Getting kids reading

I'm on a mission to get books into little hands - because the best way to give children a love of reading is to give them books from an early age.

I often get parents of 2 and 3 year olds saying that their child is too young for books, while another family will happily buy one for a baby under a year old - so what is the secret of these young book lovers?

It's simple, their parents have read to them from being tiny babies. It doesn't matter at that age whether they understand all that is being read to them, they enjoy the closeness of a being held and hearing the sound of your voice.

Choose a book with colour pictures for your baby to look at as you read, and by the time they graduate to stories without pictures their imagination will have learnt to paint the pictures in their heads as they read.

Many picture books are written on two levels - they need to entertain a small child as well as their parent, so choose a book that you can enjoy too... 

But I'm Not Sleepy - still my bestseller - it seems everyone has a Lucy who just doesn't want to go to sleep. But few will admit that they were just the same at that age...

Ramblings of an author trying to crack the clicking code

Is it just me, or does everyone come up against these constant learning curves...?

So what is the latest one? Well to get people into my bookshop - it's a little bookshop with big ideas, I think I've mentioned that before but hey, you might have missed it... 

So where are all the customers? They seem to be flocking past on the world wide web, on an endless treadmill of shoppers, all heading for the main shopping outlets.

But I believe there is a growing trend of people who are tired of the endless pushing of goods we probably don't need, and if we search something on the web, then that product turns up on every facet of what we're doing. 

A prime example would be when I recently bought a safety gate at a mainstream online outlet - well the search engines, or whatever causes these things to pop up didn't know what to do with this uncharacteristic purchase, and started sending me adverts for baby products and dog products - I have neither a baby or a dog, so they had failed to second guess what I needed a safety gate for... and I'm quite happy to leave it that way, I don't like to feel spied on, and certainly don't want to give them the satisfaction of knowing the answer to that little mystery...

So... how to play the search engines at their own game...? Gathering clicks in the right place - clicks are the new footfall. OK, now I have a theory - and a bigger mystery than ever... arhh

So help me crack the code - click on my Little Bookshop with big ideas and help me buck the trend... or leave comments below.