Pure, Liquid Madness

I have just discovered that one of my books is being sold for between £162-£199 second-hand on Amazon. I am rarely left bewildered by the greed of some booksellers, but £199.48 for one of my old books? Madness. Pure, liquid madness.

However, as an author, what can you do when some avaricious and deluded soul attempts to sell one of your old books at a clearly insane price? I figure all I can do is offer one of my own copies of the book for sale on Amazon and put the following in the description panel:

‘Buy a brand new, signed copy direct from the author who will inscribe the book in any way you wish. Dispatched from the UK within 24 hours of purchase by first-class Royal Mail post.

Seriously, as the author of Conspiracy Theories: Real-life Stories of Paranoia, Secrecy and Intrigue (Paperback) for £162.86 I will not only sell you a signed copy of the book, I will take you to one of my drinking haunts in London for a cocktail before heading over to my favourite Indian restaurant where I will buy you dinner and do my best to keep you entertained for a couple of hours. Alternatively, for £162.86 I might deliver a lecture on any of the material in the book to any audience you care to gather, sell you my own annotated copy and give you some of my hand-written notes made during the researching of the work.

With the above offers available, you would be mad to buy a ridiculously overpriced copy of Conspiracy Theories: Real-life Stories of Paranoia, Secrecy and Intrigue (Paperback) from other sellers on Amazon.

David Southwell’

I did not even want to say what I could possibly be persuaded to do for £199.48.