The Mindless Ones will be returning to Thought Bubble this year, but for the first year I won’t have a new book to sell there — California Dreaming has turned into a much bigger book than I thought (and isn’t a Thought Bubble kind of book anyway), Head Of State is still grinding its way through the publishing process (unnerving for someone like me who’s used to clicking “publish” and having the book available straight away), and the Cerebus essays have been taking far longer to write than I’d hoped, because basically between June and mid-October I had one of those traumas you’re meant to go through about once every five years happen about once every two weeks, which was fun.

So while the other Mindless will have a variety of great stuff, I’ll only have the same old same old.

So what I’ve done is I’ve bought five copies each of the four most Thought-Bubbley books I’ve done (Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!, An Incomprehensible Condition, the book on Doctor Who, and my collection of SF short stories Ideas And Entities). I will be selling these, in paperback, for that weekend only at half price — £5 (my books are normally slightly more expensive than average because they’re printed on demand — I actually make less from a physical book sold on Amazon for £10 than I do from an ebook sold on the same site for $3).

For one of those books, that’s actually a loss for me on the unit cost before shipping, which is £5.75, but if I sell every copy of them I will have paid for the cost of buying them and my train ticket.

I will also be bringing along any non-battered stock copies I have of all my books except Incomprehensible Condition (most copies I have of that are of the inadvertantly transphobic first edition). If I sell all those, too, I’ll have also paid for my share of the stall.

So come along and take advantage of the half-price book sale, or say hello to the other, more talented, Mindlesses, and buy their stuff, or talk to Plok, who will be visiting once again from Canadialand.

And if you must, go and buy stuff from other people and see all the famous comics people and that. But we all know that’s not why you’re coming.