Bear Alley: Comic Cuts - 8 September 2017

BEAR ALLEY BOOKS

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The Bill Kellaway Quartet by Gwyn Evans
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"The narrative is packed with action and I think readers will have a lot of fun with [Hercules, Esq.] and there are some genuine moments of laugh out loud humour. I can understand why the film rights for this book were snapped up and even today I could envisage it being a very enjoyable one-off TV series." — Cross Examining Crime.
"Although there’s some criminous stuff going on and Bill often finds himself vying against or working with various lawbreakers, the stakes are never really life and death in this book ... There is some slam-bang action, though, as well as a smart, really likable protagonist and a lot of really clever plot twists, but what really makes HERCULES ESQ. work is Evans’s style, which is consistently breezy, fast-paced, and funny." — James Reasoner, Rough Edges.

Friday, September 08, 2017

Comic Cuts - 8 September 2017

I've had another good week of work on the Fifty Forgotten Authors book, although the totalizer won't be showing much activity this week. Having spent ages working on one long piece, I began tackling a couple of smaller subjects with renewed vigour and have turned up loads of new information: a couple of previously unknown books by one author, the birth name of another (previously unknown even in family circles), details of another author's later career outside of writing which, up until now, I only had the most sketchy details.

I love this kind of detective work and it's great to have something I can get my teeth into. I'm trying to nail each essay down before I move onto another, but that's not always possible, although some are waiting on a single line of information before I sign off on them. At the moment I've got twelve finished and five others on the go... two where I'm waiting on information, two where I've done the research and just need to write it up and one where I've just started gathering information.

After discussing how poorly I did at a boot fair over the bank holiday a couple of week's ago, I've signed myself up for the local Sale Trail, which takes place at the end of the month. I've done one of these before – way back in April 2015 – and it wasn't as great as I'd hoped. That time we had a couple of tables outside a local hall, which meant transporting all the boxes of books there and bringing 85% of them back, all for the princely sum of £35.

This time, the plan is to hold the sale in our own garden. We've signed up for a mention on the Sale Trail Map and hopefully we'll get plenty of passing trade from people heading to the Co-Op. It's one of those situations where you can't predict what will happen. We'll just have to try it and see.

Will I make enough to pay off the cost of the folding table I bought? I'm still £17.50 shy of what it cost me, so that's my target. Exciting, eh?

Random scans today are pairs of books, for no reason other than that's just the way it happened. The first two are from Curtis Warren, next up Big Ben, thirdly Digit Books – the same book, in fact – and finally two from Black Swan.