"You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to."
Jonathan Franzen
A few months back, I almost published a book in what I thought was a great format - the old Penguin pocket book style - and it is a great style, but when I got my hands on them, they sucked so bad I withdrew them immediately and went back to the drawing board. With those few months behind me of rustling up a few different formats to see what happened, I finally decided that the 6" x 9" format that I'd always used was in fact, wonderful.
So, with that pointless experiment out of the way, I can proudly present my latest collection - Cities Of The Dead - which is available to order right here and now in that wonderful 6" x 9" softback format and if I do say so myself, it looks fine, fine, fine - particularly when you stash it next to all of my other books in the store.
The digital editions for Kindle, iBooks and Kobo will also be available on that page from December 1st at a suitable digital price. I'll repost information here when it's all been taken care of later in the week.
Meanwhile, if you missed the extracts that have been published in Skin Deep over the last few months, there's an extract from the chapter on Paris right here that also features some great photography from my friend Dirk Behlau.
Anyway, here's what it looks like. I am really pleased with how this turned out:
Anybody buying five copies or more, will find an extra copy in their package to hand out to friends/leave on the train... whatever you choose. If you're an indie book store owner who is considering taking some stock, drop me an email and we'll work something out along the same lines that really works for you.
•••
Meanwhile, out in internet-land, the preview copies that went out got off to a good start with this review:
'Hard Boiled Travel Writing' is a phrase I like very much indeed and 'elegant'... nobody has ever called me or what I do elegant before. I'll add that to the list of odd things that happened this year.
•••
Alongside of the online promo, I'm going a little bit old school with it too. The internet can be like leaving a baby in the middle of a house party and expecting everybody else to look after it, so over the next few weeks I'll be hitting the streets with 10,000 of these - though not all at once because 10,000 flyers can be quite a pain to haul around with you:
To finish, I'll leave you with this from a man who, in spite of knocking back more than a few, knew what he was talking about:
“they thought that writing had
something to do with
the politics of the
thing.
they were simply not
crazy enough
in the head
to sit down to a
typer
and let the words bang
out.
they didn't want to
write
they wanted to
succeed at
writing.”
Charles Bukowski: The Last Night of the Earth Poems