Blog Tour, Day 27

OK, sit down. We’ve got a lot to get through today. First of all, today’s official blog tour stop was courtesy of the multi-talented Gale Martin, who I first encountered as a fellow competitor in the Whittaker Prize at The Write Idea forum. Gale is an accomplished mezzo-soprano and opera fan as well as a writer, and she’s about to have her first novel – set in the world of opera – published by Booktrope. Anyway, Gale and I chat about writing serials, getting noticed and … blowholes.

Today we also have a little bonus. Something odd is happening on Amazon in the UK, in that “Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens” is “frequently bought together” with this completely unrelated book. Now I vaguely know the author of the other book, Gavin James Bower, on Twitter and he messaged me to suggest that we ought to make something of it. So we got in touch with Helen J Beal, whose fault it all was (because we’re both being featured in her book group in the next couple of months – hence the skewed buying patterns).

Helen then put together a massively complicated three-stage three-way competitive interview, the rules of which we both managed to misinterpret in different ways. I think this actually played to my advantage, but honours in the end were fairly divided between the two of us. This may well be the future of book promotion and if Helen wants to be the referee for my forthcoming duel with P D James then the job is hers. (For the record, Gavin seems to be a top bloke and I might actually buy his book because the word on the street is that it’s pretty good.)

Speaking of P D James, I am still awaiting the reply from her corner. I think she may be running scared.

I can, however, announce that I have added two more highly prestigious dates to the Never Ending Blog Tour: Sarah Salway on Saturday 1st October and Scott Pack on Monday 3rd. Scott will also be here on Saturday in the guise of Steve Stack, author of “20th Century Dodos” (just out!), on his blog tour.

Oh, and apparently I’m on the bill for the next Liars’ League event, Fear and Loathing, along with VWC chum Julie Mayhew and Proxima label-mate Niall Boyce, amongst others. Apparently, there’s also a new piece by some bloke called Stephen King. Anyone know if he’s any good?

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