Marketing

Well, I'm back from Wales (my exhausting working holiday!) and it's back to the writing life, or should I say, the writing-related life. I've spent the past three days on marketing work. I've designed a poster and leaflets for the reading and talk that Cath Staincliffe, Carl Tighe and I are doing for the Didsbury Festival. Simple, you might think, but I don't have Photoshop on this laptop and I've been struggling with Word and too-large photo files. I could have done it so much more quickly on Photoshop or Pagemaker, which I'm used to! And then of course I kept thinking the files were finished and the others would chip in with suggestions, which is great, but then I would have to start jiggling them all over again. Here's a scan of the only version I can print out until I get to a colour printer:


No, actually, that's not the final version - I stuck the wrong one in the scanner (the final version says that the event is free), but I'm also having problems with my scanner, so there's no way I'm doing that again!

And I'm organizing my launches for Too Many Magpies. I'm doing several readings (see sidebar), but I thought I'd also have a couple of proper launch parties, one in London and one in Manchester, and yesterday I fixed one up for November in the great Calder Bookshop in Waterloo, suggested by my lovely Facebook friends. And updating my websites etc... And that's it, really, and I don't quite know how one can spend three days just doing that, all day on the computer and phone, but one can, it seems, and I guess I have to accept that the actual writing needs to take a back seat for the mo...