One of the best parts of being a blogger/reviewer is being invited to events held by authors or publishers, whether they are publicity events, book launches or signings. Whilst some of these are public events, some of these events are laid on especially for us blogger and so i feel very lucky to get invited to some of these events.
A couple of weeks ago i had one week were only one out of the seven days ended up being a day that i did not get to meet a writer/author. It was an amazing, if very tiring week, and although i did take away a lot of review copies of books, the most enjoyable part was having the opportunity to connect with these authors.
I have already written about my time at the Random House Bloggers Brunch so if you want to find out about that event and meeting Matt Hag, have a look back at that Post.
On the Monday I was incredibly lucky because Miranda Dickinson was lovely enough to come into my school and speak to my children about writing. It was a very tiring day for her speaking to 4 classes of year 6 children, all with very interesting questions but she was amazing. She did an activity with them that was generating story ideas and some of the tales they came up with were just wonderful! The children seemed incredibly inspired by her, and by the day and many of them have come to me to tell me that they have since borrowed her books from the library, or asked to borrow copies of mine!
The event that took place on Wednesday was a book launch. It was to launch How to Get a (Love) Life by Rosie Blake. The event took place is a fabulously trendy bar in soho and the room couldn't have been more perfect for the launch. It was great to put lots of faces to twitter accounts and meet some other wonderful authors who have added even more to my massively towering TBR pile. The fabulous author gave a very moving speech thanking people for their support and saying that she'd had the launch to thank all those of us who are so supportive on twitter as well as in real life. t was a great event and I'm so pleased for her that it was so well attended. I reviewed the book, it was an excellent chick-lit novel and you can see my review from last week on the blog!
On Thursday I was back to Random House for and evening of crime. This was an interesting event and not the kind of thing i would ususally go to. I have started to really enjoy reading YA novels and find it useful to know the kinds of things that are coming up for children of the age that I teach and up. I've found some wonderful titles for some of our more able readers recently and they are always coming and asking if they can bowwor my books or asking me to find them something to read. This event featured four authors all of whom were there and all of whom signed my book afterwards. They were; Jane Casey author of How to Fall, talking about her new books which i mentioned in my previous Random House post. Also mentioned in my previous post was Simon Mason who wrote crime detective novel Running Girl. Both of these lovely authors signed my book and talked very comprehensively about what its like to write crime fiction for teens.
We also got to listen to Niall Leonard talk about his new book Incinerator which is the sequel to Crusher. He was so interesting to listen to and spoke in exactly the same way as he writes! The final author was Helen Grant. We got given copies of her novel Silent Saturday which she signed for us all and she spoke about her new novel The Demons of Ghent. The way she pitched her novels made them sound so compelling, even though this isn't normally a genre i read, i will definitely be giving these two a go, perhaps i feel a marathon coming on.
The final event of this fabulous week of authors was organised by OUP and some lucky bloggers, including me of course, were summouned to a room just near to Waterloo station to meet two fabulous authors as they launched their books. I have read both of these novels and so it as a real treat to be able to meet the authors. We were treated to drinks and nibbles and then a talk and quiz from both Joss Stirling and Nikki Sheehan. I was rubbish at both of the unfortunately but the authors made up for that by signing my books and chatting to me afterwards.
It was wonderful to meet them both as well as the team from OUP. Catching up with some of the other blogger was great too and i was one of the last to leave, proving what an awesome evening it was.
Although this week wore me out completely, it was amazing to meet so many fabulous people and be inspired to read so many great books.
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