And it's gone!

...to the printer, at least. I missed the deadline by about 48 hours, thanks to a computer crash that took seven hours of (saved) work 40 minutes before I was due to send it off. Followed by a dozen crashes over the weekend as I tried to get the thing finished. Anyway, the magazine is out of my hands now, apart from a check at the printers tomorrow afternoon.

All that's left is getting letters and invitations out to the various important people I'm hoping will come to the launch. I went to the local wine shop to see about ordering a couple of cases of wine, and the woman nearly hugged me when I said I thought I'd do better buying from them than from Tesco's. So had a very nice time discussing the realitive merits of sauvignon vs quality rose, summer reds, Pelorus (the wonderful NZ Cloudy Bay fizzy and no, I'm not having THAT at the launch). But the nibbles will be from Marks and Spencer to make up for it.

And in amongst all this I mustn't forget about issue two...

More small presses are coming on board. I think you can tell the presses that are likely to succeed; they're the ones that bite your hand off at the chance of reviews, advertising and general networking. It also helps to have a communication that gives some idea of the person at the other end. Email is possibly more helpful here, though handwritten letters can have the same result. There's something horribly stiff about a typed letter, and it somehow causes a retreat into formal language (and I'm as bad as anyone else at doing that). But you can't send a handwritten letter to a broadsheet editor and expect to be taken seriously. The best you can hope for is that you will spark a less formal email contact and get on with business in a more relaxed way.

It's quite surprising what people will do. Last week I received a pack of review material. There were a couple of 'arty' notebooks, a book of 'children's questions', about 10-15 art postcards, and two books of 'art' crosswords. No accompanying letter. Nothing to identify who they were from. On a close search, there did seem to be a common denominator small press/writer, but it required going through the fine print in each book and teasing it out from among the swathes of sponshorship logos. I was a bit annoyed - firstly, this is clearly not reviewable material (postcards?) for the magazine. Secondly, whoever sent it couldn't be bothered with the courtesy of identifying themselves. Thirdly, this had all been produced with lottery and arts sponsorship, i.e. your money, and I do believe that anyone taking sponsorship has a duty to make the effort to spend it wisely.

When I receive review copies, they are logged onto a book list on the website, so that publishers can check that they have arrived. They are then logged out again when a reviewer requests them. I need to keep this data anyway, so it's a simple courtesy to those who are spending their (often very small) budget sending me books.

I have no idea how to log a handful of postcards and notebooks onto the list, nor how they should be reviewed.

Home news - Bosie sprained his ankle and was on three legs yesterday, but a night on my bed seems to have fixed him. One very cute mouse swapped for a piece of chicken (Lucy is easily persuaded) and deposited in the woods. Back to work tomorrow; a morning surgery in Bognor. Now I'm off to check some wine samples. I wouldn't want to serve anything at the launch that I wouldn't drink myself, after all...