Month: June 2008

In search of a recipe for prawn curry the other week, K stumbled across a posting on a London-based food blog called Eat Like A Girl, and decided to give it a whirl.

The results, we both agreed, were spectacular. As I said in Eat Like A Girl’s comments box at the time: “A nice combination of aromatics and sweetness, with a great texture (the prawns work very well in this respect) and a lovely long finish.”

The dish has since become a regular fixture; we must have eaten it four or five times over the past couple of months. And so, in the name of Spreading The Joy, I’m linking to it here.

(Seriously, just try it. It will take you to a Happy Place.)

Long-term TD reader Adrian McEwen has just launched a new web-based service called Booklert, which should be a useful tool for any authors wishing to track their Amazon sales rankings on a regular basis.

The service lets you choose the book (or books) whose rankings you want to follow. (These don’t have to be books that you have written yourself, of course.) It also lets you choose how often you want to receive the updates: weekly, daily or even hourly, at time slots of your choosing.

Updates can be sent to you via e-mail, or via Twitter.

Badges can be generated showing your books’ current rankings, which you can then display on your website. These will also allow click-throughs to the Amazon pages for each book.

The Booklert site is here. Further product info is here, and the sign-up page is here.

As an inveterate Stats Freak, I have to say that this appeals to me greatly. Now, all I need is a Book Deal…

Congratulations to Sarah Peach and her team for publishing You’re Not The Only One: a compilation of 106 personal stories contributed by mostly UK-based bloggers, with all profits going to War Child: “an international charity that works with children affected by war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.”

The book has been compiled and published in a similar way to last year’s Shaggy Blog Stories, but (rather more sensibly!) over a period of a few months, rather than in one single week. It’s great to see a whole new crop of bloggers represented within its pages, with only a dozen or so writers from last year popping up again this year.

Oh, and I’m in it. So, with that Killer Sales Hook fresh in your minds, please proceed forthwith to the ordering page on lulu.com, where you can preview (for free)the front and back cover, the contents, the introduction and even the first story.

There’s more information about the book, as well as a list of contributors, over at Sarah Peach’s blog.