Seriously. I’m asking you — how annoying is that?
I honestly don’t know how I should feel about someone copying my title for a book on exactly the same subject. But I learned today (of all days) from Paul in the comments (here) about this:
I thought it was a good title when I came up with it — although in all honesty it didn’t sell enough copies to make any royalties [Note to self: Get over it!], so his book certainly won’t hurt my “sales.” Heck, I might even get some more sales by accident.
Hmm. Now that I check it out, my Amazon ranking two years later — 169,231 and #33 in books on climate change (woo hoo!) — is lower than his four months after his publication. Which I suppose all goes to show that there’s not a lot of point in writing books on global warming anymore unless you are really famous. Perhaps this post will even boost his sales.
Indeed, given that my blog reaches maybe five times as many people every month than the number who have read all of my books combined over the past two decades, I don’t really see the likelihood of my writing books in my field every again. [And that’s very optimistically assuming people who buy or received my books actually read them. In reality, I can’t imagine more than half do.]
So go ahead would-be authors of not-particularly-high-volume-sales future books, take all my titles: The Once and Future Superpower and Defining National Security and Lean and Clean Management and Cool Companies. Well maybe not all. I am still rather fond of The Hype about Hydrogen — hard to see how somebody could borrow that one in the future, although you never know what people will be peddling when we get really desperate to avoid catastrophic warming in the 2020s.
I have emailed Alastair McIntosh, so we’ll see what he has to say for himself. He’s one of those people who make you verify your name using one of those word-recognition programs before he accepts your email — ‘nuff said!