When I came home from the post-conference dinner* last Monday evening, although I’d had several glasses of wine, I checked my emails while Malcolm gave Teaga her late night constitutional around the block. I don’t know why I checked my emails as I wouldn’t normally late at night but I did (although it does give credence to someone’s comment that I’m a workaholic!) and was surprised and delighted to find one telling me that we’d reached the Scottish shortlist for the Independent Bookshop of the Year Award. All the regional shortlists can be seen here and it’s lovely to see that some of the people I met last week have also made their shortlists.

We’d only entered because there wasn’t a New Bookshop of the Year category (won last year by the wonderful Mostly Books) and we didn’t expect anything to come of it. It’s wonderful news and has really invigorated us at a time of year when trade is always slow (although for us still better than last year when we had just opened). Now we need to put a submission together detailing in more depth why we’re so fantastic and thus deserve to win the Scottish regional award and if we can manage to pull that off… then we’ll be off to the BA conference to see if we can win the UK award. Actually, I’m happy to just be shortlisted and if we don’t get any further than this it will be ok; there’s always next year. Mind you, the megalomaniac in me (which I generally don’t give in too) wants to win very badly indeed!

We’re up against the very lovely Mainstreet Trading Company in St Boswells, fabulous children’s bookshop Blast Off Books in Linlithgow, The Linlithgow Bookshop (also in Linlithgow as you might have guessed) and Yeadons of Elgin, recently purchased by the Edinburgh-based publisher Birlinn and looking fantastic since its refit. All marvellous bookshops and all stiff competition and losing to any of them would be no disgrace.

* I hope no-one who listened to my Blogging 101 talk last week has noticed that I haven’t been paying attention to my own exhortations that one should blog at least twice a week in order to keep your readers coming back. Sorry. It’s been a busy week and in view of the news above I have had to spend quite a lot of it grinning and telling absolutely EVERYONE I know about it.

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