This is more or less how it goes. I’m approached by Fused to write something for the Independent Issue of there listing magazine Area, which is out now by the way and looks fantastic. This is not unusual, I have written for them quite a bit and am happy do so.

So I drink in all the independent pubs in Birmingham in one day, getting hammered in the name of Truth (capital T). I was joined by Jon Bounds my good friend and co-editor of Dirty Bristow and we decided to do a joint but alternating perspective on the day. Unfortunately while in the process of turning my weird drunk scrawl into human text I had amassed over four thousand words or so with Jon clocking up about the same.

Now Fused put up with a lot from me, but an eight thousand word article is a little heavy to go in the magazine. So me and Jon decided to print it as an e-book and release it into the wild for free.

To put it on Amazon, we had to charge, so we set it for the lowest price we could. A side effect of this is that on its listings it tells you where you are on the various charts. And a side effect of that is that I was checking it at a boringly regular interval. I’m not really competitive per say, but I can have egotard tendencies.

Then a really strange thing happened, it started going up the charts. And up, and up. It peaked at not only Number 12 in the Kindle Travelogues and travel essays, But 29 in the Amazon Travelogues and Travel Essays Bestsellers Chart.

Don’t believe me?

look, there we are, betwixt the Danny Wallaces as it were.

Now I know there’s probably a million reasons why it got up there, and yes I know the category isn’t particularly hard fought, and no, I won’t let Jon tell me how little we’ve actually sold/downloaded.

Because, for a few minutes, I was a bestselling author.

you can get your copy of the book here 

But to be honest the reason we released the book in the first place was to encorage people to buy issue two of the magazine and more importantly get people to buy tickets to the launch event

You can buy the tickets here.