Tag: independent book publishing

Review | Green Lion, Henrietta Rose-Innes | Book of the Week

In the popular imagination, Africa is one great big game reserve where man can hunt to his heart’s content, relishing the thrill of the dangerous chase. Theodore Roosevelt, and Ernest ernest hemingway big game hunterHemingway (that hackneyed darling of writing course instructors), recounted testosterone-fuelled tales of derring-do as they pursued their prey across the vast “uncivilized” plains of Africa. Roosevelt returned to the US with thousands of specimens – lions, elephants, rhinoceros – duly donated to the Smithsonian Institution. Disney’s film The Lion King is the second-highest-grossing Disney film of all time. It depicts all kinds of animals frolicking across great, untamed African landscapes devoid of human beings – whereas the reality is more likely to be that Africa becomes a great landscape empty of animals.

Green Lion is a deftly-executed novel about man and beast and extinction; about bereavement, animal magic and the human desire for connection. It opens with the mauling of volunteer zoo keeper, Mark Carolissen, who ends up in hospital in a coma. He was looking after a rare black-maned Cape Lion, Dmitri, kept in kept in captivity for breeding with lioness, Sekhmet. Visitors gawp in thrilling terror at the kings of the animal world, safe behind glass. Continue reading Review | Green Lion, Henrietta Rose-Innes | Book of the Week

BookBlasts® | Autumn Reads for Independent Minds

Good writing and good ideas of all kinds make the world go round! Since we first began our celebration of independent publishing in February 2015, seasonal newsletters rounding up our exclusive interviews and curated eclectic reads have been emailed to friends in the publishing and media industries in the UK, US and France. All the wonderful feedback  received over the years has been sustaining and heartening. For readers who have missed out on our latest activity, here’s a taste of what’s been happening . . .

“To define is to limit” ― Oscar Wilde 

Dandy at Dusk published by Head of Zeus on 5 October, is hailed as a “future classic” by Nicky Haslam, the interior designer and founder of the London-based interior design firm, NH Studio Ltd. Meet the author, Philip Mann, to whom we asked, “Why do you write?” . . . “Because I inexplicably missed out on being a film star.” He writes about Soho Bohemia, in his exclusive guest feature: “For thirty years I hid my fame in taverns“. Our other guest writer this month, freelance writer, journalist and cultural historian C.J. Schüler, writes about all things dandy.
 Continue reading BookBlasts® | Autumn Reads for Independent Minds

Interview | Kevin Duffy, Bluemoose Books | Indie of the Week

Kevin Duffy lives in Hebden Bridge with Hetha, co-founder of Bluemoose Books, his two sons and their dog, Eric.

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My dad wasn’t a big reader, never read fiction, nor non -fiction for that matter. My mum read a lot, Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy, but there weren’t that many books in the house. There was a mobile library that came to our village every Monday evening and that’s where we got our books. My parents were both very religious so we had two sets of encyclopedias, Butler’s Lives of the Saints and The Encyclopedia Britannica.
Right, now for the Miss World answers: I’m fifty five, married to Hetha, with two grown up sons and live in Hebden Bridge. I’ve worked in publishing for 30 years, 25 of those in sales and marketing, for various publishers, fiction, non-fiction and academic. I started working life in a bakery, worked in a  jigsaw factory, was in a pantomime with Les Dawson and became a team leader at Burger King in Hounslow for 12 months too.
As a school governor we stopped the local authority from closing the school my lads went to and a few of us curtailed Whitbread’s ambition to demolish a 13th century coaching Inn and turn it into a Karaoke-in-a-basket fun pub.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
No not really. I knew it existed of sorts because I read books, but it wasn’t on the radar as something that I would or could do. I worked for a library wholesaler in Hounslow and met lots of sales reps for publishing companies and then applied for a sales job at Headline books in 1987 when they had just started, got the job and it progressed from there.

Has your vision from when you started Bluemoose Books 11 years ago changed?
No. Our vision from the start was to find great new writers, nurture their talent and publish them, and that’s what we’re still doing.

Continue reading Interview | Kevin Duffy, Bluemoose Books | Indie of the Week