Glorious tidings! Indeed, these are tidings I should have had for you ninety-seven yonks and an eon ago, but the fact remains that TALES OF BRITAIN IS BACK IN PRINT – and in eBook form, to boot!

My folkloric magnum amplum opus joins Soupy Twists and three volumes (so far) of the HISTORIES OF BRITAIN series on my Plummie Books platform. And to celebrate the belated re-release, we here at Plummie Books (checks with the staff, yes, Fred nods) can offer you a BRAND NEW folktale in traditional British PDF form! THE BIRTH OF ALBION!

(As ever, here’s where I sincerely apologise for using the irredeemably evil Amazon platform KDP. If you run an equally usable self-publishing platform and you’re not an utterly amoral bald billionaire piece of feculence, please do DROP ME A LINE!)

Since Tales of Britain first swooped into shops almost precisely seven years ago, so much has changed, on personal, national and international levels. We will, as ever, gloss over the experience of being initially published by Unbound Publishing – their just desserts are long digested by now – but I can at least offer the wee olive branch to the bosses of that company, that they had the decency to return full rights to both my books to me long before the poo hit the cooling utensil. And all this time, I have had the rights to bring this book back into public circulation, but somehow not got round to it until now.

Well, I know why, in fact – it’s because since we locked down the original manuscript, I still haven’t stopped collecting British folktales, rewriting them in Brother Bernard’s unique daft/magical style, and adding them to the pile. We now have 100 folktales, to the original book edition’s 77. Add to this the fact that Unbound simply couldn’t be bummed to honour any of our original plans for the book – which was always intended to be like a road atlas-cum-tourist brochure, with maps and illustrations for every story, it was going to be AMAZING – and you can tell that a brand new DELUXE edition is the intended be-all and end-all for Tales of Britain.

But that doesn’t stop me from being eternally proud of this original edition of 77 folktales, and anyone with even the slightest interest in a good ancient story should have a copy on their shelves – if not in their bog.

The eternal nightmare remains that the dreamt-of Deluxe Edition is going to require a truly colossal amount of hard work. I do have a fantastic artist slowly compiling likely illustrations – the immensely talented Perry Harris has agreed to take part for far too little money (albeit more than I currently have available) when the time comes. Ideally I’d like to arrange a proper permanent deal with Perry, but first of all we have to make the Deluxe Edition exist, and there’s zero capital at the moment. Perry already supplied a few wonderful sample pics for the original launch, but hopefully there’ll be a lot more when the Deluxe Edition does finally become available, whenever that will be.

But, never having come across a single publishing company with the first idea of what a good book is, at least when it comes to British folklore, I am now forced to remain in the ‘If you want a job done well…’ stage of my career, so it looks like every single page will have to be designed by me alone, if I want the book to come out as intended. This will also involve the creation of many new maps and icons, and of course the text itself has to be honed and perfected, with every fresh addition to the roster tested with live audiences. It’ll all be me.

Believe me, I’d love to hear from a publisher who can see the value in helping to shoulder the burden, but my past experiences have not been anything less than horrific – as with Soupy Twists, anything besides complete autonomy was only going to result in a lacklustre release, published by people who just don’t GET IT.

So I seriously have my work cut out for me in the coming years.

And this isn’t even mentioning the audio versions of all 100+ tales, with which Rakkit Productions and I plan to flood the market! I have stockpiled 80 recorded stories so far, but their release will have to wait. Audible obviously never understood our original grand scheme, to release affordable volumes of this vast collection every now and then, and the sods never even uploaded Volume 3, but you can still sample the earliest audio releases HERE and HERE.

Neverthefewer and any which way, in the meantime, it seemed ludicrous that this brave first edition of Tales of Britain should languish out of print, when I have the rights, the files, and a KDP imprint. Every time I travel the country performing these stories, it’s a bit more futile than it sometimes already seems, to be out spreading the word about our glorious multimedia British folklore treasury, if the book isn’t actually commercially available. So I’ve put that right at last, and with only a few updating tweaks, Tales of Britain: The Original Edition is now back! And I’ve taken a huge royalty cut to plump for what they call ‘Expanded Distribution’, which mwans it can be sold in shops – so you can now ask for your local indie bookshop to buy in copies, or buy them directly from the evil website yourself. Please do mention it to your local bookseller anyway, who knows how many future browsers might be glad you did?

To celebrate the unexpected return, for the first time in years, I’ve turned one of the stories you won’t find in the book into a PDF to be enjoyed as a standalone Tale of Britain. And as this is a fresh start, what could be more perfect than to share with you the all-new beginning of the Deluxe Edition, predating the current opener, the story of Prince Brutus and the so-called ‘founding’ of Britain. The legend of Princes Albina is the direct prequel to that yarn – and of course, women got to this country first, with no need for rowdy Trojan Princes to suck up all the glory of ‘inventing’ Britain. You can read my take on the Albina legend HERE.

Please buy a copy, come to a show, download an audiobook – the more pennies it earns me to live on, and to support my family on, the more security I will have to sit down and create the Deluxe Edition! And believe me, I’m aiming to make it the one and only British folktale anthology every single British household deserves.

Merry new year!