These days, Scott writes an increasingly popular blog called Me and my Big Mouth, which is chock full of book recommendations, games of fantasy tennis, songs he’s fond of and tales of the mad bin woman.

I dropped Scott a line to ask him about the future of e-books, his media reputation, and his ideas for a fantasy book prize. This is what he had to say…

In December you pointed out that the Waterstone’s e-book Bestseller charts had changed — in a couple of months — from a list that was headed by a French-language edition of Dickens, to a place that is “abuzz with major league crime”. Are we really getting more switched on to e-books, or is it just a fad made possible by Sony’s Reader and other hardware?

With the revelation that Waterstone’s have sold 30,000 Sony Readers since the launch late last year then it does look like we are getting more switched on to eBooks and it is more than just a fad. I have had my own Reader for some months now. It was a freebie so my attitude to it is almost certainly different than if I had bought it. I have read lots of submissions and manuscripts on it as well as reviewed some new books from other publishers but, and this is crucial, I haven’t purchased a single eBook. I know I am not alone in this. I think people like the technology but find eBooks to be overpriced. I suspect they will come down in price quite a bit in the year ahead.

Whilst researching your career from the web, I was amused to note the praise you have received from bloggers, little-known writers and small publishers, in complete contrast with the vitriol that’s been poured on you by ‘big names’ who thought you were strangling the book trade as Buying Manager for Waterstone’s. How did you manage to pull that off?

Most of the time, not all of the time but most of it, the people having a pop had never met me or had any dealings with me at all. The exception is Tim Adams who lied his arse off during the interview and then wasn’t very nice about me when it appeared in print. I think he is a wanker but at least the physical description he gave of me was based on an actual meeting. Nick Cohen was quite unpleasant about me in the New Statesman, calling me bull-necked — the tosser, despite not knowing me from Adam.

I tend to speak my mind and am very direct. That rubs people up the wrong way sometimes. During my time at Waterstone’s I made some observations, often about how old fashioned and clunky the industry was, and there were people who objected to that. That is absolutely fine and both views are valid. There was a perception, false though it was, that I wielded a lot of power and if you think someone can make or break a book and you don’t like the cut of his jib then you are unlikely to be singing his praises across your bangers and mash at The Ivy, in publishing meetings or in print. Fair enough really.

In general though, people who have dealt with me directly are pleasantly surprised that I am not the complete cunt I am sometimes made out to be. I am a bit of an arse but not quite as bad as my press would suggest.

I personally find the independent publishing sector to be a vibrant and exciting source of wonderful books so I was happy to go out of my way to support it when I bought books for a living and am still keen to do so now I have a blog that a few people read. That approach has won me a number of friends and I see that as a wonderful by-product of what I do.

So, after that rant what I really mean is that the people who slagged me off usually didn’t know me and the people that did know me tended to be a bit nicer.

How did your critics in the publishing and media world react when you left to become Commercial Director at web-to-print publisher, The Friday Project?

Initially it garnered a bit of attention but I quickly fell off the radar into obscurity.

You’ve been blogging at Me And My Big Mouth for over two years now. What’s the most unexpected thing that’s happened as a result?

Being sent a free Sony Reader. Receiving a parcel of CDs from John Connolly.

What do you most appreciate in book and cover design?
As a reader I like something tactile and gorgeous. I love the untrimmed pages you often get with American hardbacks.

If you had a few thousand quid spare to set up your own book prize, what would you call it and how would it differ?

I have often been tempted to start my own book prize — only in my head, mind you. I love the idea of creating a huge prize fund and then the shortlisted authors would be invited round my house for tea and cake. All of this televised on BBC4. We would chat about the books on the sofas in my living room and then I would announce the winner. The runners up would receive a freshly baked cake from the Pack kitchens.

I have, though, read Katy’s free sampler on her publisher’s website. It’s cracking. And it has a damned fine photo on the front.

Oddly, what I like so much about Katy’s poems is the fact that they reveal a fine prose writer. Take this, the first stanza of her poem ‘The Bog of Despair’:

We’d lunched on Greek salad and coffee
in a place with white walls and a skylight,
and when the guy in the corner’s phone
went off in a polyphonic can-can
we laughed without even trying to hide it.

Run the lines together, tidy up the punctuation and – bingo – you’ve got a slice of musical prose. Delicious.

Anyway, I caught up with Katy by email and asked her about her dreams, and what she thinks about some of mine.

When did you start writing poetry, and why?
My relationship with poetry started as soon as I could read… no, in fact everyone’s relationship with it starts even earlier, with the beginnings of speech – with nursery rhymes and songs. My grandfather used to sing me the old vaudeville song, “K-K-K-Katie, beautiful Katie, you’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore…” and it’s still imprinted in my head. And I still think “Row, row, Row Your Boat” is amazingly mysterious: that creepy use of the word “merrily,” and “gently” down the stream – the stream of life, which is “but a dream.”

Children love play with words and sounds, and meaning is fluid to them. They love different ways of understanding things – it’s how they learn. They don’t have an innate sense of poetry being dull or boring – they get taught that.

I never really differentiated poetry from other forms of books, stories, songs, etc. I was lucky; my parents and even their friends gave me poetry books, along with fairy tales, which I’m also steeped in. I still have my Selected Poems for Young People by Edna St Vincent Millay – a selection, not specially written for children. I can remember reading it at about 7 or 8. And I was unafraid of the Oxford Book of English Verse; I’d just dip in and read whatever took my fancy.

I’m sure I was sitting down and writing poems by about 12 or so, and I also wrote stories and everything else. I kept it up till I was about twenty, and then didn’t write poetry seriously again till about 2000. (In the meantime I worked on a novel, wrote a few poems, and wrote short stories, of which one was shortlisted for a prize. But I’m crap at plots!)

Poetry offers forms of meaning that other ways of writing don’t. Symbol and metaphor are powerful ways of conveying something. Word play opens up the language itself, like a pile of roasted chestnuts, for our delectation. Sound, and the texture of words in your mouth, informs our reaction to the content of those words. The poet Michael Donaghy wrote a wonderful little book called Wallflowers, where he talks about the physical act of reading poetry; apparently when we read, even silently, our breathing goes into rhythm with it as if we’re speaking. In this way, as Marshall MacLuhan said, the medium is the message.

Your first collection of poetry, Me And The Dead, was recently published by Salt. How did the book take shape?
Easy! I had about a million poems. I sent Salt ten, and they rang and asked for a manuscript. Over the following year I chose the best ones, whittled them down to a number that fitted into some kind of very loose thematic arc, then edited that to fit the page count. Then cut and edited the ones that ran over. Then added a few, then cut a few. It was hell. I mean it was fun! And that was before the melodrama of finding the picture for the cover.

I love the way some of your poems flit between the commonplace and the lofty. You’ll mention a used condom hanging from a tree, moments before remembering how you discussed Keats with a friend. Watching Sharon from EastEnders turns your thoughts to love. How do you manage to be poignant in this way without being Pooterish?

I thought I was Pooterish!

Seriously, oh I have no idea. I think I write the way I talk, and I can never resist the joke or crack. Also, I’m pretty firmly rooted in daily life As She is Lived. I’ve never had my Rapunzel moment in the ivory tower – I’ve been in the real world the whole time. I spent years hiding this whole side of myself from everybody, so that might have something to do with it. It’s like I got used to slipping crushed-up pills into the dog food.

Your blog, Baroque in Hackney, reveals a fascination with good design and typography. What interests you about these disciplines, and is their influence discernable in your poetry?
I love structure. I love things fitting together stylistically, thematically, integrally. I feel terrible if a conceit fails. In language, tone is of the utmost importance, which means understanding the histories, previous usages, provenances of words and phrases. Poetry and design are both about combining elements, expressing things in different ways, translating ideas into sensory cues. Design and typography both rely on nonlinear ways of thinking in order to be able to do them. They use different parts of the brain at once.

I used to read books about colour theory: Johannes Itten, and also the hippie people, and psychologists. Also, I’ve always had a thing where the letters of the alphabet have colours: A is red, O is black, R is green and E is yellow, etc. Maybe this accounts for the colour theory books. I also used to see my words rolling in white across the black of my mind’s eye whenever I spoke. (I don’t so much any more, though I can still make it happen.) I confided this to my mother one day when I was about seventeen, and she just thought I was weird. I’ve recently discovered two things. One, it is part of what they call synaesthesia, where people, for example, smell colours or see sounds; and two, my cousin Nadja also sees her words rolling along, and she’s not a writer. She’s a painter.

Finally, I should say that poetry is largely about observing. Poems rely on images. Images rely on seeing, even if it’s only in your mind’s eye. Precision and exactitude. These are nerds’ traits. I’m a very visual person.

But are these influences discernable in my poetry? You’d have to tell me, I think. I hope so, I hope they are.

You rarely publish your poems on your blog. Why?
I think it’s not really what either poems or blogs are for. If I’m browsing the web and find a blog that’s mainly the person’s poems I tend to surf straight past it. Whoops! Unless it’s the blog of the late, and fascinating, Tom Disch, who stopped publishing books in his final, sad years and simply put all his new work onto his blog.

I’ll put poems by other people on my blog, though you have to be careful for copyright reasons. Once in a blue moon I’ll put something of my own up, but for a reason. Also, if it’s up on the blog you can’t put it in a magazine, so if it’s on the blog, chances are it’s in the book.

If you could be Poet Laureate for a year, what would you do?
I think what Andrew Motion has done with the Poetry Archive is wonderful. A lasting legacy and a wonderful resource.

I’d like to change the way they do poetry in the schools. I know children’s poetry is a Good Thing and all that, but I always found it patronising as a child and I can’t be the only one. There should be a drive to get kids reading real, grown-up poetry with complex layered meanings, much earlier. This way when people grow up and encounter it, they find they already know it – that’s incredibly empowering. And it’s even aside from the value of simply having it in your brain!

I think I’d also like, as Poet Laureate, to take on the poetry publishing establishment – and the booksellers – and really accuse them of not serving either poets or the public. In my experience, people say they like poetry – or they used to love it at school – but don’t know what to read. That’s shameful! Here we have an industry that produces fusty, dated-looking books, often quite boring books, and shops that don’t order or promote poetry unless it’s by (for example) Seamus Heaney. When do you ever see a poetry collection, say by a young woman, or a guy in his thirties, maybe wearing a leather jacket like a novelist, in the 3 for 2’s? This myth that no one wants poetry becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is tons of great stuff out there that people would like to read! But it’s stuck in its own ghetto with its little skinny spines facing out…

Let’s end on a stanza. Which one do you choose?
The final stanza of The Master and the Future (it’s Henry James talking, after the catastrophic failure of his play, Guy Domville, on which all his hopes were pinned; it’s based on a sentence he wrote in his notebook):

Large and high the future exquisitely opens
Over chestnut trees in full flower along a promenade
Where the park widens out to a horseshoe shape, courting
Sly clouds that dawdle over scampering puppies
And over a certain interesting girl on a young man’s arm,
That roll like hoops alongside great waves of what is possible;
Opens into the chance to breathe afresh again, as if
One had never breathed the old torpid air full of mistakes:
Clicks, in fact, open like an ivory fan.
It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life.

Me and the Dead by Katy Evans-Bush is available at a discount from Amazon.co.uk for £9.99.

North Meadow Media’s Ben Locker asks Alex whether a life spent in sheds has the foundations for a successful career.

Why a shed? Why not a tree house, an Anderson shelter, a loft conversion or another space in or near your home?
To be a shedworker you have to have a garden office, and in that respect I’d argue that a tree house and Anderson shelter are ’sheds’ – I regard ’shed’ as a flexible concept rather than a concrete architecturality (i.e. if you think it’s a shed, then it’s a shed). While shedworking bears strong comparison to loftroomworking, spareroomworking and kitchentableworking, there are some key advantages:

• physically, it’s easier to prevent – or at least restrict – your children, spouses and pets invading your work space if you’re based in a garden office (although admittedly I get more bees in here than I did when I worked in the dining room).
• there’s no need to double up on spaces. With a shed, your third bedroom remains modem free and your dining room table is not deluged by paper.
• a shed keeps you away from the fridge so the temptation to nibble and grow obese is more remote
• financially, it adds value to your property: up to 5% according to some reports,
• it’s also a great place to meet clients. I’ve had several meetings in my garden office and every single visitor has been at the very least intrigued by the arrangements and most are positively impressed.
• psychologically, shedworking marks a clear difference between where you live and where you work – there’s no taint of work attached to any part of your home. Instead all the taint is in the shed.

I’d add that shedworking is as much a statement of intent as it is a piece of architecture: John Ruskin argued that our buildings must mean something to their inhabitants, that their spiritual concerns are as important as the material ones. Shedworking is just plain more fun, adding a certain pizzazz to your working life.

Do you miss working in the same room as your colleagues?
No, although I do miss the option of nipping out for a swift half sometimes. I spend time with people I actually like now rather than those whose paths accidentally intersect with mine

What’s the story behind Shedworking?
When we moved to our current home six years ago, it became apparent after a while that we simply didn’t have enough room for us all to live in and a dedicated spot for me to work in. So we bought a garden office. As I gradually came across other people in the same boat, I felt that some kind of publication keeping us all in touch would be both pleasant and useful. Originally I’d intended to start a hard copy title, but luckily this was at the start of the digital revolution so instead I started producing a bimonthly pdf magazine (now an online emagazine) and blog. It’s still a one man band.

How do you manage to keep finding fresh and interesting content about such a niche interest?
Having just said that it’s a one man band, actually it isn’t. Most of the content is sourced by me simply ambling around the interweb, but increasingly people now send me suggestions (and even write articles) which is marvellous and a perfect example of democratic citizen journalism in practice (well, perhaps not democratic, more benevolently despotic, but still). I’d agree it is niche interest to an extent but Shedworking actually covers a wide range of subjects – there’s the strong working from home element of course, but also the architectural side; and there are many examples of intriguing small scale buildings which, while not strictly garden offices, show the flexibility of the concept. Today, for example, I’ve just posted about a small, oval alpine hut made out of reflective glass that would never be a daily place for work, but which indicates the many possibilities out there. And we also include book and music reviews, news about flexible working arrangements, co-working, third place working, fashion, beach huts, outhouses, green lifestyles, competitions, and so on – all of which are related to the central concept.

You’ve got a book coming out. How did that project get started, and when’s it going to hit the shelves?
Originally I wrote to Clare Christian at The Friday Project (herself a shedworker) who loved the idea and commissioned it. The book – Shedworking: the alternative workplace revolution, which is inspired by the blog and magazine rather than being a straight cut and paste job, should have come out summer 2008; but TFP was taken over by HarperCollins about six months ago and they politely decided it wasn’t their cup of tea. So it’s slightly in limbo at the moment – currently a literary agent (who came to me via a reader of Shedworking) is doing her best to get it taken up as quickly as possible.

Do you manage to pay the bills writing about sheds, or do you get up to other things?
I pay some small, shedshaped bills but I’m not retiring yet (until the book makes me a millionaire of course). In real life I am a freelance journalist – I work on a regular basis for The Independent’s web site and blogs/forums, helping to develop their online reach as well as being the Webmaster for Designer Breakfasts’ website. Elsewhere I act as an editorial consultant for various national charities, including campaigning publications for Age Concern and members’ magazines for the National Association for Colitis and Crohn’s. I am also a half-decent snooker player but make no money from that. Yet. I also run a satellite blog, Bookshelf, which is all about bookshelves, bookcases and things that look like them. That pays no bills at all but is extremely good fun to produce.

We’re always interested in learning more about good design and copywriting. In these respects, what’s the best shed advert you’ve ever seen?
The best I think is Ecospace’s series of ads designed by Amp a couple of years ago [see below]: most importantly, not only did Ecospace get some good media coverage and attract more visitors to the web site, Amp say that a direct result of the campaign was an increased number of garden offices sold. Can I make a plea for the worst? The one below from B&Q which quite rightly featured on the Photoshop Disasters Blog.