A belated ‘thank you!’ to my friend Dr Bob Rich

Dear Bob,

In March last year, I believed that nobody else was going to blow my trumpet, so I’d have to do it myself. Thank you for proving me wrong!

My tardiness in responding to the email you sent me three weeks ago advising me that you’d reviewed my book is thoroughly inexcusable. I awoke this morning with an “Eeek!” moment, suddenly realising that I hadn’t yet thanked you for your kindness. My excuse was that I noticed at the time that while the review you advised me of had appeared in your neck of the woods (on amazon.com.au), it was showing on neither amazon.com itself nor in my antipodal location (on amazon.co.uk), and I wanted to give it a little time to see if that was just a ‘delayed update’ issue.

Well, it’s been over three weeks, and I can still only see your review on the amazon.com.au site, and not the other two. I have no doubt that this is also reflected on other amazon sites across the world, too, but life’s too short and precious to investigate further. My estimation of Jeff Bezos and his global monstrosity has dropped a further couple of notches, to an all-time low, and this has hardened my resolution to maintain my own boycott of that megacorporation, even though I know that has a pitiful effect: I shall continue seeking what I need anywhere but there even if it costs me a little more or I have to wait a little longer.

Yes, yes; I recall we discussed my internal struggle and misgivings over my hypocrisy in publishing my book on their Kindle platform while at the same time ‘boycotting’ the business. And I thank you again for your kind words in that regard — although, unfortunately, I’m unable to locate your actual words of wisdom about this. I think it was in a comment on Wibble somewhere (I consulted a WordPress Happiness Engineer about that, thinking that there ought to be some way to filter a site’s comments by author and find your words that way: but I’ve been informed that this is not possible. Computer technology! /eyeroll I know I read somewhere that ‘computers would make our lives easier’… me, I’m still waiting). But, as is my wont, I digress….

The good news is that goodreads.com isn’t so provincial; your — five star! — review was there when I checked just now (I don’t know how long it took to get there).

The Eclectic

I’ve learnt quite a bit from this exercise. Not the least of which is that I should have chosen a better title. The one it has competes with too many others whose creators clearly thought as I did that the word ‘eclectic’ would be sufficiently unusual. In retrospect, I should probably have gone with something like ‘The Phlyarological Obscurity’.

I should also have chosen a better author name; the moniker my parents chose for me is as common as muck, as I discovered some years ago when I went egosurfing on faecesbook and, believe it or not, discovered a group called ‘We Love Colin Reynolds’ (I kid you not. I sent messages to as many of my namesakes on there as I could find, suggesting that we should all join this group and say ‘Thank you!’… but not one of them took my hint. I guess we don’t share the same sense of humour).

I see that on goodreads.com my own book — The Eclectic — is associated with another title: ‘Whilst Others Sleep‘, with the suggestion that that’s by ‘the same author’; but it’s not me. Sigh. That’s my next job, I guess: try to find out if I can break that linkage….

So… far, far too long story short: thank you ever so much for your review, Bob, I sincerely appreciate the time you took to read my humble words and comment on them.

Incidentally, I’m doing another one-day free promotion of ‘The Eclectic’ in just under three days’ time (on, appropriately, All Fools Day) — Yep, that link is currently ‘404’, as it’s scheduled for 01Apr2021. Think of it as time travel! (which we all do, albeit slowly 😄).

With very best wishes,

Colin Reynolds (the real one).

P.S. How are you getting on with your ‘modifying links homework’? I know I’ve mentioned before that I think booklinker.net is a very useful tool; it allows you to create custom links that automagically redirect to the amazon website in the clicker’s neck of the planet; it’s an all-in-one, and saves you having to list separate links for all the amazon sites. You’ll just need one (easily remembered) ‘mybook.to’ link for each of them. For my money, that’s a no-brainer. You might want to investigate… in the meantime, I’ve crafted a link on my own booklinker.net account, just for you: http://mybook.to/SleeperAwake. By the way, I have my copy of that book already; it’s next on my reading list, and I’ll review it when I find a spare round tuit. :D