Drive to Nowhere at the London Book Fair's New Title Showcase

Those of you who know the story behind by thriller Drive to Nowhere know it's a self-published creation, done on a minimal budget.

I'm a self-published author and proud of it. I don't have an agent, I can't afford promotional tie-ins with social networking websites, and it's difficult to get it reviewed as people want free copies in return, which costs money.

One thing that independent publishers and authors can do is be featured in the London Book Fair's New Title Showcase. Essentially, as you can see from the image, it allows your book to be displayed on one of a series of bookshelves. It's not cheap but it is affordable (less than £200) and it also gives you free entry to the Fair (more about that another time). The three-day London Book Fair is absolutely massive, attracting tens of thousands of visitors from around the world and featuring hundreds of stands. Book buyers, agents, publishers, authors, marketers... pretty much everyone in publishing goes to the LBF. So, the chance to have your book out there for all to see is great. You see it as soon as you come in, as well!

The trouble with the New Title Showcase, for all its good intentions, is that the organisers could do more in promoting the actual books on its stands. The stand's signposting is a little crude looking when compared to, say, the snazzy Wiley stand or the glitzy HarperCollins or Mills and Boon ones. I appreciate there's a budget to maintain but even so, there are no signs that explain what its mission is and what the books it displays are all about. Yes, it's a showcase of new books. And some of the larger independents will have stalls elsewhere in the show, and their books are displayed on the outside part of the stand. But for the 425 books on display, 300 of those come from independent publishers - it's likely that most of the people are just like me. Drive to Nowhere is still lost in a swarm of other books, albeit a far smaller swarm (for the record, mine's on the longer stand, third row down, eight across).

Quite frankly, if you came across the books as they're displayed, you would only be attracted to a book by the look of its title and cover. They aren't really categorised properly and I didn't notice that my book had been particularly thumbed through. Maybe a small, one-sentence blurb posted on the shelf underneath each book might help differentiate them. There's an accompanying free catalogue, which a lot of people were picking up thinking it was a Fair directory or something similar, so at least there's that, and each book has a sticker so people can look it up in the catalogue.