This week has been an especially good one. A few news bites:

• Saturday I got some coverage for the book in the Montreal Gazette.
• Sunday there was exposure in the Ottawa Citizen.
• On Wednesday I presented at the Ottawa Public Library. I had stiff competition since down the street at the National Library of Canada there were readings going on of Governor General Award winning authors. So my audience was modest but I did set a record of selling a book to everyone who came, including the guy from the library whose job it had been to introduce me to the (minor) throng.
• Thursday I was guest on CBC’s noon radio show Ontario Today with Rita Celli and got to talk for half an hour to people all over Ontario.

When doing a live phone-in anything can happen and since I can’t precisely remember everything I wrote in the book 5 years ago there’s always the potential that a caller can stump me. But the show went better than I could have hoped, with one person calling in and saying how much she liked the podcast and another caller saying he’d already bought multiple copies of the book to give to his family at Christmas.

While that’s all good and had me humming merrily as I did my errands, I also signed on Thursday a contract for an audio book to come out in the late spring of 2008. Here’s an image of the cover.

For a while we had a working title of The Word is Flat (a pun on Thomas L. Friedman’s book The World is Flat) but my publisher MacMillan decided they liked Global Wording better (and so do I).

But the intricate wheels of technology are such that even before I’d actually signed the contract, one bookstore chain at least had already gotten into their database the idea that I was coming out with an audio book. So for a while anyway, there it is on their website with the name it won’t end up having.

Happy holidays everyone!

On Wednesday, December 12 at 7 p.m. I’ll be at the Ottawa Public Library (main branch) doing a reading.  When you promote a book an event like this is called a reading but in actual fact I won’t be reading much but just telling some stories about some of the words from the book and some other words I’ve done in the podictionary podcast.  If the audience shows interest I’ll talk a bit about my (limited) experience in the publishing world.