Mr. Liam Donnelly:

English language publishers all have bodies on the ground. Some have four or five. Penguin Ireland has five representatives and HarperCollins has three. Hachette has three, with two more sitting in the offices as support. Áis does not have the support. Áis is only a distributor but it communicates most with us. The individual publishers do not communicate with us. The most successful event I have ever done with an Irish language publisher was with Futa Fata. Its representatives were willing to come from Galway to do an Irish language event for children. It was fantastic because they came but it is expensive for a publisher to decant five or six people. This is simply about being in the shop and celebrating a book, not anything else. Decanting four or five people from Galway to Dublin for the day and back is an expense and small publishers cannot afford to do it. Big English and Irish publishers can but it is difficult for the smaller ones. That is a very simple form of marketing without involving newspapers and stuff like that. It is about getting to the bookshop with an author and celebrating the book. That is an expense and some way or other English publishers are able to absorb that expense and make it an easy thing for them to do.

As Sarah Kenny rightly said, Irish language publishers do not engage enough with the bookshops. If somebody came to me with a fantastic author and asked me to do an event, I would do it straight off. That is a simple form of marketing. Besides national press, radio, television and all that other stuff, having the actual physical body in the shop is the most important thing. The publishers are not going to bring authors to me. Every day I get requests from UK and Irish publishers in English to say they have somebody coming over and asking if we could we have an event. We have three events a week launching books or celebrating them - it does not really matter what the event is - but they are all in English. The one time I worked with Futa Fata, which was five years ago, it was fantastic. We had 60 children and it was just brilliant. It was a celebration of a book. Since then there has been nothing. It has been radio silence. That is because they are either afraid or they do not want to spend a little bit of money. Maybe that is something we could do.

With regard to overall marketing, even a poster in a window of a shop helps. I have never had one from anybody except Futa Fata. A simple poster in a shop window does wonders. It is the simplest form or marketing. People walk by and see it. This is something I have never understood. Áis could produce them but it does not. The publishers are responsible for doing that. They could even send me a PDF and I would pay for the poster but it does not happen. I find it odd.

With regard to audiobooks, it needs to be an ecosystem. It has to be encouraged somehow to get people to read the books and record them. It is not an expensive process; it just takes time. It takes 15 hours to read a book into a microphone and then it can be distributed all over the world but it is about getting people to do it, getting the right books and finding the right reader. The reader is the most important thing. If the book was read by me everybody would fall asleep but if it was read by someone who can engage properly in the language it would be fantastic.

However, that does not happen. It is not our purview as booksellers but it is something the publishers could look at or club together to do. A recording studio does not cost that much for 15 hours. It is just a case of finding the right reader and the right book and using their skills, if they have them, in publicity to show people that it is out there. As Gráínne Ní Mhuilneoir said, you cannot find them if you go looking for them.