QUILLBLOG

Author to spend six days in bookstore window

Isabel Losada has just wrapped another day sitting in the window of a Parisian bookstore. That’s four down and two to go for the U.K. author, who’s in town to promote the release of the French-language translation of her 2001 book, The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment/Mes Tribulations sur le chemin de l’éveil (Presses du Châtelet).

It isn’t the first time Losada has been “author in residence in window” (as she refers to the experience on her website). Last year, the author — who also wrote the 2004 bestseller For Tibet, with Love — set up shop for a week in the window of a London Waterstones to mark the SW11 Literary Festival. This time around, she’s parked her publicity/merchandising stunt from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the window of W.H. Smith, the largest English-language bookshop in Paris. If a recent status update on Losada’s Facebook page is any indication, the setting hasn’t been ideal for selling a French-language title: