Girl Aloud Giveaway!

One of the most wonderful things about getting published has been meeting lots of YA and children's authors.
If you're embarking on a new career you couldn't pick a more welcoming bunch of people. They are - collectively - warm, funny, friendly, encouraging, knowledgable, entertaining and big-hearted.
Some have become friends to meet for coffee or lunch, ask for advice and discuss how best we can promote our books. It turned out that I knew one of them already - Kaye Umansky, creator of Pongwiffy the witch - lives three doors away from me. Others live many miles away but feel like neighbours, they're Twitter pals or Facebook friends or both - available for chats and banter all hours of day and night.
To celebrate the general wonderfulness of the YA and children's writing world I'm going to have the occasional signed book giveaway on the blog. To enter you need to be a follower of the blog - just leave a comment under this post if you'd like to win and I'll pull a winner from a hat in a few weeks.
The first giveaway is Girl Aloud by Emily Gale. This is an incredibly rare item in the Northern hemisphere - it'll probably be worth a fortune one day - because Emily lives in Melbourne, which makes her a Twitter/Facebooky friend. She's written an all-English book though, the story of Kass whose dad is desperate for her to shine and enters her for X Factor although she can't sing for toffee and has no interest at all in being famous. I loved the way the characters slowly reveal themselves to us, and the plot refuses to conform to stereotypes.
Girl Aloud came out in the UK in September but has only recently been published in Australia. At Emily's launch party she gave away a pile of signed YA books by Australian and British authors. When I was packing up a copy of When I Was Joe to send halfway around the world I had the idea for this blog feature. I'm hoping it will become a regular thing so spread the word!