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Valverde Maclean

Life and love can take us to unexpected places


How I sold one book.


Sometimes you know a reader, and why and where they buy a book.  Often you have no idea.

Today I found out about one purchase.  It’s a story of our times.

A cattle producer in a remote part of the Northern Territory of Australia has set Google to trawl through news items and reports, and feed them to him each morning.  The search engine is set to find key words important to his industry.

Much that arrives is of little or no use to him, maybe a report of cattle numbers in a sale in southern Brazil, or a report of cattle smuggling somewhere in the world, but amongst the haul there can be some important news: a change in tax on cattle imports into Indonesia, or a possible need for cattle in Vietnam.

One day he saw  a news item from a small community newspaper two and a half thousand kilometres away from his station.  A book reviewer had unknowingly used the key words programmed into the search engine.  Curiosity triggered, the cattleman read the review and passed it to his wife.

She went online, found the website, decided the book was interesting and bought it as a gift for her sister.

That’s how one copy of “The Disappearance of Merry” was sent to the Daly Waters district of the Northern Territory of Australia.


To find out more read the review


Click Here