Events in London: All About You Book club event :: Best-selling books

Best-selling authors at the All About You Book club event, London - best-selling books - allaboutyou.com

The first All About You Book club event took place on September 17 at London’s swish Century Club in Soho. Hosted by Allaboutyou.com and Pan Macmillan’s www.thewindowseat.co.uk, authors Jane Green, Karen Swan and Lucy Diamond (pictured right to left) read from their current books – Saving Grace, One Night in Italy, The Summer Without You – and talked frankly about the process of writing them.

It was a fascinating look into the process of creating novels - finding ideas, pulling plots and characters together – ably assisted by intriguing behind-the-scenes publishing secrets from Pan Macmillan editor Caroline Hogg (pictured far left). I had the fun job of asking the questions for the first hour; we then opened up the debate to our audience and the conversation really flowed – in fact we could have gone on several hours past our 8pm finish time.

But we were keen to allow time for readers to talk to the authors on a one-to-one basis, so as soon as the panel discussion ended, the authors signed books and chatted to readers while the cocktails flowed and canapes circulated. Our bookseller was delighted with the response, as people queued up to buy copies of the authors’ books, including Jane Green’s Saving Grace, which wasn’t due to go on sale in the bookshops for another week – a lovely sneak preview for our book club readers.

The feedback from readers who attended the event was fantastic; people found our authors extremely inspiring and enjoyed the panel discussion, as well as the chance to chat to them at the end of the evening. And we had quite a few budding writers in the audience – a show of hands during the discussion revealed that many of our attendees are currently writing their own books – so I very much look forward to interviewing them on the podium at a future Book club event!

And so many people asked us ‘when is the next one?’ Which means of course we are starting to think about planning it already.