Books for bricks

Hi all. There's been some disquieting news on the house front. Apparently it's more buggered than we first thought. Accordingly the cost of getting it fixed (which was already pretty high) has gone up.

Please consider this an appeal, but not a demand. Those of you who know me well will know how I feel about doing this. I'm hoping there are some of you who don't yet have a copy of my book who will buy it, thus putting around £1 in the kitty for getting the house fixed. I'm further hoping that you'll pass this request on and tell your friends. If any of you know anyone famous, please let them know what I'm trying to do. At the end of the day, the money will probably become available once we've gone through the legal battle with our original surveyor, but the house needs fixing *NOW*, and now is when we desperately need the funds to do it. We've got guarantees of some money, but now that the price has gone up we're not sure it'll be enough, so please, if you haven't already, get yourself a copy of the book (entertain your kids, it's good, honest!), and if you have, tell your friends, tell your local school, tell your library, anything really. Feel free to link back to this post if you think it will help.

The book is available at: http://tinyurl.com/czb5fn (thanks Megabitch, I'm not with it today!)

Thank you.

Thanks

Thanks to those of you who've bought books so far. It means a lot to have your support. I've sent an email to the local press describing the story and telling them I'm hoping to sell more copies of my book to raise the money required. I'm hoping they'll want to do a story and raise the profile of both the issues we've got and the book in the local area. Cross your fingers. If you have any press contacts or know anyone that could help, please let me know. I've got my blood up now. With your help, I'm damn well going to fight, and one way or another we'll keep that house and get it back to the condition it should be in. I'll admit I was starting to feel like I'd been beaten and it was all going to end badly, but if it does, at least I can say now that I did everything I could think of.

Blimey, I've not written this many posts in a day for years!

In response to your comments, I think the idea of setting up a way for people to contribute via Paypal is great, as long as we donate the money to charity if (when?) we get it back at the end of all this. My intention was to provide something people might want in return for their money, I don't really feel comfortable asking for it straight out. If you want to contribute and you've already got a book, a button will be set up at some point so you can donate whatever you want. We'll be "paying it forward" to Shelter when we get things sorted.

Again, thank you all, I'm a little overwhelmed, to be honest.

Alternate places to buy the book

I've been told that some of you would like to buy the book, but postage is an issue. If you'd really like to buy a book, the easiest way is to go to your favourite local online bookstore and just do a search. Lulu's retail channels seem to be quite adept at getting books on sale pretty much anywhere in the world. I've lost count of the number of sites that are selling it now. In a previous post I gave urls for American bookstores, but the same should hold true in Europe and all over really. It's rare that searching for "Sir Parsley" at an online bookshop doesn't bring my book back as the first result, so please, if Play.com isn't an option, try your nearest provider, it won't make the slightest difference to how much I get, the fee to me is fixed regardless of who the seller is.

Paypal button

For those of you who wanted to donate to the cause, but already had/didn't want a book, I've put a paypal button up here:

http://www.sequoiasolutions.co.uk/housefund

Don't worry that the account details are for Sequoia Solutions Ltd, Paypal just messed me up when I registered my business for paypal payments, it will go to my normal paypal account.

Again, many, many thanks, you honestly don't know how much you're helping.

You generous people

You're all being very generous. Thank you so much, but please, please only give us what you can. I wasn't expecting the response we've got so far and you're all really, really fantastic for doing this, but watch out for yourselves as well, please. *hugs* all round.