Monday arrived with a banging on the door by the postman and a pile of books and now the same thing has happened today, Saturday. On Monday Snowbooks sent me a stack of books and now another publisher Accent Press have sent me some of theirs to look at and review.
As you know, I am still slightly overwhelmed (no, totally actually) that nice kind publishers will email me and ask if they can send me some books to review and it feels like Christmas to me to have parcels arriving. I don't like Christmas very much at Christmas time, but for the rest of the year, well that's different.
I have to be honest and say that I had never heard of Accent Press until I received an email from their founder, Hazel Cushion, with this offer of books so I immediately logged on to their website and had a look. Hazel started this publishing house in 2003 and here is how she describes herself on the blog attached to the site:
"I'm the mother of triplets, manage my own publishing company, Accent Press and live in a lovely old school, at the top of a valley, in Wales. Previously I've been a jeweller, worked on cruise ships, in the Duty Free industry and run an organic wine business. I've lived in the US, Indonesia, Middle East and France. I guess it was time to settle down! Life is busier than ever running our own company but it's also enormous fun - I finally seem to have grown up and found out what I want to be......"
Not sure how old Hazel is and would not dream of asking, but this all fits in with my previous blog when I was lauding us older women (Hazel's triplets are ten I gather so she is considerably more youthful than me and perhaps does not fall into this category) but she certainly sounds as if she is a fully paid up member of the Grown up Women who are not Afraid to have a Bash at Anything Association. I am looking forward to reading some of these books and writing about them, but I have books coming out of my ears at the moment, and not sure when I will make inroads on these new arrivals.
This is why I am posting about Accent Press now. I am an inveterate reader of other blogs and have noted that several fellow bloggers are planning Summer Reads of have a book plan for the summer. I am not so organised and on looking at the heap I have to work through realise that a plan just ain't gonna work, but I did want to have a theme for summer blogging. It came to me last week, when I realised that I have quite a number of books on my shelves and in my reading heap from small publishing houses such as Long Barn Books, Snowbooks, Fidra Press etc and I decided that a good summer plan would be to write about small publishing houses (actually I prefer to call them Independent publishing houses). Without wishing to sound like an advert for Tesco ('Every Little Helps' is a slogan that drives me mad when you are standing in a mile long queue at the checkout), if I blog about a publishing house and this encourages just one person to log on, buy a book and then write about it themselves, well it is worth doing. We all know that recommendation and word of mouth is a great marketing tool and, regardless of the recent discussion on this blog and others about the status of bloggers, publishers are keen to seek us out so we must be doing something right.
So, thanks to Hazel for sending me these books and please do check out the website. I have noticed that Accent Books are based in Wales. Fidra Books is in Scotland. Long Barn Books is just one of those based in England. Now, is there anybody out there in Ireland who wants to send me some books?
Bring them on.
