Further to my post last week reporting that Stephen Miles’s 2006 comedy novel All My Own Work is now being listed on Amazon at a shocking $17 ($6 over the normal price), this morning Thoughtcat has received the following from publisher Lulu:

“All My Own Work was listed on Amazon as part of Lulu’s Amazon marketplace pilot. We’ve been reading the forum posts and emails and have learned a great deal since we launched the pilot. The majority of our authors have responded positively and many are already seeing an increase in their book sales.

“Based on your feedback and after reading the policies of several marketplaces, we’ve decided to match your titles listing price on Lulu with the listing price on Amazon by removing the 30% markup.”

The email goes on to emphasise that this is a pilot and the Amazon price may go back up again at some point, but for the time being at least, if you prefer to buy the book through Amazon rather than Lulu, it will cost you $11 (about £8) + p&p either way. Yay!

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I spotted this the other day:

– and thought it was just crying out for this:

Stephen Miles's 2006 'memoir' All My Own Work, which is exclusive to Thoughtcat, is now available from Amazon at $16.90.

Until now it had only been available direct from publisher Lulu at a somewhat lower price – it's now $11 (about £8) + p&p from that site.

The Amazon listing was automatically managed by Lulu and has not been authorised by Thoughtcat. In its email to Thoughtcat this week, Lulu explains that 'Amazon charges a fee to list your book, and in order to cover that cost your book will be listed with a 30% markup; however your royalty will remain the same, and your book's price on Lulu will not change.'

Therefore although both Stephen and Thoughtcat are happy about the potentially greater visibility of the book on Amazon – which we'd never really looked into because until now we needed a proper ISBN to get a listing, which Lulu charged about £100 for – it makes no difference to us in terms of revenue if people buy it direct from the publisher.

All My Own Work tells the story of how British writer Miles won a £10,000 UK literary prize, the Leonard Sankey Award for New Talent in Fiction, and was then controversially stripped of the award. Thoughtcat has never been very clear whether the book is a novel with aspirations to being a memoir or the other way round but it is a very good read either way, described by Lost Army of Cambyses author Paul Sussman as 'clever and original … extremely witty'.

Further information including sample chapters, an author interview and reader feedback can be found at http://thoughtcat.wordpress.com/buy-stuff/allmyownwork/

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…and even if she did I doubt whether I'd follow her.

I admit I was tempted when I read this tweet a few minutes ago, linking to this article on, er, The Money Times. I was impressed – not only because she is (it has to be said) of advanced years, not just because she's Twittering from her hospital bed, but because she's bloody Dame Elizabeth Taylor, for heaven's sake! I've never exactly been a fan, and there is the small matter of the friendship with Michael Jackson. But she's an institution! She was in all those amazing movies in the fifties, before I was even born! She was in Antony and Cleopatra! She was married to Richard Burton! Twice! And here she is, in 2009, still with us, and tweeting. Incredible.

Except I can't convince myself it's actually her doing it. Not because it's difficult, not because she doesn't have the ability, but because there's just something too weird and unlikely about Liz Taylor typing a message on a keyboard or an iPhone. I mean, if you were Dame Elizabeth wouldn't you get someone to do it for you? I can believe the sentiments (about animals, charities, diamonds, fans and so on) are hers, but I still can't picture her actually bothering to put manicured finger to touch-screen. There must be a PR guy who comes in to see her a couple of times a day and asks her what she wants to tweet, or who's at the end of the phone any time she feels like 'communicating' with her fans. Or quite possibly both.

Okay, maybe I'm out of line. People are strange. You're just as likely to find a 30-year-old who doesn't even know what Twitter is (as I did recently) as you are to find an 80-year-old using it as naturally as people once wrote postcards. But I just can't get used to the idea.

Call me a purist, but I don't see the point of following a Twitterstream not written directly by the person themselves. I don't even mind when they're honestly updated by someone else, with tweets saying things like '[celebrity's name] is working on his new album and planning a tour', because they're just using the Twitter platform, as they already do all media channels, as a way to get information out there about what they're doing to people who want to listen. But even the slightest thought of getting someone to tweet on your behalf that you're 'eating brie on a toasted baguette right now' just makes me shudder.

Sting once said that cocaine was God's way of telling you you've got too much money. I reckon that having someone ghost tweets about what you're eating has overtaken that in the 21st century.

Anyway, the following update from Liz's Twitter was what decided it for me, regardless of who typed it: 'Presents make everybody happy. My friend Arnie Klein gave me a Matisse today! Happy.'

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Private detectives investigating the ­disappearance of Madeleine McCann are examining reports that a convicted British paedophile lived an hour's drive from the area where she vanished, reports the Guardian today.

A few paragraphs in however, the story turns out to be actually a report on a report, in this case from the Daily Mirror, which has published a photo of the man in question.

So, will the detectives be interviewing every other person with convictions for child abuse who lived within a 30-mile radius of Praia da Luz in May 2007?

I do hope so, otherwise it might seem a bit like a vendetta against one bloke by a nasty British red-top intent on fingering someone, anyone, for Madeleine's disappearance to sell more newspapers.

I am not defending anybody who commits crimes against children, but everyone deserves a fair trial, which this sort of reporting will compromise – not to mention run the risk of setting off a gaggle of bonkers Mirror-waving vigilantes.

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I am glad that Michael Martin is resigning, as he fought long and hard to prevent MPs' expenses details from being released to the public. But I still found it hard to stomach the sight of some of those very MPs in the Commons this week calling for his resignation. Where were those calls throughout all the years he was campaigning against the release of this information? Then again I sympathise, as it's very hard to call for anything when your nose is so far down in the trough.

MPs have found a scapegoat, as they always do. Last week's scapegoat was the fees office, of course, but they can't sack that in quite the same way.

What's even worse now is the sight of Gordon Brown at yesterday's Number 10 press conference saying that Parliament cannot be run like some 'gentlemen's club … where the members make up the rules, and operate them among themselves'. The sentiment may be welcome, but the tone was as if he is now getting on top of this crisis and drawing a line under it and punishing those responsible. This is, to use a technical term, bollocks. He hasn't done anything of the sort. Gordon, it has never been acceptable to run the Commons in this way and you should have come out and said it years ago – not wait til you were all caught with your pants down and your trotters in the till.

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You learn something new every day… there I was last night watching Have I Got a Bit More News for You and nearly falling asleep when the show ended and the announcer announced that Mark Lawson was now interviewing Ian Hislop on BBC4. This woke me up – I’ve long been a fan of Hislop in his role as editor of Private Eye and HIGNFY stalwart, but Lawson’s interviews are always worth watching (with the possible exception of the one with Phil Collins, which I think sent me to sleep). The next hour was great fun, Hislop chatting affably about his childhood, how he got started in comedy and satire, his run-ins with the legal system and his now some 20 years on HIGNFY. Best of all though they showed a clip from his first ever TV appearance in the early 80s, which I’d never seen before – no less an interview with Tom Waits, another of my all-time favourite people. The pairing in fact seemed so unlikely that I had to check I wasn’t mis-hearing when Hislop uttered Waits’s name – I thought surely he’ll correct himself in a moment and say it was some other Tom (not that I can think of any other Toms right now, but even so), but he didn’t. Here is that fateful encounter:

It’s not great quality but basically Waits is plugging his new album (not sure of the date, possibly Rain Dogs?) in his trademark mumble-slur, and Hislop tries to get him to speak up. ‘Plug it a bit louder,’ says Hislop. Waits looks round to check he heard him right, realises silently that he did, and growls ‘I’ll plug it in my own damn way!’ Hislop gets no help from the audience or his other guests (rightly so), and in the Lawson interview concedes he thought Waits might thump him…

All excellent stuff. In the meantime the Lawson – Hislop interview can still be seen on iPlayer.

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