The sneak preview is almost at an end, thanks to all of you who had a look around and commented/Tweeted us. Your suggestions will be taken in, your praise wallowed in, and you criticisms used to check our expanding egos. Now, without further ado, here’s the promised giveaway for your time and troubles. I have 5 mini-hampers to give away. Each includes:

You Are Here by Christopher Potter, aforementioned book that floored my jaw this year.

Generation A by Douglas Coupland, the new novel from the author of Generation X and JPod, and another dazzling acheivment in experimental storytelling.

Bad Vibes by Luke Haines. If he wasn’t so funny you’d hate him. But not as much as he hates ‘Wonderwall’. A brilliant, biting memoir from the dark days of Britpop.

Plus limited edition Windmill Books notebooks and postcards.

To win, simply tweet me the answer to the following question: What four books did I think fast readers would get mixed up? http://windmill.rhgd.co.uk/index.php/2009/11/what-kind-of-reader-are-you/

The first 5 Tweets will win. Go go go!

Working in publishing has done many things for me - from testing the limits of coffee consumption (five, since you ask, after that I’m shaking so much I spill more than I drink), to putting me in touch with a startling variety of ‘eccentric’ people (your unpublished, unknown book has a potential readership of 6 billion you say? Hmmm…) - but one of the biggest things it’s done is massively broaden my reading taste.

To provide context: coming out of my English Literature degree, I pretty much exclusively read novels. Serious, prize winning, canonical, literary fiction of the sort you hold up on the train to make sure the person across from you can see the cover and know how clever you are. Yes, yes, I was that person with the Virginia Woolf proudly on display, furrowing my brow and wearing - Oh God - a long, trailing scarf, glasses perched on the end of my nose, and a dodgy goatee perched on the end of my face. It was a look - not a good one to be sure, but a look nevertheless.

But the weird thing is, as bookish as I thought I was, I read hardly any non-fiction. Perhaps one a year, a Christmas present usually, but I’d never actually go out of my way and buy one myself. No memoirs, history, pop-science, anything; half of the bookshop was a huge blind spot to me.  Leaving aside the disregard English Lit degrees have for teaching non-fiction beyond literary theory textbooks (and what’s that all about anyway?), I never really thought to question this. Novels are just what I loved the most (and for the most part still do), so why would I waste my time with anything else?

Now though is different. I read a lot for work - unsurprisingly it’s much easier to market a book if you know something about it first - but also I’ve been exposed to so many different kinds of books, so many different kinds of readers, that I can’t help but take on some of their enthusiasm.  And some of the most rewarding reading experiences I’ve had have come from it: one that comes to mind (and I say this both as the marketing person for this book and as someone who completely loves it, which is why my job rocks) is Christopher Potter’s You Are Here, the only book that’s ever actually made my jaw drop, twice.

Am I a better, richer person for having my reading possibilities expanded in this way? That’s debatable. But what I do know is that by breaking down this psychological divide between reading made-up stories that tell us deep truths about ourselves, which I believe the best fiction does, and true stories that reveal the strangeness of the world outside (and indeed other people), I have countless more opportunities to have the kind of experiences I talked about above. And that may be the best reason yet for taking a chance on the other side of the bookshop for a change.

Whilst this blog is in its early stages, tottering around like a new born foal, I think it’d be good to say early on what we’re not going to do here, and why. This is as much for our benefit and anything else, because if put it all out there now, then we won’t be able to break our own rules later. And if we do, you can shame us with our own blog post (queue evil laughter). So here we go, and in no particular order:

WE WILL NOT

1. Self-pity. The publishing industry is not doomed, and even if it was, you can read about it somewhere else. We’re interested in the cool new stuff that book publishing is doing, not naval gazing.
2. EXCLUSIVE SPECIAL OFFER!!! We absolutely love it when you buy our books, we want you to buy stacks and stacks of them and then tell your friends to do the same. But we’re not going to put special offers up on this site to try and flog them to you. For one thing, we’ll never be able to beat the prices in the shops or on the high street (nor do we want to, for good business-sense reasons). And another, we don’t think it actually sells any books. (We’ll still be giving away books and doing competitions for great prizes though, so keep your peepers pealed for those.)
3. Random musings and chatter that has nothing to do with books. I might care that this-or-that marketing campaign is hopeless / brilliant; you probably don’t.
4. Talk about ‘imprints’, ‘publication dates’ or ‘proofs’. That’s industry speak and sounds like ‘Stop reading this blog, I’m really boring’ to the rest of the world.
5. Ignore your comments/block you from saying what you think. As long as it’s not abusive, sexist, racist, or spam, you can say what you want about us, and we’ll reply to you as quick as we can: we might not always agree, but that’s part of the fun. Someone smarter than us said ‘If everyone is thinking the same thing, then somebody isn’t thinking.’

That’s 5 good ones for now, though I’m sure there are others, and you can call us up on those if and when we do them.

Welcome to your sneak peak of the new site for Windmill Books, proud publishers of some of the most exciting new and established literary authors around today.

The site will officially be launched on the 1^st December, with more of the latest titles, news from our authors, events, competitions, podcasts, and posts from The Turbine blog than you can shake a pointy stick at. As this is a test site, some of the pages may be a little slow to load; it’ll be back to its slick best for the full site. Otherwise please have a rummage round, and let us know what you think by leaving comments or tweeting us @WindmillBooks.

The Windmill Team

This is the kind of question only a slow reader (like me) asks. What we’re doing - us ’slowies’ with our ‘One book a month perhaps if we really knuckle down on a Sunday rather than get stuck watching X-Factor again, however ‘ironically’ we’re allegedly ‘enjoying’ it’ - is trying to find the secret to others’ reading speed.

‘Really, a book every three days you say? And how many hours would you say that was? Do you scan read? Do you remember any of the plot afterward? Do you get mixed up? Has Emma Woodhouse ended up sharing a lifeboat with a Bengali tiger? Have the clocks struck thirteen in Discworld?’

It’s all envy. I know full well that I’ll never read every book I want to in my lifetime (how awful would that be anyway?) but it’s depressing to think that so many others are way ahead of me in the reading stakes. I have terrible gaps in my reading too: the pile of books I should read or authors I should know about gets larger and more intimidating by the hour.

But perhaps I’m going about this the wrong way. Yes, I am a slow reader, and actually slow down even more when I’m really enjoying a book, but only so that I don’t have to stop reading whatever it is. We all must have those books you wish you could read for the first time again, that book that goes off in your head like a clap of thunder, that changes - perhaps forever - the way you see the world or yourself.

What I really want then is to have that one book again and again, forgetting it completely in time for me to start it over and be amazed once more. But in the absence of time machines or memory wiping gadgets, I read on, hoping the next book will replicate that feeling.