The Well-Tempered Clavier

Now just because I’ve been on holiday this past month doesn’t mean for one moment that I’ve been off the case as regards The Well-Tempered Clavier. No Sirreeee!

Throughout my time in The Sticks, I was sending out yet more copies of the Clavier, as well as pounding the phone.

And - surprisingly - I even managed to get a plug for the book in the world’s most prestigious paper (bar none), The Wall Street Journal.

Of late, I’ve turned into a bit of a book reviewer. For The Express, I’ve just done up a review for Manfredi’s (dire) book "Pharaoh".

But the Journal is a bigger piece of cheese altogether - not least because at the end of the piece they allow you to give your own book a little puff. How civilised is that?

I was reviewing Hugh Trevor-Roper’s book "The Invention of Scotland", written 25 years ago, but only just published. Trevor-Roper loved nothing more than dishing it out to the Scots and, even though he’s been dead five years, would be thrilled to know that he’d got in one more pop from beyond the grave.

I called up Idle Tom the Publisher to tell him the good news.

"Got another plug in the Wall Street Journal," I said.

"Hey that’s great!" he said. "Do you know I think I’ve witnessed a knock-on effect today in the Amazon sales."

"You check my Amazon sales every day?"

"Certainly do! I think that after your story appeared, there was a spike that lasted about two days -"

"So what’s that mean in terms of sales?"

"Oooh - not bad. Not bad at all. Maybe two even three -"

"Two or three? Are you joking?"

"Nope - it all counts though BillyBoy!"

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Well-Tempered Clavier. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.