Friday, May 18, 2012

If you're looking for a badger glove puppet...

I'm indebted to @RobDoylecouk for this discovery...

At the time of writing, this is what you see if you search amazon.co.uk for the words badger glove puppet. One of my books - America Unchained - turns up as the fourth search result. I have no idea why.
I know that in the book there is a brief mention of Bodger and Badger (and Badger's profound love of mashed potatoes) but surely amazon isn't returning searches based on every word contained within a book is it?

There must be other more badger-centric books out there. Like, say, just as an example, BADGERS, by Michael Clark.

But presumably that doesn't contain the words glove and puppet and presumably mine does. (I don't recall the exact context but I'm pretty sure every book I write will contain at least some passing reference to a glove puppet. They're bound to all things considered.)

If it is to do with the content of the book then presumably this is to do with the Kindle. I think all of my proper books are now available on the Kindle which means that amazon now has the content to all of them.

But out of all the books they've kindle-ised, is mine really the only one to contain all three of those words? It doesn't work for any two word combination... if you search for Badger and Glove a load of other books show up before mine. And the same is true for Badger and Puppet and, obviously enough, for Glove and Puppet... but when it's all three, mine is the only one. Odd.

I suppose if there is a two word amazon.co.uk search that leads to only one book... well... you could call that, something, like, oo... I dunno... say, a Kindlewhack.

But I'm not going there.

EDIT TO ADD: The immediate response to this has been a mass, "ah ha... you so will go there... go on, write a sequel." The navel-gazing explanation as to why I definitely won't be doing that is here.

5 comments:

Dingwall said...

Page 123 - 'So why am I being named after a glove puppet of a badger?'

It seems it certainly is searching the entire content of the book!

Phil K said...

hedgehog printer - a kindlewhack ;)

gives one result - Hedgehogs by Charles Darwin (Unknown Binding - 1868)

LOL

AsleepOnKeyboard said...

This could make a good game...

I did

"on rent boy's in King's Cross"

and got

Born to be Riled by Jeremy Clarkson

as the second choice which funny enough ranked higher in the search than

"A Young Man's Passage by Julian Clary"

Dan said...

Awaits the kindlewhack adventure.

Emma Spreadbury said...

How nice that the comments after your post are an almost identical précis of the comments you got after GW. Like this scenario will always play out like this. Which sort of messes up infinite universe/possibilities theories, but supports the power of schadenfreude.