Is reading really dead?
From our UK edition
I get up early and head to Liverpool Street. Meet Isabelle Ralphs and Amy Batley from Hutchinson Heinemann publishers and we take the train to Colchester, then a taxi to the giant Penguin Random House (PRH) warehouse, where I am to sign 3,000 copies of my new novel, Farewell to Eden. (I have already signed 3,000 loose title pages or ‘tip-ins’ at home.) Dave, the local PRH chief, brings in the wooden pallets full of books on a sort of fork-lift arrangement. Isabelle passes each one in from the left, I sign, and Amy, on the right, makes small piles which Dave shifts onwards and replaces with new piles taken from the pallets. Thus the stacked 10ft-long table in front of me remains ever full. I am the Sisyphus of rural Essex. To clear the table takes seven-and-a-half hours.
