This Upcoming Book.

As many of you will know there is a book coming out on November 18th purporting to be the best of British blogging over the past year. Edited by me. Yes, terribly exciting, I know.

This is to try and explain a little bit about what it actually is and then to ask for your help in pushing flogging publicizing it.

The first point is that obviously, all of the material is already out there for you to read for free, so why have a print anthology at all? It’s really aimed at that 95% (? 98%?) of the population that doesn’t read blogs at all. In fact, if you add up the traffic of the bigger UK blogs I think you’ll find no more than a million page views a week and of course a lot of those are repeats. That means that even of the 8% of the population that buys more than one book a year there’s an awful lot of them to try and introduce to this pleasure we all indulge ourselves in.

So one of the things we hope to do is to get people to realise quite how much good writing there is out there available to them. We, the cognoscenti, already know. Well, we do to an extent. I’ve found, while doing the research (I skimmed through 5,000 blogs and read in much more depth a 1,000 of them to make the selections), that it isn’t true that we do in fact know all of the good ones. Certainly, I found that there were whole areas of personal and music and culture and so on blogs that I knew nothing at all about. (BTW, if you have someone you think I should know about drop me a line. Final closing date for alterations is early October.)

I’d also better point out that this isn’t just me and my muckers, isn’t all right wing or economics, it’s an attempt, however limited by space, to give an idea of the huge variety out there. Yes, of course there is Pootergeek, Norm, Samizdata, Harry’s Place, there’s also Dead Men Left, Chicken Yoghurt, Green Fairy, Angry Chimp, Twenty Major.....over 100 different bloggers from all sides of every question. There’s pieces on sex, sport, music, politics, elections, bombings, piss ups, books.....there’s even a couple of pieces of the lost John B archives.

It really is an attempt to highlight the great pieces over the year. There are angry pieces, funny ones, intensely sad and ones that should, at least they do me, engender great venom and bile against their targets.

It might also serve as an explanation to people about what you do in that darkened room for so long each day. "Umm, what is this bloogger thing then dear? " and instead of tirades about the Citizen Journalist you can just point them to this selection.

The book’s being published by The Friday Project, Pan Macmillan are doing the distribution and from what I hear, Waterstone’s will be stocking it as one of their "Books of the Year".

It is also, of course, available from Amazon. Now there’s a few wrinkles to this. The first is a technical detail about how the bestseller charts are compiled. All pre-orders at Amazon.co.uk are recorded as sales on the day of publication. So anything that is sold over the net over the next two months gets recorded in the week of the 18th. November is also the slowest month of the year for bookselling. Sales of about 5,000 will get into the top 50, 7,000 into the top 20 and 30,000 or so will probably be the number 1. No, of course, I realise that any of those are going to be tough targets. But perhaps I can prevail upon you to see if we can reach one or other of them?

Please note that it only available from Amazon.co.uk. You cannot get it through the US operation.

So, if you want to highlight this coming publishing sensation on your blog you will need to have an Amazon.co.uk Affiliates Account. Commissions seem to start at about 5% and can go as high as 10%. It might also be worth noting that there’s already a 20% discount on the book as well. For those of you who don’t have one or don’t want to have one (and don’t want to earn the commissions available) I’ve put the html for links below the fold. These obviously link to my Affiliates Account so I’d suggest you only use them if you really don’t want to earn a few quid.

The basic page for the book is here.

So, there we have it. A lovely new book coming out and I’m hoping that all of you will help to make it a great success. Yes, partly because I’d like some money myself, partly because you can make some out of selling it and partly (and the proportions depend on your thoughts on my selfishness I guess) because  if this book is successful it will draw a much larger number of people into the UK blogging world.  Which is what anthologies are supposed to do, of course, provide a taster of the glories that are the larger works.

It might also be worth noting that a successful book of blogging, rather than one about blogging, should bring forth hordes of publishers looking for people to do the next one. I think we all have our own short-lists of who those should be (usually with ourselves at the top) and it will probably be true that advances will be on offer. As they were not for this one.

If you’d like to help out, get yourself an Amazon.co.uk Affiliates Account and for those who don’t want to do that, there’s code below the fold.

For a box giving the title and cost of the book use this html code. Add it to your template.

<iframe src="http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?t=timworstall-21&o
=2&p=8&l=as1&asins=0954831837&
fc1=000000&=1&lc1=0000ff&bc1=000000&lt1
=_blank&IS2=1&bg1=ffffff&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;
" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>

You’ll need to remove the extra space from the end of each line.

Couldn’t see how else to post it.

This should provide a text link:

<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code
=ur2&amp;camp=1634&amp;
tag=timworstall-21&amp;creative=6738&amp;
path=external-search%3Fsearch-type=ss%26keyword
=worstall%26index=books-uk">worstall</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.co.uk/e/ir?t=timworstall
-21&amp;l=ur2&amp;o=2" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt=""
style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />

Similarly, there’s an extra space at the end of each line.