For those of you who haven’t seen this, take a look at this page on the website of the San Francisco publishers McSweeneys – click here and you will go to their competition to find a new columnist for their web magazine. You have seven days from now to submit. All this training as a Beautiful Conversationalist should surely put you in a prime position…

McSweeneys, for those of you who are unaware, was founded by Dave Eggars, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and is now one of the USA’s most innovative publishers. We’re proud to be publishing Darin Strauss’s Half A Life in February 2011, which is just coming out over there from them.

“For a book to be produced with any hope of lasting half a generation, of outliving a dog or a car, of surviving the lease of a house or the life of a bottle of champagne, it must be written against the current, in a prose that makes demands both on the resources of our language and the intelligence of the reader.” Cyril Connolly, The Enemies of Promise, 1938. We don’t have a title in this year’s Booker longlist, so I’m happy to say that my money is on Tom McCarthy’s C, the only hope for the prize’s authority this year. Well done Jonathan Cape for publishing and promoting it. We’ll be putting up a bit of a fight next year though. But who would you like to see on top this year?

We’re going properly live with the new website today, so we hope that as many people as possible will join in, make comments and suggestions, buy presents for loved ones, and generally be beautiful all day long. We’re passionate about what we do, and we hope you like some of what you find. Do take a look at Adam Curtis’s short film on our home page – he thinks we’re all becoming, like Richard Nixon, neurotic weirdos. I’m not sure, but I might just make an appointment at the doctor’s just in case…

I’m always surprised when I meet people who don’t quite understand just how difficult it is becoming to sell paperback fiction in the UK these days. Here’s an example (no names, no pack drill): a major UK book retailer recently offered to purchase 800 copies of a paperback we had priced at £8.99. It’s a long novel, with lots of pages, and therefore more expensive for us to print. Their offer was £2.33 per copy. This is for a brand new novel, and it constitutes their offer to place that novel in a prominent position instore. Out of that £2.33, we would need to pay print (about £1.20), distribution, warehousing and sales costs (let’s say 60p to be generous) and a royalty to the author (around 80p). You can see we’re already at minus 27 pence. That’s before we’ve started to pay the rent, or pay for staff to work on the novel, or typeset or design or market.  The only possible way to try and turn that negative number into a positive number is to print so many copies that you get the unit price down, and thereby run the risk of having thousands of unsold copies in one’s warehouse; even so, once one has paid for all the different elements required to produce a physical novel, then one still plunges into the red. So we said no to the offer. That’s how (not to) sell books.

The BBC has launched an online archive of interviews with forty writers – from Virginia Woolf to Angela Carter. It also features a great interview with A Clockwork Orange author, (now in the Beautiful Books stable), Anthony Burgess. The interview, 1989, is revealing of his childhood growing up as a ‘catlick’ in Manchester, a city that contained a majority of ‘proddy-dogs’, both familiar terms to my own childhood. Burgess is a fascinating character. I found him and the work for which he is most known, so fascinating, that I wrote A Clockwork Apple.

The archive is a brilliant resource – it’s just a shame that it stops at forty. The Iris Murdoch interview is also a must-see as she discusses, with the legendary Frank Kermode, the conflict between freedom and form. P.G. Wodehouse is also interviewed in 1958, by which time he has been writing for 58 years, 56 of which he has been earning a very nice living from his pen. Are there any late writers you wish had been included? If so, which, and why?

Like some drugged out ex-prize fighter, surrounded by his minders and his money men; or like a witness-protection scheme ex-con, shuffling into the limelight once more, Tony Blair is due to appear in Waterstones in Piccadilly in the next couple of weeks to sign copies of his wretched memoir. Lao Tzu said of such leaders in the Tao:

A Leader is Best
When people barely know that he exists,
Not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
Worst when they despise him.
‘Fail to honour people,
They fail to honour you;’
But of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will say, ‘We did this ourselves.’

Writing for the Guardian’s books blog, Alison Flood asks who are the most overrated writers? It comes on the back of a piece for the Huffington Post, on which Anis Shivani has, somewhat controversially, listed fifteen writers he believes he are overrated. He has included the likes of Amy Tan, poet John Ashberry, former NY Poet Laureate Sharon Olds, and Junot Diaz, amongst others. There are the usual suspects that are mentioned on the GU books blog, Ian McEwan being the prime contender – and many more of which are in agreement with Gabriel Josipovici’s latest lament, which was covered on the BB blog soon afterwards. But whilst Shivani has focussed on writers, is it not fairer to focus on individual works? Aren’t McEwan’s early works very different to those of the current decade? So, with individual works in mind, how about naming those individual poems or novels that you think have been largely unjustly ignored/underrated?

My first and second contenders would have to be two debuts – Peter Hobbs’ The Short Day Dying (which I reviewed upon publiation for Pulp.net) and Georgina Harding’s The Solitude of Thomas Cave.

I am an aunt to Caleb (18 months), Keenan (6) and Kya (5), and a godmother to Max (8). I take my responsibilities seriously but the relationships with each, lightly. Books are a great way of bonding – they are light, yet serious. And each one devours and looks forward to the books I send, which is a joy to behold! Max is a big fan of Egyptology, so in addition to a visit to the mummies at the British Museum, it is also a chance for a book on King Tut. Keenan loves Ben 10, which is added to with the BFG. Kya adores Peppa Pig and Dora the Explorer, both of which are influenced from the television programmes she likes to watch. Caleb, despite being the youngest, is devouring books – The Grufallo, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, Rupert…  Almost every picture my brother and his fiance send, has him sat, fascinated, with a book on his lap, whilst another is opened beside him. Yet a month or so ago he was pictured sitting on the floor, beside a stack of newspapers, leafing through the Observer magazine, trying to make sense of the pictures! Encouraging children to read as much as possible is important, but how far do we also go in buying books that were important to us as children? Growing up I couldn’t get enough of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers range. Girls playing hockey and larking around in dorms at their boarding schools. I wanted to be one of them. Yet what appealed so much about those books lies in the fact that their lives were the opposite of mine – I was growing up on a council estate and irregularly attending state school where most of us weren’t exactly overly encouraged with anything. Blyton features heavily in my debut, A Clockwork Apple, for this reason – to show the distinct gap between the protagonist, Alex, and the middle-class norms that she is denied, a lack of which serve to have far reaching consequences. Whilst it can be great to read for escapism, it also exposes our yearnings. Which is why I’ll be watching closely as to how my nephews, niece and godson develop their own reading tastes.

Another favourite of mine was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden – what a joy that was! A pocket of natural bliss at the centre of un-belonging and uncertainty. What books were your favourites growing up, and what, with hindsight, would you say you were getting from them – escapism or identification?

One of my favourite second-hand bookshops, owned by Keith Fawkes (a direct descendant of Guy Fawkes whose comment is usually sought once a year!), is situated on Flask Walk in Hampstead, NW3. Its very location adds to the bookish romantic and nostalgic feel that I enter into whenever I visit, although the attraction has waned somewhat in the past year due to the outside ledges and space being used for a woman who sells bric-a-brac. Yet one of the advantages lies in the fact that the shop is managed by an American man who has an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of books covering every discipline. For almost a decade I have bought from here everything from popular fiction to 18th century poetry, (tatty) nineteenth century editions of Carlyle to philosophy (it is here I found a lovely cloth bound A History of Western Philosophy by once local Bertrand Russell) to fly-fishing, (I made that last one up for the alliterative effect, but I’m sure they are all here). Living in London we are spoilt for second-hand bookshops of all types, from the curiously chaotic to the efficiently organised – there’s also Judd Books – one of those rather cleaner, organised set-ups (but still retaining the distinct mustiness of used books) close to the British Library, as well as SKOOB in The Brunswick. Do you have a favourite or a local second-hand bookshop? Have you discovered any prize titles (or long sought after) that you have found?