Chapter 2.03 The Handheld Diaries

In which I am showered with new novels.

15 February 2018: I send Sharon the February Newsletter:

The Handheld Newsletter

February 2018

New bookmarks

Our new bookmarks are out, as are our February Handheld Classics: Una L Silberrad’s Desire (Edwardian feminist romance drama in the Potteries), and Gerald O’Donovan’s Vocations (trouble at ‘t convent). Each book ordered from the website (free p&p in the UK, folks!) has a bookmark inside. And I’ll be handing them out at book fairs and publishing whatnots over the next few months.

New book cover for the first Handheld Modern

We are very pleased to present the cover of the first book in the Handheld Modern list. After the Death of Ellen Keldberg is a literary thriller by the Danish novelist Eddie Thomas Petersen, and probably falls into the category of Scandi-noir as well, since there is a death. Well, perhaps more than one. But there are no police, and no detectives, and there is no gore (except when a very horrible person gets righteously beaten up by an outraged man). After the Death of Ellen Keldberg is a gripping novel of family secrets in the artists’ town of Skagen, at the very northern tip of Denmark (we’ve been there, coincidentally, but not in deep winter). When Toby Bainton sent us his translation, we could not put it down until we reached the end of the story, so obviously we had to publish it.

Making our networking début

We’ll be going to the Independent Publishers’ Guild Spring Conference in Oxfordshire in March, and to the London Book Fair in April, where we already have meetings booked with publishers and agencies from Spain, Portugal, Finland and (just booked today) the Netherlands. It’s all very exciting. If you’re going to be there too, let us know!

Handheld Press is moving

In early February we began the first part of a complicated house move that will also move Handheld Press to new premises. We’ll be in Reading for two more months, but after Easter (builders willing) we will be moving to Bath, and Handheld Press will have views over the Avon Valley to inspire us to more publishing adventures. If you’re in Bath, Bristol, Somerset or Wiltshire and would like us to come and talk to your book group, your bookshop, your school class, let us know!

18 February: A printer asks for a London Book Fair meeting, but I say no as their quotations have been uniformly too high.

A Swedish literary agency asks to send me pdfs of their titles: this might be interesting.

Nicola asks me if I would publish the UK edition of her new novel, So Lucky, which surprises me. I do the costings with David and send her the pros and cons, which are the title (anonymous, hard to market) and the timing (completely interferes with my carefully worked out schedule). She’s a great novelist, she sells well in the US (I think), but she barely sells at all in the UK. Is this mad?