
I had gone along to the fair as a participant, with two other local authors, Jane Harlond and Lorraine Mace, to display my books in Authors' Corner, as we nicknamed it. We had plenty of interest in our work and chatted to a lot of nice people; we got rid of quite a few bookmarks and business cards but actually made few sales. Chatting later we came up with two observations - most people like to buy ebooks these days; they find them more convenient and cheaper to buy. The other observation was more surprising - at least half the women that we spoke to did not read. Yes they read a book if they were on holiday but most had neither the time nor the inclination to pick up a book, never mind buy one. It left us both surprised and depressed. Lifelong readers of the written word, we found it hard to understand that not everyone felt the same as we did.
The first book I ever published was Daughters of Spain, a true account of what life was like for women in Spain during the Franco years. As I chatted to the women who stopped at our Authors' Corner, I felt how appropriate it was to be there on International Women's Day and how far we women had travelled since then.