How do bloggers

...find the time to complete a blog posting every day? I find that a month has slipped away since my last posting. There always seems to be something more pressing making demands on my time.
My current excuse is that we are in the middle of moving both our home and our business from Totnes to Brixham. Days have taken on a pattern of spending the first few hours in our Totnes office; making phone calls to ensure that the builder, roofer, decorator etc are coordinating; then going to various builders' merchants looking for everything we need to buy for the house we are doing up; and finally going to Brixham to put in a long afternoon/evening shift on DIY in an attempt to make sure that the house is ready by our planned moving-in date.

In many ways we will be sad to leave Totnes. It is a town of great character with its beautiful old buildings, its stunning site on the banks of the Dart, the whole town dominated by the Norman castle. But Totnes is not what it was: it now feels like a town in decline. Soaring house prices in recent years mean that the artists, poets, musicians and those in search of an alternative lifestyle - all of whom contributed to the atmosphere of the town - can no longer afford to live here. New arrivals are attracted to those features that gave the town its character, but are not contributing in the same way. Our favourite pub, where we used to enjoy the Totnes Blue Grass Band and a rich variety of folk music, has changed hands and now boasts an up-market champagne and cocktail lounge - and no live music.

The town is now being squeezed financially having been hit by both the moving of the College of Arts from nearby Dartington to Falmouth (estimated to cost the local economy £6m p.a.) and the closure of the town's largest employer with the loss of 160 jobs.

Add to that the continuing failure to make the narrow streets traffic-free (resulting in a dangerous and fume-filled experience for pedestrians) and perhaps you can see why we are making the 10-mile move to the attractive coastal town of Brixham - a town with its own set of problems, but beautifully situated at the southern end of Torbay and with property prices massively lower than in Totnes.

We're receiving regular enquiries about our Book Review Service, which reflects the problem faced by authors of books that are either self-published or published by a small independent press i.e. it is becoming increasingly difficult to persuade anyone in the media to read and review such a book - and reviews are the vital tool in persuading bookshops to stock a book and readers to buy it.
Such authors have to wrestle with the decision as to whether it is worth paying a fee for a professional review of their work. It's impossible for us to give firm advice before the book is actually reviewed since, clearly, we have no idea how positive the review will be. All we can say with certainty is that good reviews were the key to success with my own book and, correctly used in an active promotion, this should apply to any book. A good review can make the difference between having a pile of unsold stock under the bed and seeing the book fly out of bookshops.

There was sad news for us last week. We have been working with an author to publish his first novel, a very funny tale of a private investigator working in Torbay - imagine a cross between Raymond Chandler and P G Wodehouse and you might have a flavour of the book. A local bookshop was prepared to stage the launch with a well-advertised book-signing. We were confident of good sales and the author, Terry Harper, had four more books in draft featuring the same characters. Unfortunately, Terry was taken ill and died after a very brief illness. He was a much-loved and respected indiviual who will be sadly missed.