Short Blaze of Praise

Another excuse to
print this cover
(design: Tim Bradford)

Writers tend to disdain critics who give them bad reviews, because the reviewers obviously didn't 'get it'. Or, if we're very disciplined, we ignore them. On the other hand, if they write a glowing appraisal, we reciprocate the applause. This person is obviously a highly intelligent, well-adjusted person with a sane and judicious world view. Much like ourselves. And so I link to Neil Nixon's write-up of The Chairman's Daughter this week at the When Saturday Comes website, in a wider piece about football books and digital publishing.

Authors also grab what little positive attention we can in a market so packed with niche-seeking tomes that the available royalties sometimes seem like the literary world's equivalent of twin fish and a clutch of loaves. Only it's not Jesus generously handing them out to the success starved authors, but a tightly stretched business that in some quarters is still peering at the e-market through the foggy monocle of a baffled, tweed-jacketed editor from the 1930s. Which is a long way of saying that, without apology, I here replicate Mr. Nixon's kind words in full:

"You don’t do these things for money, but there is money to be made, and the small sums on offer are expanding. It’s open season for anyone with knowledge, skills and the time to craft a book. The Chairman’s Daughter, by WSC regular Ian Plenderleith, is a Kindle-only delight published in 2012 imagining a lowly factory team, their millionaire owner (rich on the back of a device for scooping dog shit), a 4,000-seat stadium and a 29-year-old former England international on the comeback trail. He signs with one condition: he must avoid the chairman’s daughter. It looks workable, until she shows up.  The book has held its sales to the point it frequently appears in the offers at the bottom of an Amazon page for another book.

"The Chairman’s Daughter is gloriously old school, built on description, action and crowd pleasing plot-twists, and it’s selling in a market in which anyone can load and publish their own Kindle item. If you’ve read this far, maybe you’re football’s next Kindle cult hero author."