Speculation, Fact and Fiction

I've just learned that Irons in the Fire is going into Waterstones' bookstores summer reading promotion. Which will mean it'll stay as part of the current 3for2 offer for a potentially useful number of weeks.

So if you're thinking of buying it, go on, you know it makes perfect sense now!

Because, let's be honest, nice though these lovingly produced trade paperbacks are, book budgets aren't infinite and mass-market paperbacks look very attractive here in the midst of the worst fiscal downturn economic correction let's stop calling a spade a soil relocation implement recession since the days of who knows when.

Look, trade-paper followed by mmpb was a perfectly sound idea back when we signed that contract two years ago. Before wbankers playing games with monopoly money and fairy gold managed to screw up the global economy for all the real people.

And yes, thanks, I am wholly aware of the irony, given my readiness to explain in exhausting exhaustive detail how deleterious the effects of deep discounting have been on the UK book trade this past ten years. And all of that still applies.

But I don't get to make the rules, so I'm just playing the cards I've been dealt here. Okay?

Ah, the infinite vagaries and surprises of this book writing life. Wouldn't it be so dull without them?