Amazon availability

A couple of readers have said they have received emails from Amazon UK saying that delivery of the Hockey Stick Illusion is now going to be delayed into February. This is not correct.

The stock was shipped over the last two working days. My publisher is going to contact Amazon to try to get this updated. I'll post an update when I have it.

Hockey Stick Illusion for US readers

While my publisher has made valiant efforts to sell the US rights to The Hockey Stick Illusion and I've made my own attempts too, we've had no joy so far. US readers can buy the book direct from Amazon UK, but this may be relatively expensive. Could someone perhaps find out how much it would cost to buy and ship a single copy to the US?

I'm still very tempted to self-publish in the US. There's a typeset manuscript ready to go, which would just need a cover design. However, wiser heads are advising me to hold on, and of course if I can make an impact in the UK there's always the possibility that someone will pick me up for North America.

What do readers think?

Reviews - 1

I thought that people might be interested in some of the pre-publication reviews of The Hockey Stick Illusion - I'll post these up over the next week or so. Here's the one that was chosen for the cover:

This is a thriller about codebreaking – not Napoleon's or Hitler's codes, but computer codes that generated a false signal to the world about runaway global warming. Like most codebreaking it was painfully slow but Montford keeps the drama pacy as the years pass, while he explains the intricacies in the plainest possible language. By military codebreaking, the likes of Scovell and Turing helped to change the course of history, and McIntyre and McKitrick should soon do the same, when the statistical fudges that misled the politicians become more widely known.

Nigel Calder
Former editor, New Scientist
co-author, The Chilling Stars

Hockey Stick Illusion ships Monday

I've had word from the publisher that The Hockey Stick Illusion will start to ship from the warehouse on Monday.

Phew! That was a long haul. Amazing to compare the turnaround at a traditional publisher to the speed with which Fuller and Mosher have produced their Climategate: The CRUTape Letters.

Something's up

The Hockey Stick Illusion currently has an Amazon sales rank of around 200, its highest to date. Yesterday it was at something like 17,000.

What happened?

Bookselling

With America at Thanksgiving this weekend the Climategate pace has slowed slightly, allowing me to take stock of where I am. Blog traffic has been unbelievable, and it's been fascinating to see the relative power of old-new-media (like Instapundit; my first Instalanche!) and the new-old-media sites like the newspaper blogs. Thanks to everyone for the links.

I've also had some interest from big media. BBC radio is coming to see me next week (gulp) and there is the possibility of some independent radio too. I have precisely zero interest in becoming famous, so this is going to be bit of a trial to me, but I guess it's a cross I will have to bear.

All that traffic did good things for the book, which at one point last weekend was inside the top 1000 on Amazon UK, which I think must be pretty good seeing you can't actually buy it yet. I've finished writing a new chapter on Climategate, which adds a lot of corroborating evidence to the case I build in the rest of the book. It's amazing how little contradiction there was between what I'd written before and what was revealed last week. The new material all went off to the publisher on Friday, so with a bit of luck we can get it finalised and off to the printer next week.

Another upshot of the attention is that I have managed to get a foot in the door at an Australian publisher. It's early doors yet, but it's encouraging just to make contact, as anyone who has ever tried to get a book published knows. I still need to find someone in the US, which is obviously likely to be a big market for me. So if anyone out there knows someone in a US publisher who would like to buy up the rights to a very readable and very topical title on global warming scandals, do please put me in touch. Likewise I'm happy to speak to people about all the other rights - translation rights, TV and so on. Don't be shy.

One for the shopping list

Heresy Corner reviews Ben Wilson's new book, What Price Liberty?

Too depressing to read?

I'm going to be adding this to my shopping list at Amazon. Not that I need to be any more depressed about the state of the country, but he may have some ideas on what to do about it.

A new meme

There seems to be something of a new meme doing the rounds of the media at the minute. Fraser Nelson seems to have started it at the Spectator, with a short article wondering whether the similarities between Brown's Britain and the dystopian future imagined by Ayn Rand in her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, weren't just a little to close for comfort. (If you don't know the story, you are probably a stranger around these here parts, but in a nutshell it tells what happens when government gets too big and all the productive people start walking away from society. It's a famously badly written book, but despite that manages to get under your skin and inspire you).

The Speccy piece was picked up by Johnathan Pearce at Samizdata and from the comments there, I found this article at the Wall Street Journal by Stephen Moore. The title tells it all: Atlas Shrugged: from fiction to fact in 52 years.

As I said, all the good guys in Atlas Shrugged walk away and head for a sort of anarchist utopia called Galt's Gulch, where the hand of government can't reach them. And if anyone can give me directions, I'd be grateful.

Close down the libraries

Donald Clark is one of the best business bloggers I know. Always thoughtful, always provocative. His thesis today is "Close down the libraries". This might sound daft but it's a well-thought out piece and I think he's probably right, but maybe the time is not quite right. It won't be long though.

In the post...

Eamonn Butler's Best Book on the Market: How to Stop Worrying and Love the Free Economy.

(I always wanted to write that).  

Property law

Much fun at the Volokh Conspiracy this morning, where you can find out more than normal people should want to know about property law as manifested in the Lord of the Rings. Apparently all that fighting and questing and general nastiness could have been avoided if all parties to the dispute had properly followed the law of acquisition.

Apparently Pride and Prejudice is actually a treatise on property law too. 

Littlenose

I've done a short book review - this time one for small boys everywhere.

Book reviews

I've added a page of book reviews to the site. There's a link in the navigation bar. There's a couple of titles there now, and I'll add to the list from time to time.