It’s been a long time but I better try and get back into the swing of trying to resurrect my weekly blog about work. It goes without saying that the phones have been busy as usual. A high percentage of the calls have been about not receiving their books, the books have been particularly slow in reaching the readers or in some cases just don’t seem to have reached their destination at all. There must be a black hole somewhere in the postal service full of our Talking Books. Production Department have reported no problems with the burners and we haven’t yet had any more red-faced emails from Royal Mail who recently decided to return our post back to us instead of sending it out to the customers, obviously didn’t understand the concept that they need to look at the different addresses on the CDs instead of the return to sender address!
We had our stock familiarisation meeting last week with the theme being the vague read something you’ve been meaning to read or something you would not normally read. Luckily, this bought a good sample of books to talk about it such as Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex which turned out to be more readable than previously thought, Emma Donoghue’s Room where they didn’t like the subject matter and cracking reviews for Jonathan Barnes’s The Somnambulist and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. My two offerings were Andrea Levy’s The Long Song which has been on my pile of must reads and didn’t disappoint and one of the Jack Sheffield Teacher series which I would not normally have read and was as I envisaged – cosy reading and Sunday tea-time fare. I’m surprised this hasn’t been picked up for a TV series – someone is going to tell me now that they have!
Book selection starts again in earnest this month so I managed to spend some time looking through The Booksellers to catch up with the news. Some good new releases coming through which will attract a lot of customers including titles from J.K. Rowling, Kate Morton, Zadie Smith and Barbara Kingsolver. We’re already getting customer interest for Bradley Wiggins and Claire Balding autobiographies. The two non-fiction books that stood out for me and I think will appeal to a lot of our customers are Clare Mullroy’s The Spy Who Loved and Catherine Bailey’s The Secret Room.
Requests for 50 Shades Darker keep coming in and we’ve now have a record of over 150 requests. I think our customers will be pleased to see the Erotica titles in the bestseller charts though when trying to pick one for book selection, the reviews were quite poor, particularly Eighty Days Yellow. In the end, I went for Porta De Costa’s In Too Deep, I think the Librarian receiving the erotic notes and what happens afterwards did it for me! Talking about bad reviews, it’s worth going on Amazon and reading the reviews for 50 Shades of Grey, Oh my with lots of eye rolling and lip biting, they’re more entertaining than the book itself!
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