Much better than chocolates and flowers and stuff

Some visitors to Waterstone's this Valentine's Day will be tempted to explore the great selection of books in their latest promotion. For the romantics amongst you, "The System: How to Get Laid TODAY! by Roy Valentine" will be hard to resist. But I urge you to go here about halfway down the page. Strangely, the book underneath the book underneath e-luv is what my wife bought for me last year. Which was nice.

An Amazon embarrassment

There is an imminent catastrophe in my life. On Amazon, e-luv is in freefall, and was last seen hovering around the 230,000 mark. My friend Kevin had his book published 4 years ago - it was a collection of photos taken during Manchester City's last season at their old ground. As I was on Amazon, I decided to check what its ranking was - and to my horror discovered that it was in 239,000th place - closing in on e-luv. This is distressing on several counts:
1. Despite being a fabulous book, it DID come out 4 years ago. Most books have disappeared without trace after this time. Mine has been out 6 months and is already disappearing without trace.
2. He will waste no opportunity to let me know that his book is doing better than mine.
I beg of you - buy e-luv. Even if you've already bought it. Please.

Person of the Week

This is Dinah from Toronto, who has patiently stood by without complaint as others have taken the coveted Person of the Week title.
But now it is her turn to shine.
She earned this honour by not only buying e-luv, but also leaving a review here on the Chapters/Indigo website, putting a review up on her blog and picking e-luv as one of her favourite books of 2006.
As if that wasn't enough, she went into her nearest bookstore and rearranged the e-luvs so they faced outwards.
AND she quotes Belle and Sebastain on her blog.
Has there ever been a more deserving Person of the Week?

I need a more unusual name

One of the problems of being an author called Dave Roberts is that I am just one of many Dave Robertses with a book out. As most bookseller websites don't seem to be able to tell the difference, people who bought e-luv are urged to also buy other books which I did not write but am happy to take credit for. Such as another Dave Roberts's seminal work on pipe and excavation contracting. Or yet another Dave Roberts's meditation on following Jesus. There is also a Dave Roberts book called GOD'S PLAN FOR CHILDREN - THE CHURCH'S RESPONSIBILITY TO NEST GENERATION: The Church's Responsibility to the Next Generation, but I do not recall writing it.

It's the new, improved e-luv blog

Your favourite bright green website is no more and it is the fault of italk2much.com. That's a website where they look at people's blogs and then tell them how rubbish they are. Obviously, I had to ask them what they thought of this - the theory being that I am so desperate to get people to come here, I am quite happy to go through any humiliation they care to dish out. As it happens, the reviewer (shown here) was quite nice about the content, but the template led to comments like "the green makes me think of regurgitated grass my cat leaves in random places of my home", "e-luv is amusing, once you get past that neon green" and "vomit green and then white text on vomit green".
I took this to mean they didn't like it and have changed it in the hopes that this will persuade just one of my many new visitors to actually buy the book.
(The only downside to changing templates is that the links have all disappeared. So if there was a link to your site can you email me and I'll put it back.)

And the winner is...

I have won a few awards in my time. There was my Karori Swifts " Goal of the Season 1990 " award, which was slightly tainted because I was in charge of judging. There was also a Cannes Silver Lion. But these are meaningless when compared with the honour which has recently been bestowed upon me. You see, this blog has beaten off no competition whatsoever to win the prestigious " Best blog that mentions this blog" category in Timbo's 2nd annual Swampy Awards. I see it as recognition of the fact I was so desperate to sell just one copy of e-luv, that I spent several days publicly pleading with Timbo to buy it.
Eventually he did. And then he gave me this award. I love Timbo.

e-luv goes to Second Life

My neverending quest for free publicity has taken me to Second Life, the virtual world which everyone knows is the next big thing - as long as you can work out how to use it, which I couldn't.
It took about 10 minutes of flying and walking through trees before I encountered virtual people. That's me on the right. The other two were from Venezuela and I knew things were not going smoothly when, in reply to my question of whether either of them had read e-luv, the bloke on the left asked me to give him a lap dance.
Next I found someone calling himself Rommyusa Jarvis. I asked him if he was American. He confirmed that he was. I asked him if he'd read e-luv. He flew away at great speed.
I gave up.

My MySpace fiasco

After all the recent unpleasantness it is good to return to the matter at hand - my startlingly inept attempts to promote e-luv. MySpace was the location of my latest efforts. The idea seemed simple. Invite loads of people to be my friend then inundate them with extracts, reviews and reasons to buy the book.
Problem Number one - I am a plump middle-aged man and most people who read e-luv tend to be in their teens to mid 20s. You can see the problem, can't you? Inviting teenage boys and girls to be by friend is met with suspicion, swiftly followed by rejection.
Problem Number two - My clever strategy of targeting people with an interest in internet dating or chatrooms wasn't at all clever. It has resulted in being stalked by an American woman (shown here) who describes herself as an " Internet Dating Coach" and is very keen for me to enroll on one of her courses.
Problem Number Three - I failed to take into account that these friendships are a two-way street. The price I pay for flooding these people's Inboxes with increasingly desperate pleas to buy my book is receiving increasingly desperate pleas to listen to their band/get free membership to their dating agency or..umm..read their book.
Number of enquiries about e-luv so far - zero.

Person of the Week

Normally, buying e-luv is all it takes to become Person of the Week. But Cat has gone way beyond this simple act. She put up a favourable review on her blog. She helped spread the e-luv by passing the book on to a friend. And she reguarly quotes Belle and Sebastian.
For this, Cat is a worthy winner.
Remember, you can win this internationally (well, next week's winner IS in Canada) prestigious award by going into a bookshop and saying: "Could I have e-luv: an internet romance by Dave Roberts please?" and handing over your money.

Knob stripped of title shock!

Jeffrey Archer, zillionaire author who omitted to tell the truth in court. Ben Johnson, disgraced Olympic sprinter whose gold medal win was steroid-assisted. And Miss Nevada 2007, who was photographed kissing other young women, exposing one of her breasts and showing her thong at a party in Tampa.

What do they have in common? I will tell you. They were stripped of their titles. Or in Archer's case, should have been.

It is now my unfortunate duty to do the same to Sean Thomas, who was recently named Person of the Week. The reasons can be found at NWM's blog,
where she has been questioning whether he is being ironic or is just a knob. It is now clear that he is a knob, for the following reasons:


1. He claims to be busy ("not enough to make me interrupt my day to comment on a blog") yet manages to find the time to leave 4 self-promoting comments on NWM's blog and 1 on mine.
2. He puts plugs in for his blog AND his new book (Never Change A Baby With A Hangover (Bloomsbury, June 2008)), under the guise of comments.
3. He is so proud of calling someone "sour faced french cunt" that he tells us how to find it.
4. Not only is he under the impression that I am a Kiwi, he also makes a Kiwi/sheep shagger gag. Which no-one has done before. Ever.
5. His book really is a bit rubbish.
6. He has sold loads more than me.


While Sean is left to pick up the shattered pieces of his life, there'll be dancing in the streets of Scotland, where Cat is about to take over as Person of the Week.

Person of the Week

It's Sean Thomas, leading literary figure and author of Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet you, who responded to a recent post with this outstanding tantrum:


I wrote Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet You.

Rubbish, eh?

You may want to know it went to number 6 on amazon. It has also sold 20,000 copies here in the UK, in hardback alone. So far. And it has been sold to Germany, Italy, Norway, Korea, Spain, Russia and America - the latter for a very healthy five figure sum.

We have additionally had four offers for the film rights.

How many did your dismal litle tract sell, you tiny-dicked Kiwi? Go on, fuck off back to the land of the long white loser, you wankstain on the duvet of literature with you.

Only kidding mate. Happy New Year!

Sean T

The books I do not like to mention.

Around the time e-luv came out, several other books also appeared, covering roughly the same ground. I read a couple and they were rubbish, so I decided not to mention them, out of fear that the truth would come out - that I am bitter and resentful about them outselling e-luv. But now Cat (whose blog I recommend) has posted a review which names and shames them. Here is the relevent part, which makes her a certainty for future Person of the Week honours:

Back to the book. This is hardly an untouched topic. Indeed, over the last 12 months I have read a variety of books dealing with internet romance – Diaries of an Internet Lover, Dot.homme, Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet You and so on. None of them were brilliant, and all of them painted a rosy picture. Dave doesn’t. And this is where e-luv comes into its own amongst its competitors. The story is rife with disappointment, lies, deception and unpleasant characters preying on people’s insecurities. Which seems much closer to my own online adventures (now ceased) than any of the other books I read. It’s funny and entertaining with characters who seem real. The short sections mean it’s easy to pick up and put down – an ideal public transport novel.

2007's first Person of the Week

It's Timbo, of course. He made sure of the honour by reviewing e-luv on his fab site here.
As you can see, he throughly enjoyed it but demanded I make a few changes just for him. Which, of course, I will because I like him.
Be warned - Timbo is a crazy internet stalker and would be most displeased to hear about anyone not buying e-luv. I only pass this information on for your benefit.
I always like to finish with a cute animal story, so here are Donna's dogs beseeching me to write a sequel. You can see the desperate pleading in their eyes. But I am hard of heart as well as lazy, and must disappoint them.