::waves at huge crowd::

I have a couple of topics I think (hope!) regular readers will find interesting, and I'm happy for the chance to talk about them. Thanks for the opportunity, Charlie.

In the meantime, if anyone has anything they'd like me to talk about, please drop a comment to let me know. For the curious, you can find my short and useless bio here. My website has more info about my books, including free sample chapters.

If you're interested in breaking in to professional publishing, the story of my first novel sale can be found as part of Jim C. Hine's First Book Friday series. It's a tale of quitting and shame, but it has a happy ending.

Thanks again to Charlie for giving me a chance to chat with everyone. I'm looking forward to it.

I'd like to see somebody examine the relationship between Charlie recommending a book, and its sales after that point.

I'll admit to a mild curiosity about this, too. If you like, I'll make note of my site traffic and purchases through my own Amazon.com affiliate links. Only Charlie can tell how many purchases came through his own affiliate links above.

Welcome Harry!

I first found your books through Scalzi's Big Idea. I've read Child of Fire and enjoyed it; I'm looking forward to Game of Cages which is waiting on my shelf.

Fantastic! I loved Child of Fire and Game of Cages, and am looking forward to the next book in the series.

Greetings and Salutations Harry.

On Charlie's recommendation of awhile ago I read 'Child of Fire ' and ' Game of Cages ' which were pretty good; Dark and Moody with a firm grip on the realities that you set forth in your stories .. very .. "Red Harvest" ... which a reviewer rightly says '... is one of the most violent mysteries ever written. It was Dashiell Hammett's first detective novel in 1929, and shows a detective caught between two warring factions in a corrupt mining town. "Red Harvest" strikes powerful themes with its story of a lone hero standing against an evil town. Ultimately the novel has been loosely adapted for several movies, including "Yojimbo," a samurai tale by the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa.'

http://www.helium.com/items/862594-book-reviews-red-harvest-by-dashiell-hammett

The first two in your series were more than Good Enough for me to have pre ordered " Circle of Enemies: A Twenty Palaces Novel(Paperback) " at the absurdly low price of '£3.72 - Save £1.24 (24%)' from The Book Depository.I did buy the first two in the series from Amazon.co and am therefore part of the Statistics but I know that quite a few people have switched from Amazon to the bookdepository and this may affect your analysis of your book sales patterns.

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9780345508911/ -

Do have fun whilst you are occupying Charlie's Comfy Seat of Power.

Welcome, Harry.

I found your books through Amazon's insidious "People who liked this..." connected with some of Charlie's books. We've enjoyed them tremendously and are very happy the next one has a firm release date.

From the wording of your bio-short, you are a USian .... Any comments on this vile carve-up between the US and Brit guvmints? Note that the "environmental" campaigners also come out quite badly.

Or the lieklihood of an "Egyptian" revolution breaking out in either Russia or Belarus, both of which are already at the kleptocracy/gangster-state level?

Curse you Stross!! ;-) I was doing so well at "not buying more books until the 'to be read' bookcase was a bit less over-full" too!

I've Tried ..Gaud Knows I've tried to resist the Temptation, BUT, whilst you wait for the next " Curse you Stross!! ;-)" you could do worse than to have a look at ...

" Rivers of London [Hardcover] Ben Aaronovitch
Ben Aaronovitch (Author) › Visit Amazon's Ben Aaronovitch Page Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author name " ...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rivers-London-Ben-Aaronovitch/dp/0575097566/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297708548&sr=8-1

You like The Laundry sequence, as do I, and so there is a pretty fair chance that you will like Ben Aaronovitch .. I've pre-ordered the following in the sequence " Moon Over Soho " and the third in the series ..yep its that successful with the Powers That Be in Publishing.

Of COURSE theres also Kate Griffins Urban Magic Sequences ..one set in the present day and One - theoretically ' Young Adult ' I think that the genre is called - to which you will find links from HER Blog site, here ...

http://www.kategriffin.net/

SHE ..Sigh !! ..has an alternative Job that has just GOT to be the Envy of all, full ? Time, Writers ....and SHE has the bruises to prove it!See the photos on HER ..sigh .. Blog.

Anyway, My Work Here is Done, and I'm Now off to Plot my Latest Scheme to Rule The World from MY secret Underground H.Q. which is Beneath an Extinct Volcano just toward the outskirts of Edinburgh ... now where did I put that Damn Cat?

As far as sales correlation, Scalzi's comparison to the Laundry series had me pick them both up on the Kindle just now...

Thank you, and thanks to everyone for the kind words. Sorry it took so long for me to respond, but Sunday and Monday are my busy days.

Mentioning RED HARVEST is pretty spot on--Child of Fire started off as a deliberate attempt to translate RH to urban fantasy setting. There were a lot of changes on the way, obviously, but that was the origin.

And I think The Book Depository is great! I recommend it all the time.

Greg, I'm tempted to apply the old saw that Arabic peoples aren't capable of democracy to Russians, but no one knows me here and they might not recognize the joke.

The truth is that I don't know much about the situation in Russia or Belarus, but it's my understanding that it was the youth demographic in the Arab world that's pushing for change, and the populations in Russia and Belarus are old enough to remember Bowie's glam period.

And what happened to those Chagossians is a damn shame. They should at least be offered proper recompense and a return of their citizenship (if they want it.) But no, I hadn't heard about it before.

Anyway, My Work Here is Done, and I'm Now off to Plot my Latest Scheme to Rule The World from MY secret Underground H.Q. which is Beneath an Extinct Volcano just toward the outskirts of Edinburgh...

Hmmmm.... not many of those, all of the extinct volcanos are in the middle of town. There are some closed-down coal mines around, although the main shafts are all blocked...

...actually, the whole place is coal mine country, and subsidence is a frequent problem (our house is built on a concrete raft).

Now, if you wanted a $SEKRIT_HQ, you could do worse than the disused railway tunnel towards Charlie's end of town... St. Andrew's tunnel - easy access at one end to Waverley station, and a supermarket at the other :)

Harry, that old saw is a truly facile and self-serving piece of crap. Foreigners, particularly the Americans and Israelis are terrified of the merest hint of democracy anywhere in the Arab world, Persia or Central Asia. That's why we've been installing and propping up tyrants and coming down hard on any movement which shows signs of democracy. That's why we threw down the democratically elected government of Iran and put the Shah back on the Peacock Throne. It's why we supported Mubarak, the House of Saud, the Kuwaiti Royal family and so many others.

Harry, that old saw is a truly facile and self-serving piece of crap.

Hello to the point I was making.

Incidentally, there's a thread downstream of here for discussing political events in Egypt. An intro to the new guest blogger probably isn't the right place for that (regardless of what some of the more eccentric regulars on this blog might think).