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An Interview with Jen Campbell, author of The Bookshop Book

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The Bookshop Book, by Jen Campbell, is about weird and wonderful bookshops all over the world. It is the official book of the 2014 Books Are My Bag campaign, and I was lucky enough to be invited to take part in the blog tour and receive a copy of the book. It’s a gorgeous hardback, full of great stories and characters, and I was delighted to interview Jen. I hope you enjoy reading my questions and her answers.

First up, I’d like to say how much I’ve enjoyed reading The Bookshop Book. I think it’s made me love bookshops even more! I don’t think I’ll ever travel anywhere again without first checking The Bookshop Book to see if there’s an amazing bookshop nearby that I could visit! The Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops books are definitely going on my Christmas list, I’d always planned to read them anyway, having heard a fair few weird things in my own time as a bookseller.

I was stunned by how many bookshops you managed to mention. How long did it take to research and write the book?

It took just over a year – I think I could have gone on and on, but I had a deadline (which was helpful, really, because it meant I had to prioritise!). It was a pretty intense year of research, whilst still working, and trying to travel to places in between work, too. But it was a lot of fun!

I saw in the guest post you did for A Daydreamer’s Thoughts that you visited the bookshops in the UK and Europe, and talked to the owners of bookshops around the rest of the world via Skype. Which of the bookshops that you didn’t get to visit would you most like to go on a trip to?<

That’s a tough one… I definitely want to get to El Ateneo in Buenos Aires; it’s so beautiful! I’d also love to get to Jinbocho – Tokyo’s Book Town, Librarie Papillion in the Mongolian Steppe, and Paju Book City – a purpose built bookish town in South Korea with over two hundred bookshops and publishing companies, founded on principles of peace. I mean, who wouldn’t want to go there?

I would love to visit any (or all!) of those! On the subject of bookshops I can’t wait to visit, as you know, I got very excited about the concept of a shop that sells both hats and books. If you could run a shop that sold books and just one other thing, what would that other thing be?

Ooh, that’s an excellent question. There are some odd combination bookshops – a bookshop in Greece that’s also a laundrette, a bookshop in the UK that’s also an ice cream parlour, a bookshop in Kenya that also sells cows…. Perhaps I’d have a bookshop that also sold tea. I don’t just mean that I’d have a cafe, I mean I’d have aisles of tea from all over the world. We could then pair up different tea bags with books that originated from, or are set in, the same place.

I love that idea! I would definitely visit a bookshop that matched tea with books. In The Bookshop Book, you feature short pieces by different authors, in which many of them describe their fantasy bookshops. What would your fantasy bookshop be like? And while we’re on the subject of imaginary bookshops, do you have a favourite fictional bookshop from a book, film, TV show, or play? (I assume there must be a bookshop in a play somewhere!)

I’d love to have a bookshop in a forest – with treehouses to read in, and barns that each house a different genre. There’d be lots of fairy lights and Alice in Wonderland references. My favourite fictional bookshop is a toss up between the bookshop in You’ve Got Mail and Flourish and Blotts.

Some of the bookshops featured have long, rich histories dating back centuries, but I think we should take a moment to remember bookshops past. Do you have a favourite historical bookshop, or a bookshop now closed that you wish you could visit one last time? Or both!

I’d like to have gone to Walter Swan’s bookshops – they closed when he past away a decade ago. He was a bit of a character, and I’d love to have met him. Here’s the extract from The Bookshop Book with the (slightly ridiculous but excellent) tale of his bookshops.

Walter Swan was born in 1916 and grew up in an old mining town in Arizona. When he was young he enjoyed sharing stories and going on adventures with his big brother, Henry. Later on in life, Walter’s wife Deloris said he should start writing some of these stories down, so he did. Walter would recite them, and Deloris would record them, because Walter wasn’t very good at spelling.

After typing each one up, she’d put it in a box. Within several years the box was overflowing, and Walter decided to send the stories off to publishing companies all across the States. He got rejections from every single one.

In 1990, therefore, when Walter was seventy-four, he took out a loan so that he could pay a Tucson vanity publisher $650 to print 100 hardback copies of his book, Me ’n’ Henry. Not really nowing much about the bookselling industry, Walter then went around local bookshops to see if they would stock it, and was horrified to discover they would want 40% of the profits if they sold any.

So, what did Walter do? Let them take the profits?

Nope.

Give up?

Nope.

Walter’s plan was to open his own bookshop. Not just any bookshop, but one called the One-Book Bookstore: a bookshop that only sold copies of his book, and nothing else. Walter and Deloris remortgaged their house, and opened their shop on Main Street in Bisbee.

How many copies did they manage to sell? Seven thousand!

Walter published three more books, and opened a bookshop next door called the Other Bookstore, so he could sell those there. He said he couldn’t possibly sell them in the One-Book Bookstore, because that was just for his first book.

By the time he passed away in 2004 he had sold more than 20,000 books.

Thank you Jen for agreeing to be interviewed! 

And Now, Some Nepotism: An Interview with Nick Bryan, author of The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf

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My boyfriend, Nick Bryan, has published a book, The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf, and this has caused all kinds of ethical dilemmas to grow wings and flutter around my brain.

I had already decided a few years ago not to review books that I had been involved in at an earlier stage. The first of my friends to publish a book was Ali Luke, who I met when we were both doing the MA Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. Her novel, Lycopolis, is about a group of roleplayers that sort-of-accidentally summon a demon. It’s very good, I enjoyed it. I would love to be able to review it, but I just couldn’t separate the-book-as-it-is-now from all the bits and pieces of earlier drafts in my head. When I review a book, I want to be sure that I am reviewing only what made it to the final pages.

My role in the production of The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf was more minor, all I did was proofread it, but still, the idea of reviewing it makes me uncomfortable. He’s my boyfriend. It would Just Be Weird. But I wanted to do something to celebrate the book’s publication. After a bit of thought I hit upon the idea of doing an interview. Nick and I talk quite frequently about the craft of writing, but I’d never really asked him about where his ideas came from before, so I started typing up questions and emailing them to him.

Does it count as nepotism when all you’re doing is interviewing your boyfriend for your own relatively minor book blog? He has more Twitter followers than me, hell, he has more Twitter followers than the shared Bookish Brits account at this point. So maybe this is actually sneaky nepotism on his part, because he’ll be promoting my blog by tweeting about this interview?

In any case, whoever is the nepotist, here is the interview. I hope you enjoy it.

Let’s start with a pretty basic question. How did you come up with the idea?

I watched a lot of odd-couple detective shows and thought “Y’know, if one of them is going to act like a teenager, they might as well be one.” After that, a lot of the dynamic, from the way both of them cover up their real selves for silly reasons to their on-off infantile bickering, came pretty naturally.

Like many things I write, it originally had more of a fantasy element – the wolf they’re chasing in The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf was basically the Big Bad Wolf, straight out of a fairy story. But as I read Fables and watched Once Upon a Time, it became clear that was well raked ground, and I came up with this crime-drenched modernity instead. Like the old gangster days where every business is a front for criminal activity, except with more contemporary enterprises. And still a Wolf, because making it fit without the Big Bad aspect was almost more fun.

Which part of the writing process did you find the most difficult?

The hardest part of the writing process by far is actually having an idea. The typing and editing takes longer – and self-publishing does admittedly contain some quite monotonous tasks – but it’s nowhere near as stressful as getting my thoughts together.

A short story by Nick Bryan will generally have involved half a day of drumming my fingers trying to work out what to do for every one day spent actually writing it. This is one reason I like novels and serialisation – I get much more use out of the ideas.

Oh, ideas. If only they arrived fully formed rather than full of gaps that require a lot of hard thinking to fill in. Which part of the writing process did you find the easiest?

For me, the part where you sprint away into a first draft, no longer chained down by the leaden chains of having an idea and before the sudden stop of having to bring the story into a sensible shape in order to finish your first draft and edit it into something socially acceptable.

Finishing later, more arduous edits is more satisfying, but pattering out first draft is definitely the easiest bit for me.

Oh, except for the part where you sit down the pub with your mates, talking about how you’re going to write a book but never actually doing it. That’s also kinda straightforward.

Yeah that is not something I’ve found a particular struggle, though when progress is slow I find it kind of embarrassing to talk about. Back to The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf, which character is your favourite? Is it hard to choose?

Hobson and Choi, probably jointly. Hobson is more fun to write, but Angelina is more like me. Turns out, channelling my inner teenage girl comes pretty easily.

Outside of the heroes, probably The Left Hand, the evil discount pub. It’s not a character, obviously, but it’s just such a ridiculously OTT concept. And in the broader context of the entire Hobson & Choi series, I think The Left Hand probably did the most to set up and establish where it’ll all end up going. It was such fun, I decided to go harder in that direction.

That’s set up a nice segue into my next question, thanks. The Hobson & Choi series is set in London, and there’s quite a lot of travelling to different locations. What area is your favourite to write about? Is there a location that you haven’t featured but would like to write about in the future?

Outside The Left Hand, I enjoy writing about South London a lot, actually. It’s easy and fun to make it into a character. So look for more Peckham and Brixton stuff in future books.

In the future: I may have to bite the bullet and take the team into Central London, properly in town with all the tourist attractions. Don’t know if I can put it off any longer. They gotta meet the Queen.

Do you think you could have written the book, albeit under a different title, if Twitter had never been invented? The Girl Who Facebooked Wolf? The Girl Who Put A Wolf in her Myspace Top Friends?

Without social media, I imagine they’d just have read about it in the paper. Or maybe someone would’ve come into the office and hired them, like all the classic detective storylines, and I’d have needed a different terrible wolf pun.

Of course, Twitter could become redundant in the future, but the beauty of self-publishing is I could just go back and update it into The Girl Who ZapKibbled Wolf or whatever replaces it.

Probably won’t really do that, but do all remember to friend me on ZapKibble. I really think it could be the next big thing.

Back in 2014, you can follow Nick on Twitter at @NickMB, or visit his website to find out more about The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf and his other writing.


I hope you enjoyed reading this interview! If you’re a book blogger, have any of your friends or family members published books? Do you review their work or have you found other ways to support them?