A little follow-up to yesterday's post. As a reminder, blogger Liam Reads posted a list of the ten books that he would rush into a burning house to save, and Cirque Du Freak was one of the lucky ten. Explaining his choice, Liam noted the following:

"I was fortunate enough to meet Darren at a signing in Waterstones Newcastle back in 2016 where he happily signed a whole bunch of books for me. And - he'll probably kill me for saying this - he was absolutely lovely. I've never met an author so patient with his fans - there were people showing up with entire series of books and he signed them all without complaint. I can't imagine anyone less suited to writing about vampires and demons! It was lovely to see and it's those kinds of interactions with authors that you remember."

Awww! That put a big smile on my face. As anyone who's seen me on the road over the years will know, I always appreciate it when people turn up for a reading or a signing, and do all that I can to make it special for them when I come to sign their books -- I pose for photos, I try to have a little chat with each fan, and I almost always sign as many books as they've brought along or bought on the day. (Very occasionally, for logistical reasons, that hasn't been possible, but I almost always manage to make it work.) It means that fans sometimes have to wait a LONG time in line, but the vast majority don't mind -- like Liam, they've come for the interaction as opposed to just getting a signature, and I really think that means more to most of us than the signature itself.

(Some people DON'T share that view, and I have sometimes had to endure complaints from organisers or security personnel or parents of fans -- and even sometimes fans themselves who only want to get the book signed and haven't the least bit of interest in chatting with the guy who wrote it -- who just want me to sign one book per person, ASAP, and move the line along as swiftly as if humanly possible. I simply ignore them.)

I haven't been out on the road much in recent years, and that's unlikely to change in the near future -- it's looking increasingly probable that my next Darren Shan book is going to be self-published, and one of the big downsides to that is that it won't be in book shops and so I won't get to go on tour with it -- but any time that I DO get out and about, rest assured that I will always strive to offer the same level of service that I've offered Liam and the tens of thousands of other fans who have come to support me since the early noughties. It would just seem incredibly rude to me NOT to...

https://www.liamreads.co.uk/post/burningbuildingbooks-challenge