A week or two ago, I got an email for an editor at WordPress to let me know that this very high-level writing blog was on their Bloggers With Books list in their 2015 Year In Review. I’m not quite sure how that happened, but I can tell you from working part-time in an actual bookstore that my book’s sales in comparison to those of the other authors on the list is probably about the same ratio as visitors to our blogs. Nonetheless, I am honoured and bewildered to some extent, and would like to thank WordPress for letting me post my gibberish for free on here, and providing the forum to do so. I’d also like to thank anyone who has ever got lost and clicked a link and read about all my goings on over the past few years.

Take a gander at the full WordPress Year In Review by clicking this line.

I managed to find a review of Debris in Booklist, the journal for the American Library Association. I stumbled across it at work while looking at my own book on a place we use to order from the States (as I imagine all normal people do), and managed to track it down online. Booklist requires a subscription to use properly, but I did a trial membership to read it in full. Not too shabby. I know that the good folks at Biblioasis, namely publicist Grant Munroe, took Debris down there to BookExpo America last year, and a few librarians in attendance picked up a copy of the book and seemed to be interested in it.

The book actually gets a US release on February 9th, in about two weeks. And I’ve made no secret of that fact that I am very much after trying to make some inroads into the American market. I know stories don’t do much down there, or anywhere, but it is nice to see even a few people give one or two shits.

The last little bit of news is that I also found a review from back in November, that we missed somehow, published by the Winnipeg Free Press and written up by Rory Runnells, the artistic director of the Manitoba Association of Playwrights. In any case, it is also a pretty good one. So it turns out that even the worst of them weren’t bad. I know you can’t put too much stock in all of that, but I’m glad to see a first book received well, and reviewed the same way you’d review a veteran author, not a newb. I’d rather take my lumps in that kind of review, than hear that bullshit about “they’ll be pretty good one day, nice start, kid.”

Anyways, here is that review in the Winnipeg Free Press. Get to it by clicking this line. 

That is all I got for now. I’ll post more soon as things develop, and as my west coast tour schedule and other plans for this book and the next shape up.

Cheers.

Hardcastle