Wednesday 21 April 2010

London Book Fair and the Author Blog Awards Party

It's been a busy couple of days for me at the London Book Fair, what with the Author Blog Awards party, meeting lovely SCBWIs and SASSIEs, signing with a new agent--oh, and doing a little volcanosquatting (more of that later). 

First, the Awards report, as promised.  Despite all your lovely votes, I didn't win.  The honours went to The Shopgirl Diaries written by Emily Benet.  I've had a look, and it's a really good blog, so I'm not feeling too bad about it!  I'll be getting a nice shiny blogbadge for being shortlisted, anyway. Here I am at the party,
where I met all sorts of twitterites and literary folk, including:
Emily Benet, winner!

and Jon Reed of Publishing Talk along with Anna Lewis and Jon Stark of Completely Novel and lots of other nice bookie people too numerous to mention. The wine flowed and the chat was chatty and I even wore my eBay Jimmy Choos (which I'd promised Sam Missingham of The Bookseller I'd bring to the party in a rash moment on Twitter). 
Here I am with one of the Jimmys in an empty LBF stand--which brings me to the matter of 'volcanosquatting'.  I'm not sure if any of you have noticed, but Iceland seems to hate us because of all that banking malarkey. So a special plume of volcanic ash was organised by the Norse Gods so that none of the foreign publishers or agents could fly through it to LBF.  This created a certain amount of empty space at the fair, (and a certain amount of Facebook and Twitter conspiracy chat among those children's authors who were going). All I will say here (for fear of being arrested after the event) is that we took the opportunity to brighten up a sad, lonely and deserted space by putting our books, posters and leaflets up in an entrepreneurial sort of way.  People liked it.  We even met some lovely student illustrators who joined us in our anarchic public-spirited activities.  Here are some of us posing in our newly acquired premises....
Culprits Entrepreneurs Kathryn Evans, Candy Gourlay and Tabitha Suzuma (and me).  Other culprits entrepreneurs (like Anne Rooney and Jackie Marchant) cleverly avoided photographic evidence of their crime clandestine activities.  

Other News from the Fair: At the end of last year I was very sad to find that Rosemary Sandberg,  my lovely agent of 10 years was retiring. However, after a long and fruitful meeting in the (scarily empty and bereft of foreign agents) International Rights Centre, I am delighted to make an Official Announcement!  Sophie Hicks of Ed Victor Ltd is going to be my new agent, and I couldn't be more delighted. She's lovely--and she immediately won huge brownie points from me by introducing me to Eoin Colfer, creator of Artemis Fowl and an extremely nice and funny man (who is obviously James Bond in disguise despite his protestations that he is 'too short' to be a glamorous international spy).

I'm going away to have a lie down now, after all that excitement.  I'll be back on Friday, bringing you a Mythic Interview from no less a luminary than Michelle Paver.  I AM lucky to be keeping such starry company these days!

5 comments:

Kathryn Evans said...

Ah joy, I know it was a rough ride for agents and publishers. Very sad to that South Africa didn't get the lift it should have done by being one of the fair highlights BUT we made the best of a bad situation did we not ;O)

And hey! You got to meet Eoin Colfer and I didn't, some girls have all the luck. It's those Jimmy Choo's....

Caroline said...

Sounds like a perfect day out. Love the shoes.

Lucy Coats said...

Kathryn--yes indeed, we DID make the best of it in the face of Eyjafjallajokul. Don't know about the Jimmy Choos--they may be lucky for me, but they don't half hurt my feet!

Caroline--just wish you could have been there too. We could have commiserated on our non-winner status together and toasted our blogs' future success in many glasses of wine!

Susie Day said...

Choos! Commiserations, but hurrah for the volcanosquatting - proof positive that kidlit peeps are endlessly creative. :)

Candy Gourlay said...

Super post! We had such a good time I feel guilty because I'm sure the people who were actually at the fair to do business were not very happy!

 
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