Forthcoming Atrocities

5. The Book Signing

Part One – News

I stared at the 'of Sickness...' chapter head graphic. I was just getting spots (or at least dots) before my eyes when my phone rang. My agent calling to congratulate me on my talk. The commissioning editor had been in touch; apparently the publishing team were 'stoked' by the size of the crowd and its engagement. They needed quotes from me in the next five minutes to add to a press release they were putting out.

According to my agent, they'd been worrying that I wouldn't generate much book-signing activity at the next day's event, despite the relatively good sales of the hardback version of 'Ten Books they Burned'. Now, she said, they were excited and throwing more signage at the big Piccadilly retailer, that was hosting the event.

The rest of my evening and early morning were spent talking to the literary PR agency the publishers used. Before I knew it a handful of news shows had slots for a short interview and one of the national papers called wanting more thoughts on the 'One Billion Dollar Book'. I recognised this journalistic interest as the catchy snippet that would lighten the shocking and desperate headlines that currently dominated the news cycle. The world was going to hell and they wanted to talk about a book that didn't exist.

My agent and I brainstormed a few angles for the interviews. She wanted to try to put the focus back on my current best-seller, but I insisted that Raposo was the story.

'That was the book that didn'a sell, remember,' she said.

'It did in Europe,' I replied, 'and I got bugger all money from the translation rights, if you remember. That was the book the publishers didn'a understand.'

'Woah, what happened to forgive and forget. OK, I'll suggest to the commisioning editor that you're willing to update and repackage Raposo: Myths, Magic and Mayhem in the light of this new exposure. They'll be looking for a way to cash in. Try and think of another word that begins with "M", Roman.'

'Mercenary,' I suggested.

'So how come she's not famous like Nostradamus?' asked the radio show host in my first interview next morning. He hadn't read the press release.

'There are similarities with Nostradamus, in that both authors attracted the interest of the Holy Inquisition, but Nostadamus's Les Prophities survived beyond his death – there were even four editions,' I said. 'The fact that they burned all copies of Raposo's books, made sure they could never be reprinted, and killed her twice over, didn't help.'

'Yeah,' the presenter's mind was clearly on more important stories, 'that's terrible. Why do you think they did that?'

'In the case of the first Raposo, the Spanish Inquisition charged her with heresy. The second Raposo was accused of being a witch by Prussian authorities and consequently murdered.'

'That's really extreme. So, as a fellow author, how does that make you feel?'

'We all have to deal with critics.'

A TV breakfast interviewer at least focussed on the money. 'How can a book possibly be worth a billion dollars?'

'It's pure speculation,' I said. 'No one can know its true worth because it will never come to auction. However, the two Raposo books are the literary equivalent of discovering a spaceship from Roswell or Area 51 and putting that up for sale. What do you think that would go for?'

A US TV news presenter had done their research. 'You presented material in your book, Dr Karalis, that suggested Raposo's Forthcoming Atrocities title focussed on fifty to a hundred years of disasters: natural cataclysms, religious genocide, pandemics, famines and wars. How could she know?'