a day, and it always takes me a day or to to recover!

I read a story on the front page of the Daily Mail yesterday, about eight Albanian criminals who have been granted British citizenship and are now living in the UK. The Albanian chief of police is furious, but good old Britain won't extradite them because we have to protect their human rights! I plan to use this as a thread in the new Spider Shepherd book.