21 Years On The Back of Dixie Klondyke's Spanish Guitar

Added on 05 October 2010

21 Years On The Back of Dixie Klondyke's Spanish Guitar is well-known in the strange little world of Long Midnight Publishing, and pretty much unheard of on the remaining 99.99999999999999999% of Planet Earth. (Not sure if there are enough 9's there, but there's no hard empirical evidence.) The only publisher I ever showed it to was Piatkus, back in the day when they'd just signed me up, but they weren't interested. It's been tucked away ever since, apart from a brief year or two exposed on the defunct Barney Thomson website.

Recently, as I've been preparing the Barney Thomson series for Amazon Kindle, I decided that maybe I should put Dixie Klondyke up there too, which has brought me to reading it again for the first time in several years. It had always lain there, buried in the hard drive of an old computer, this book that I didn't remember much about, and which I assumed wasn't all that good.

Well, on further review it's actually not rubbish, which is a start. (There's a quote to put on the cover. "...it's actually not rubbish..." Well, not that I'd put a quote from myself on the cover.) Having been reading through the Barney Thomson series, it's quite refreshing to read something that's a bit edgier, where the lead character just wants to get drunk/get laid/light a cigarette. I suppose he's not that different from the fellow in Lost in Juarez.

So, I'm going to put the book on Kindle, and at the same time release a short paperback run to make the release official. Will time it for early December, or thereabouts. While the run will be short, I won't be disingenuous and call it a Limited Edition, putting it on a par with Mint KitKats and Jojoba-flavoured Quavers. If the run sells out, I'll reprint. (Obviously, it's bad marketing to not try to force some sort of purchaser's imperative, but here at Long Midnight Publishing HQ in downtown Tokyo, we like to be honest.)

21 Years On The Back of Dixie Klondyke's Spanish Guitar, coming to a bookshop - virtual or otherwise - near you in December 2010. And you know what, it's actually not rubbish.