Hocking and Pack(ing)

The Silvereel draws my attention to the new blog by former head buyer from my one-time employer. It is interesting to read it, especially given Scott Pack's postings on why he left Waterstone's and the way the buying team took much of the public flack for some fiasco when it was obvious that they were simply having to follow the decisions made by the senior management. I seem to recall commenting to that effect many months ago - despite my problems with the way the company had been going the buying team was not a crew I had difficulty with, quite the reverse - unlike upper management (or sometimes even branch management) they actually listened to suggestions and replied to them, even if it wasn't something they could use. Then again, most of them actually read a lot of books, so we had that language in common.

As an interesting sidebar there is a link to an interview with Scott by Ian Hocking; Ian was the first author I interviewed on the FPI blog after being kicked out of the W. It is indeed a small world and the literary one is even smaller; if you don't know someone in it chances are you know someone else in the biz who does. Aside from the bit on W I'd recommend having a look at Scott's new blog as it is a pretty good read (especially on the book front).