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Thursday, March 25, 2010

REMAINDERS OF THE DAY

Discount bookshops are a hunting ground of both pleasure and pain for me, a soon-to-be-published author, and independent bookshop employee. To see all those unsold/returned/unsellable books stacked up, it tends to break your heart a bit. Still, there are reasons books end up in the discount pile. My most recent trip to Brisbane's biggest discount book graveyard reminded me of a few of them...

#1 One spin-off too many



#2 Books with coloured pages



#3 Books that don't fit on any regular bookshelf



#Books that have to be pulped once their subjects turn out to be a deeply dodgy probable rapist. Or Matthew Johns.

Monday, March 22, 2010

SOME THINGS PUBLISHING REPS HAVE ACTUALLY SAID TO ME

"Dinosaurs are great. They never die."

"This book is about Stephen Gately, from Boyzone, who is currently dead."

(Of a book of collected football chants, called Referee's a W****r!): "This one is called Referee's War."

"No really, you should order 20 copies of Cherie Blair's biography. People can't get enough of her."

"Of course that won't be the final cover."