BIG NEWS!
After a tense wait, Breakthrough Book Collective and I finally received the news yesterday afternoon that Blackwell’s UK will be stocking my new short story collection Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood. This means, brilliantly, and slightly astonishingly, that the book can be ordered from almost anywhere in the world with FREE delivery. What’s more, ALL the first 1000 copies Blackwell’s sell will be signed. I was quite tempted to get someone else to sign them - I had in mind one particular bloke from the up the road who walks his dog a lot and always seems quite bored - or using one of those signing machines Bob Dylan got in trouble for using but I’ve decided to get down to the task myself in a couple of days, here, in my own well-insulated garage, where the books are being stored until Blackwell’s pick them up on Wednesday.
You can order yours here.
As many of you will probably know by now, I'm putting out this book in a different way, working in collaboration with Breakthrough Books, a Cornwall-based collective who, like me, wrote books for Unbound before it imploded last year, and - especially as a result of that fiasco - wanted to create a fairer way for authors doing weird stuff far outside the hallowed walls of the mainstream literary establishment to be be published. We decided not to crowdfund this book, but the money to pay for its printing and typesetting, and to make sure its artist and editor were promptly remunerated for their work, had to be raised via pre-orders. We also had no choice but to announce the book on the Breakthrough website before we knew whether any other shops - including Blackwell’s - would agree to stock it. So if you did order via the Breakthrough site and had to pay international Royal Mail postage costs, Breakthrough and I would like to apologise that there’s now a cheaper way (that we did not know would happen) and thank you because your purchase helped the book exist. As an an extra thank you, I’ve been sending those early copies out ahead of the official publication date, so they will be reaching their new homes very soon (I’m about halfway through the posting at present and feeling extremely glad that I live near a village with an understanding and helpful post office).
If you’d like to know more about the book, I wrote about my motivation for writing it here, and I’ve posted a small selection of stories from it - all of which are free to read - on my website as a taster. These are The Date, The Hagstone, Old Litkinov and Hedgecock’s Trip Down Memory Lane. I might well post a couple more in the lead-up to publication.
Who knows? If the book sells well on Blackwell’s, maybe a few more shops might agree to stock it.
Thanks for reading,
Tom (and Jim)
