BARBERSHOP SEVEN Chart Plummet Sparks Recession Fears

Added on 06 January 2014

When the people at Amazon combined the word Kindle with the eternal concept of The Twelve Days of Christmas and brought the world The Twelve Days of Kindle, it was a stroke of marketing genius that made millionaires of men overnight.

‘The Twelve Days of Kindle,’ intoned Professor Malcolm Connery of the Glasgow Institute of Special Things this morning, as he looked out over the city from his office on the fifty-eighth floor of the Alex Salmond Memorial Tower in Glasgow’s west end, ‘is pure genius. You just know they’re going to shift billions of downloads, creating empires at the press of an online button. Their Easter follow-up, The Four Days of Christ Dying on The Kindle promises to be even bigger.’

One of the stars of this season’s Yuletide promotion was the Barney Thomson omnibus, THE BARBERSHOP SEVEN, which leapt from obscurity into the blessed and holy Amazon Top 100 Best Sellers chart. Suddenly Barney Thomson author, Douglas Lindsay, 57, was being mentioned in the same breath as that bloke who wrote that thing a while ago, and newspapers were camping out on his doorstep trying to get his opinion on everything from this year’s hottest crime novel debut to the truth behind the Kim Jong-Un assassination-by-wild-dog rumours.

Now, however, we come to Epiphany and the end of the Twelve Days of Kindle. The promoted books have all gone back up in price, and they each begin a precipitous plummet back down the chart. With the Barbershop Seven being one of the more expensive Kindle books on offer, its return to full price means a plummet that will be swifter and more precipitous than most.

Suddenly, Lindsay is being seen as an ex-Bestselling Author, little more than a washed up bum, and reports have it that he is to be found propping up the end of the bar, with the likes of Blasted Heath staffers Malky Eight Feet and Giant Nancy, a living verse from Springsteen’s Glory Days, talking about the time when they were going to be Kings, and ending the evening with his face buried in a piss-infused bowl of Doritos.

With sales of The Barbershop Seven returning to their more traditional Almost Nothing, city analysts are concerned that the UK is once more on the brink of recession.

‘Yep,’ said Connery, as he blew sorrowfully over the top of a piping hot mochachocaccino, ‘things are looking pretty fucked, man. That’s why the Chancellor is giving out such a bleak message today. He knew the good times wouldn’t last. All that Christmas optimism was based around the Barbershop Seven, but in the cold light of day maybe it didn’t do so well in any case. Now that it’s in the process of crashing and burning, we’re in the middle of an apocalyptic shitstorm of economic mayhem.’

It is time, Connery told me just before I left his office, to sit around on the floor, sing sad songs, and drink heavily.