ANGELMAKER IS OUT.

Yes, yes it is.

Angelmaker is out at an RRP of £12.99, which is frankly insane for a hardback with shiny stuff all over it, and of course it’s selling at around £8-10 quid. The ebook’s out too – once again, at around the £8-10 mark, which actually means £7 plus the UK’s ridiculous-VAT-on-ebooks. (No one’s suggesting that £7 is superduper cheap, by the way, but it’s 1. cheaper than the paper edition, 2. cheaper than the RRP of the softback paper edition and 3. an early-access price rather than an edition price.)

So here’s the hard sell: please go and buy it! Buy copies for birthdays, for fun and for Valentine’s Day. (Why not? A sexy adventure story with a gold design on the cover and marbled end-pages? Give one to the guy who can’t quite get up the courage to kiss you. Read one of the saucy bits to your lover in the bath. It’ll be fun!) Buy it for your grandmother who’s always not quite talking about what she did during the war.

Or just buy it because you want it.

To be extra-special helpful, I have compiled a list of places you can get it. See how nice I am?

1. Hive (because they give money to your local independent bookshop. How can you go wrong with that? And yes, they do also sell ebooks)

2. Apple (because I’m an Apple junkie)

3. Waterstones (the daddy of UK chain bookstores, with or without that damned apostrophe)

4. Foyles (if you like your bookshops hallowed yet recently re-energised)

5. Amazon (of course)

6. Blackwells (for that whiff of academia)

7. Kobo (did you know kobo.co.uk was a website for a company which makes chains? I didn’t. Until now.)

8. Your local independent bookshop. Which you can actually find through… Hive.

9. Lots of other places such as Hatchards, Daunts, and so on – but I couldn’t find links for them.

Sometimes things happen which are so ridiculously amazing you don’t really know where to put them.

This is one of those things.

And here’s the kicker for me: in general, I’m not persuaded by book trailers as a concept. I haven’t seen many which make me want to buy the book. They tend to feel like old TV ads, a bit starkly representative, without a sense of build or excitement. They are often clunky transliterations of text to a video format. Publishing, after all, is a verbal and even an oral business, a person to person business. It’s a text industry. There’s no particular need – or there wasn’t – to construct a literacy in film grammar or in the art of implication and tease by moving images. In many cases, that has meant that teaser trailers are like burlesque dancers who show up naked, tell a rude joke about a frog in a tiara and march off the stage expecting a round of applause.

But this is not that. This is one of the few trailers I’ve ever seen in the book world which feels filmic, feels comfortable with its purpose, and which genuinely teases. It reveals very little, implies a great deal, and positively drips sexy and fun. This is a trailer which can take off one finger of one glove and get a response like the wolf in Swing-Shift Cindarella.

Sure, I have a vested interest. But I LOVE it.

It makes me believe in trailers as something we can use in the booktrade. And it actually makes me want to go out and buy a copy of my own book.

See what you think :)