Engine Punk

The Wormton Lamb has just had a 4 star review on Amazon. Apparently Mr B (me) is not in the same league as Mr A (Douglas Adams) but I would have agreed with that. Get this - "I was frequently completely taken aback by the inventiveness, cleverness and downright absurdity of many of his ideas." That's me the reviewer's talking about, not Mr A. There are 6 new copies available from ₤11.97 and 3 available from ₤17.24 – so there’s already a cachet associated with secondhand copies. No ranking yet but with three secondhand copies somebody must have been buying it. Buy why are they re-selling it so quickly? Or is Amazon operating true to form again? Are these prices simply meaningless? There was me wondering if The Wormton Lamb was doomed to a life of obscurity. This is just the beginning.

I spent some time this week following up leads about book reviews. With The Wormton Lamb coming out at Easter, I want to create more of a media splash than I managed with The Horsepower Whisperer. The ultimate is to arouse (good word) some interest from the national media but this seems to be a closed shop. If you are not a buddy of the editor I don't think you get a foot in the door. I could send them a copy but from remarks Bill Bryson made in his introduction to The Ascent of Rum Doodle by W E Bowman, newspaper offices are awash with books sent in for possible review that either get pulped, binned, sold on eBay and Amazon or used as Christmas presents by skinflints. Not that Bill Bryson would ever do this, of course. The point of his introduction was how pleased he was to have discovered The Ascent of Rum Doodle , which enjoyed a kind of cult following among rock climbers against all the odds. As you can imagine, that kind of story interests and inspires me great...

Regular readers of this blog will know that I don't check ranking on Amazon. Not very much. I had some visitors today and was just showing them my website when they asked me how did it look on Amazon and when we looked The Horsepower Whisperer was ranked 29,683 overall. I couldn't believe it. It is also currently (as I write) No.32 in Contemporary Fantasy and No.97 in Sci Fi Adventure! That last statistic is a new one. I've never been in the Sci-Fi Top 100 before. And I'm just a gnat's whisker away from getting into the Fantasy Top 30!

I am delighted to announce that the Search Inside The Book facility now works for The Horsepower Whisperer. It's a bit like browsing on line and about as close as you can get to seeing what the book is like without actually having it in your hands. The only thing you can't do is see the back cover, which for most people is the second thing they look at after the front, so here's a picture of it on my blog. Amazon needed the whole book plus the front cover as a pdf and it took about a week from me uploading it onto their system to it appearing on the Amazon page for The Horsepower Whisperer - go on! Click on this link! You know you want to! I know I want to - I still can't quite believe that I've got a cover image on Amazon let alone See Inside The Book. You can read for yourselves about my glorious struggle to get this far in my earlier blogs. The final result is just a small portion of what I submitted but I like what they've done with it. The text b...

I've had a lot of problems getting my cover image on Amazon. Use this link to click on the page for The Horsepower Whisperer and you will see that there still isn't one. There used to be one but it was the original cover image that has now been superseded by a spruced up revision - except that it hasn't on Amazon. Currently, you can't see anything of my book on Amazon. I removed the original naively believing that it would be simple to get the new one on there. That was back in January. I managed to upload the new image on there but the Amazon page insisted that it was a customer image uploaded by Mr R D Blackman. That last bit was true but I'm the bloody publisher. And I'm the bloody author. And the images were such pissy bloody little bloody things. I never found out why they were viewed down the wrong end of a telescope. I removed them - once I'd managed to get my mouse to rest on them in their minuteness. I'd rather no image appeared at al...

My New Year's resolution this year was to not keep checking my Amazon ranking. Okay. So that resolution didn't last long. My Amazon ranking has leapt up to 66,262. Amazing! But how? I wasn't looking really, just checking something else on the page for The Horsepower Whisperer. Maybe I'll still be able to ignore my website hit stats instead of my Amazon ranking - not.

The cover design has moved on a bit since this photo was taken. Consequently, these early versions are collector's items Things are really taking off here at Anarchadia Publishing. And I don’t mean because of the windy weather, either. The first batch of books has just about gone already. Thanks to everyone who bought one. I sincerely hope the luck pennies work for you all. There was a quite a buzz at work on Friday. Thanks to Allie Dawe in particular for enlightening me what happens at proper book signings. It’s remiss of me I know but I’ve never been to one until now and that one was my own! Apparently, the way to do it is to sign and date the book but write any personal message on a separate piece of paper. This makes the signed more desirable by collectors. I was even asked to sign off copies of the banned e-mail! (see earlier blog). Anyway, I hope this of you have supported me from the start can sell these numbered and signed copies for a fortune when I’m famous ...

I had an e-mail today from Lightning Source to tell me The Horsepower Whisperer is available in the US. This was 24 hours after it not being there, so I was dubious this was correct. So I checked and it's there! Updating the listings a few days ago seems to have worked.

The Wormton Lamb has appeared on Amazon a couple of days after setting the title up. It has its full subtitle listed on the UK site and is number two in a list of books Bob Blackman in the US. Number one is by one of the other Bob Blackmans but, yes, I've crossed the Atlantic without knowing it. Amazing. But there's no sign of The Horsepower Whisperer in the good old US of stateside. Both are listed in Canada, however. These anomalies may change once updates to Nielsen bookdata flow through their system apparently.