Paperback publication is a strange one – in a way much more important than hardback since it’s when the copies will be sold in greater numbers. But given that it follows on some months afterwards, it can feel anticlimactic. You’ve concentrated most of your efforts to self-promote around hardback time and, if you have one, your party is then. So with the paperback it’s all down to the hardworking sales teams and any promotions they can secure. The whole issue of when to concentrate publicity efforts has been further muddied by the growing e-book market too. So here I am, … Read the full entry

Yes, on the 28 February Just Like Proper Grown-ups will be out in paperback at all good retailers and all that at a very reasonable £6.99 (and no doubt some bargain offers out there too). I’m currently writing a slightly embarrassing piece to push it (I’ll remain coy though I don’t know why since it will be out there next week for all to see). I’m having my photo taken this afternoon, which is problematic since I had a massive allergic reaction to some unknown on Monday which caused my face to come out in blistering hives. My daughter actually recoiled … Read the full entry

The team behind the building of my website have launched a new website called Nudge with lots of great content including a section on books. I’ve written a piece for them on a few of my favourite coming-of-age novels here, which to me are always about bookish young girls dreaming of a more glamorous life. Even writing about them made me feel nostalgic, both for being a bookish young girl and also for that time when you can throw yourself so utterly into reading and re-reading books. I feel like now I’m always reading at a gallop and never as fully … Read the full entry

Hello for the (admittedly small) intersection of people who look at my blog and live in Bedfordshire (or even Cambridgeshire), I will be at the Bedfordshire Readers’ Day in Flitwick Village Hall. There will be other authors, including the fab crime writers Erin Kelly and Ali Knight, and I’m fairly sure some good biscuits too.

Back from holiday, back to school, back to trying to update my blog on a relatively regular basis… Wendy Holden in the Daily Mail wrote a pretty positive review of the book (‘deliciously rude’ apparently, not sure my parents would agree). And The Lady, too, thought it was a ‘hugely witty read’. Another review, also good phew, can be found here at Fabulous. Click on the links for the full reviews and please let me know if you’ve read it and have any thoughts.

To update the last post written a week ago about how my book is out ‘next week’, it’s now upon us. Just Like Proper Grown-ups is published today and available in all good bookshops, Amazon etc. It feels a little anti-climactic because, let’s face it, at the moment you’re nothing if you’re not an Olympian. I’d like to draw parallels between the athlete’s dedication and hard graft and the way that writers toil daily, but I think that would be overstating the difficulty of faffing around for hours on end staring at a blank screen. We also have very different bodies.

In the excitement of the Olympics and the summer holidays, I’ve almost forgotten that my book Just Like Proper Grown-ups is out in hardcover on the 16th August. It can be pre-ordered on Amazon and available in all good bookshops and all that. It’s so easy to get distracted when I finished it exactly a year ago and am already in the thick of the next one. The publishing schedule of hardbacks and paperbacks is so out-of-kilter with the process of writing the manuscripts that we authors can get confused. I sometimes feel as though I’m being expected to swap … Read the full entry