I tried to title this post for twenty minutes and failed

Dear Friends,

What's this! Another newsletter, so fast on the heels of the last? Forgive me – it's time-sensitive and extraordinary.

The short version: This Is How You Lose the Time War is presently, at this moment of writing, half-price on Amazon.com, available for the princely sum of $8.79 in paperback.

It is also currently ranked #21 in Books. On Amazon. Like, in all books. All the books on Amazon.

Why is it #21 in Books on Amazon?

Because of this tweet, screenshotted below in two parts because Twitter is, forever, right up until the end, super weird.

As far as I can tell, someone going by the name Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood runs a fan account for a 90s anime called Trigun which was recently rebooted, and tweeted about loving Time War with imperative enthusiasm, and somehow over the course of 24 hours that tweet went viral with people chiming in to say how much, how passionately, how violently they love the book, and it blew up, and despite the fact that Twitter Does Not Sell Books enough people bought our book in a short enough period that whatever algorithmic alchemy determines Amazon's best-sellers took notice, and the upshot of it all is that corporate marketing people at Simon & Schuster now know the name Bigolas Dickolas.

Stu had first shown me the tweet – which turned up for him in his For You tab on Twitter with no connection to anyone he follows or knows – and I blinked and wondered who Bigolas Dickolas was. A celebrity? A popular TikTok account? What was going on? What could account for the pace, the reach of this virality? The account had, at the time, around twelve thousand followers, which in terms of Twitter isn't huge – celebrity there is usually reckoned in the hundreds of thousands at least.

To say this doesn't usually happen is to invent a new category for understatement. Time War came out in 2019. It is approaching four years of being out in the world. This is wildly unusual at this point in any book's life cycle, especially one as strange and baroque as ours. I cannot explain it, and am releasing the desire to try. This is lightning striking repeatedly into the same bottle, and all I can do is marvel at it and give thanks for it. Not just to Bigolas Dickolas – blessed be their name – but to every person who read this book and loved it enough to share their passion for it at any point in the last four years. Max and I are so grateful, so overwhelmed, and so delighted.

And if you're new here and want to know what all the fuss is about – well, now's a great time to buy it! And while the audiobook isn't discounted, it is a fantastic performance from Emily Woo Zeller (Blue) and Cynthia Farrell (Red) and, as our benevolent spirit so eloquently put it, "it's only like four hours."