RE: Jerome K. Jerome
Dear Lolita
Many thanks for this [review]. I am copying in Jeremy Nicholas, the editor and the Society's President.
Would it be cheeky to ask for a link to the [Jerome K. Jerome] Society's website and a note that it is available directly from there?
We are currently fighting a battle to get it in book shops over here and haven't yet begun to research how to do it in the US, so the website, probably for the time being, will be the only place US readers can get hold of a copy.
We will add a link to the review on the Soc's website.
Any advice on how to get it in bookshops on your side of the water or to achieve further publicity would be greatly received. As the review notes TMIAB [Three Men in a Boat] sold extremely well in the US and I am sure there would be many interested readers if only we could reach them with news of its publication.
Your point regarding the [type] size is well made. However, as you can imagine production costs were a major consideration in producing this book and so we had to get in under 224 pages and so the design was based on achieving that, without sacrificing too much material --- there was quite a bit left out. But it did come at the cost of a quite tight text design.
Many thanks again for the review and for your interest in the book.
(Toynbee Editorial Services Ltd)
jeremy@toynbee-editorial.co.uk
Jeremy Toynbee has copied me in to your correspondence --- and thank you for the review of Idle Thoughts. It would be jolly good, though, if you could spell my name correctly --- both in the title section and in the copy itself. Kind regards,
Editor, Idle Thoughts on
Jerome K Jerome
www.jeremynicholas.com
Re: Jerome K. Jerome
Thanks for your email. Jeremy has already chastised us for misspelling his name, for which we apologize (it has been corrected).
> Would it be cheeky to ask for a link to the Society's website and a note that it is available directly from there?
Unfortunately, we just don't do links. If you will check our homepages you will see over the years in our letters column a series of requests for links.
Most of them are from outer space: links for, for example, pet clothes manufacturers. It just doesn't pay for us to do them.
> We are currently fighting a battle to get it in book shops over here and haven't yet begun to research how to do it in the US, so the website, probably for the time being, will be the only place US readers can get hold of a copy ... Any advice on how to get it in bookshops on your side of the water or to achieve further publicity would be greatly received. As the review notes TMIAB sold extremely well in the US and I am sure there would be many interested readers if only we could reach them with news of its publication.
You are fighting a tough battle there ... Mail order, we suspect, is the only one that ever works. We wish we could be more helpful. Sending review copies to major newspapers and on-line book review magazines is the cheapest way to publicity, but most will ignore your efforts. Somewhere I read that there are over 100,000 new English language titles published every year. Less than .01% of them will get a chance ... especially the kind of books that you, like us, seem to favor.
Ed