It's a very special time of the year!

Bookshops are off-limits for me at the moment. I was happy enough to visit them in the past and ask where they were hiding their books by gender critical authors, but I’m less comfortable doing it on my own behalf. I wouldn’t like to run into what Posie Parker endured when a Waterstones employee turned shopping for her son’s birthday card into an upsetting confrontation. Some of the nastier interviews I’ve had to do recently were bad enough without also engaging in countless one-on-one arguments with bookshop staff complaining about my legendary ‘conduct’, when my conduct amounts to holding up a mirror to the terroristic, misogynistic and homophobic nature of trans rights activism.

And yet, I have to do something, because some bookshops are hiding my book, and I need to make a living. WH Smiths won’t stock it and are ignoring emails asking why. Many shops are stocking it, but others only reluctantly produce it upon request, and certainly aren’t displaying it as they would any other Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller.

So I’m turning to you, gentle reader. Please do spread word of the book any way you can, and more importantly, let people know that it’s not all about gender ideology! Although my account of my exile from polite society is the heart of this story (and will, I hope, peak anyone who reads it) I had a whole life of creating comedy before it. At least half of Tough Crowd is about how we wrote and made Father Ted, IT Crowd Black Books and other shows.

Of course, readers of this Substack have already been hugely supportive, and I’m loathe to ask you to do more, but if you could go into your local bookshop and ask for it, I’d be grateful. Don’t do it if you don’t actually want to buy a copy (perhaps as a Christmas gift for your woke nephew?…just imagine his face!) and please always be polite.

We’re trying to ensure that shops are not hiding stock and it seems that while many are not, the rate of sale is far lower than it could be. Physical sales from bookshops account for less than 5% of our sales to date, which is odd, to say the least. There is plenty of stock in the warehouse so anyone saying the book is hard to get is not being truthful. Asking local libraries to get the book in can make a real difference and is free to do. So far, very few libraries have it on their shelves.

If all else fails, and you do need a copy for yourself or a loved one, you can get the book from Amazon, The Express shop or direct from Lightning Eye.

Thank you, and my apologies if you see me hustling more like this over the coming weeks. Baby needs shoes!