Tomorrow morning is when SW is due on the shelves of good bookstores* in Australia and NZ and available for order from online stores (such as this one, for example). It also appears to be available, at least potentially, in Amazon France, Amazon Japan, (??) and for loan in Palmerston North library , New Zealand. I have no idea why these places specifically and not others; the entire business of book distribution is more intricate than one would initially expect.

By the way, yes, all these links were found by the reprehensible act of self-googling, of which I have been very guilty of late and am trying to ditch. But that’s nothing compared to what somebody did to me a few weeks ago: I was in a room in a backpacker hostel in Sydney and was talking to a guy there. He had his laptop out and working and we were having a conversation; I mentioned the book, and he typed something and started commenting on the cover.

I had been Googled to my face!

I don’t know, it just seems wrong, him sprawled there reading about me while I was sitting waiting for him to finish catching up on my biography. I don’t know if any etiqutte (or netiquette) rules are in place for this behaviour. there probably should be. It felt so weird in that context (I imagine in other contexts it would seem just fine – hence the need for some guidance in this matter).

Anyway, tomorrow’s a sort of non-big-day for me – on one hand I’m being published, but on the other hand, unless hordes of eager readers form queues outside bookshops (yeah, right), nothing much is actually going to happen  – initial sales figures take weeks and months to come in, and often that’s not hardly the end of the story – so I guess I’ll settle for popping into a bookshop and hoping to see SW there, and…well…popping back out again. Maybe a congratulatory ginger beer. It’s out there and, to a large extent, out of my control.

*How to tell a good bookstore from a non-good bookstore: a good bookstore is defined as “any bookstore selling my book”. Simple.