On the Town: The Round Room in Dublin's Mansion House filled quickly with editors and publishers when they gathered to enjoy an evening with best-selling novelist Marian Keyes.
Chick-lit is "a response to the new world of post-feminism", said Keyes. "At the start of the 1990s a generation of women were facing a unique set of challenges and contradictions. We were told that we were equal but we were not. It was dealt with with humour in reaction to the po-faced earnestness of the women before."
Her new book, The Other Side of the Story, is set in the world of publishing, she said. Already 9 million copies of her six previous books have sold around the world, and have been translated into 30 languages.
Keyes answered questions about her writing methods, her books that are being made into movies and her recent trip to LA, put by broadcaster and author, Michael Scott, who writes under his own name and the pseudonym Anna Dillon.
The evening was organised by the Society of Publishers in Ireland (SPI), which was set up in 2001 to provide a social network and a discussion forum for those working in the publishing industry. SPI has almost 100 members, says the society's secretary, Rachel Pierce, who owns Drogheda-based Verba Editing House.
Among those at the evening were Maria Dickenson, book purchasing manager at Eason's, and her sister, Stephanie Dickenson, of Kate Bowe PR, as well as Susan Rossney, commissioning editor for legal publisher Thomson Round Hall, and Emma Walsh, of Poolbeg Press.