Celebrations

This week there was cause for celebration more than once. On Monday, the 100th post went up on the DT Blog! As with the first anniversary post back in May I marked post No.100 by selecting my favourite photos, this time since the first anniversary. I picked out ten photos and asked you, my readers, to choose your favourite one and leave a comment to that effect below the post. I also selected five posts that were my favourites content-wise, overall. Do you have a favourite post too? If so please let me know in a comment.
  

Then on Tuesday it was not just Nationalfeiertag (literally ‘National Celebration Day’) here in Austria, it was also the date when my book, Atlas of Dark Destinations, finally came out internationally (in Germany it had already been out since September). The cover of the book is featured, again, above.

So from now on it will be interesting to see if my publishers keep me updated with regard to sales figures. Obviously I hope the book will do well – and of course you can all do your bit in support of the DT blog and my website by purchasing a copy, either from a bookshop, online booksellers (and yes, that includes the giant Amazon) or direct from the publishers’ websites. For the UK that’s this page, if you’re in the German-speaking countries go here to order it, and for the rest of the world use the US site of Laurence King Publishing. Thanks to everybody who has already purchased a copy! And remember: Christmas is coming – maybe you want to get some copies to give to other people as Christmas presents …

In these Covid times it was not advisable to have a really big launch party, as I had originally anticipated, but at least we had a very small number of guests round for a mini book-launch house party (everybody fully vaccinated) in the evening, so at least the day didn’t go past totally unmarked. It was the first time we had a group of guests in our home since January 2020. Speaking of parties – today is Halloween! But like last year we won’t be having a party for that – however we incorporated a few Halloween-like aspects into the book launch (e.g. we had a small pumpkin “puking” guacamole).
  

With all these things I got a bit distracted from work on my main website, where only one short stub chapter for the Hanover Station Memorial in Hamburg has gone up and the main Hamburg entry has been updated and expanded. I still have to update a couple of other Hamburg entries, and add a major new one for Berlin. And after that I have to tackle the chapters for all the places I visited in the Baltics this summer. So I won’t run out of things to work on any time soon (in fact I never will – even if I manage to catch up on all chapters that are outstanding from earlier travels, there will still be countless candidates for new stub chapters for countries/places on my future travel wish list).
  

I’m also wondering how much I will have to get involved in the marketing of my book, now that it’s out internationally. So far I’ve only given those two radio interviews, but I know that the publishers have “pitched” the book on dozens of platforms and sent out review copies. So far I’ve not done much beyond those odd interviews. I can imagine more is yet to come. We’ll see.
  

But so much for this time.

Have a good week – and, as always, stay safe.

Best,

Peter