We're in receipt of the latest addition to the Adept family: the B format US version. Here's a handy key to see which one's which.

That's not the full number, as it happens - we have sold rights to more countries including Germany, Spain and a number of Eastern European publishers. What fun! And how nice to see that we are selling the same thing more than once - a strategy I like.

Notice the absence of a hardback: we've decided that the current publishing model of hardback-first-paperback-second is publisher, not reader, focused. In the case of debut authors, why should a reader have to shell out £17 on an unknown quantity - or if the author is established, how unfriendly to offer the high priced hardback for a year and make the reader wait for the paperback? We go into hardback when the shopping mission is a gift, or a collectible edition, but we don't just issue hardbacks to extract the maximum amount of money out of people. That would be mean. Like many things in publishing, though, hardback publishers don't mean to be mean; they're just doing what they've always done, so why change? Why indeed.