Customers who bought this item also bought...

If you enjoyed Charles Fudgemuffin then we recommend ... Charles Dickens?

As an author and a reader, a useful tool on Amazon's website is their 'Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought...' feature. It's primarily designed to help readers find similar books which they might also like, but as an author it's interesting to see what sort of books your readers are interested in.

However, some of the suggestions aren't always what you would expect, and some of the unexpected results I've found include some of my early scifi books apparently appealing to the same target audience as Charles Dickens! To be specific, A Tale Of Two Cities, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist were apparently all bought by readers who also bought Charles Fudgemuffin books.

Charles Dickens appeals to a similar target audience as Charles Fudgemuffin, apparently.

If any Dickens' fans are reading this and thinking, 'Hmm, maybe I'll give that Charles Fudgemuffin a try, then,' I should perhaps point out that Charles Dickens and myself have very little in common. In fact if I had to compile a list of similarities between us, it would go something like this:

1) We share the name 'Charles'.
2) That's it.

To sum it up, if the classic authors were on Venus, then my books would be located way beyond Mars somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy.

I think perhaps the reason why Dickens was shown as a suggested alternative to some of my early scifi books could perhaps be because at the time my books had only been on sale for a few days and therefore at that point I'd only sold a couple of books. The Amazon algorithms therefore had very little data to work with which creates a greater potential for unusual results. Now that my books have been on sale for a few months, the alternative suggestions are far more logical, with sci-fi comedy books featuring quite prominently (as well as some of my other books), which is what I would have expected.

A meat pie, as envied by Charles Dickens.

Anyway, just to reiterate, myself and Charles Dickens have very little in common, but if any fans of classic literature want to stay up to date with the latest Charles Dickens news then you can follow Charles on twitter (@DickensSays). Charles generally tweets about his novels and also reveals the occasional insight into his everyday life. For example in one of his latest tweets he reports:

"On the omnibus, riding into town to meet a colleague. Some fellow is eating a meat pie. How I envy him."

Charles also has a website where he talks about his latest projects and forthcoming releases:
Charles Dickens website

Please note, Charles Dickens doesn't really run the twitter account and website shown above. He of course has people to do that sort of thing for him!

. . . . . . . .

If you enjoyed A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens then apparently you may also enjoy some of my light-hearted scifi books, in the same way that fans of cookery books may also enjoy books discussing Russian economic policy during the 1920s.

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Please note, the above posts are actually totally unrelated, but they've got more in common than me and Charles Dickens!