Long Midnight Chart Entry Rocks Publishing

Added on 01 October 2010

Breathtaking news for Long Midnight Publishing yesterday, as the Kindle version of The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson briefly smashed its way into the Top 30 Amazon Books/Society, Politics, Philosophy/Social Sciences/Law & Disorder/Issues/Serial Killers chart. For several hours, work at LMP HQ in Dubai ground to a halt as impromptu parties broke out on almost every floor of the seventy-one story building.

Elvis Shackleton, LMP's long-standing Director of Marketing and Serial Killers, was in no mood to play down the significance of the news.

"This is extraordinary," said Shackleton, speaking by phone from his luxury apartment in Barcelona. "It's one of those iconic, once-in-a-lifetime publishing events, the importance of which cannot be underestimated. Clearly now we're seeing a sea change in the business, with the new electronic media sweeping over the industry like a ravenous and all-consuming plague of locusts, with Long Midnight at its head, devouring the old elephantine behemoths, chewing them up, and then spitting them back out into the fetid sewer of opprobrium and disenchantment."

Despite claims by unknown sources in the Bookseller that "actually, this isn't that big a deal", Shackleton remains bullish.

"When you talk about charts, when you talk about empirical evidence that intimately details where a company is at any given point in the year, you have to say that the Amazon Books/Society, Politics, Philosophy/Social Sciences/Law & Disorder/Issues/Serial Killers chart is the one chart that everyone wants to be on. Everyone. It's the gold standard. You're not on that, you're nowhere."

At time of writing, The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson had fallen to #87 on the chart, and the employees on all seventy-one floors of LMP HQ had returned to work.