A view to die for

Returned from London this morning after a reception held in the Penguin Publishers office yesterday evening. Their offices are in the Strand and in what used to be the Shell building. The function room has a balcony overlooking the Thames and it was a scorching hot sunny evening with a view to die for. It looked out onto the London Eye, with the River curving its way past the Houses of Parliament on one side and up to St Paul's on the other. I only wish I'd had my camera. I could have stayed on the balcony all night sipping wine and gazing at that spectacular view, but instead I had to listen to a presentation on the success of the World Book Day 2008 event of which my novel was selected as one of the top ten titles voted for by an on line poll. Thanks readers. The presentation also covered World Book Day 2009, and already I'm looking forward to it. Even though I don't expect to have a title entered for the prize it will still give plenty of scope for promotional activity and the chance to engage new readers.

This afternoon it was off to Hythe Library to give a talk to a lovely audience. I really enjoy giving talks and answering readers questions and get so many new ideas from people for further novels. It also gives me the motivation to continue writing. There were some visually impaired people in the audience and it highlighted for me the beauty and gift of sight and how awful it would be not to be able to read a book. Only one of my fiction titles is currently available as an unabridged audio book, although soon I hope the others will also be available as I am in discussions with a publisher about this. This has really spurred me on to see what I can do to make all my fiction titles available to the visually impaired.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

If you like Peter James, John Harvey, Ann Cleeves and Peter Robinson you'll like Pauline Rowson's crime novels

Marvik is about to face his biggest challenge in mystery thriller FATAL DEPTHS, no 4 in the series.