Now, one of the problems of attending the Raincoast Sales Conference last month in Vancouver was that pretty much all of April disappeared without a trace, so when the excellent Hesperus Press launched their new blog, I completely missed it.  Fortunately, Mark at Ready Steady Blog pointed me in the right direction by posting about an splendid rant by Hesperus Press’ Katya Aplin last week:

I simply do not understand how a tiny company, as we and some notable others are, can say ‘what the hell: this is a damned sight more interesting, exciting, than Dan Brown, and if we love it others will’ and sell enough copies to keep itself in tea and biscuits, and other publishers cannot… I honestly don’t believe that our society has ‘dumbed down’. I think we as an industry need to provide the range to allow readers to make their own decisions, for god’s sake let someone choose the author with the funny name. And the media need to expand their attentions to more than the books with the largest marketing department behind them. That said, we do a nice line in badges, if anybody wants. 

It makes me want to go out and buy some translated fiction by some guy with one vowel in his name!

AND if you are wondering why I chose the cover of FATAL EGGS by Mikhail Bulgakov, as opposed to one of Hesperus’ more recent titles, not only is the book awesome, but The Elegant Variation Blog decided to post about Bulgakov this morning so it seemed appropriate. AND I like the cover - frogs with red eyes ROCK. 

Click here to read Katya Aplin’s full post

Click here to read The Elegant Variation on Mikhail Bulgakov