ABOUT

'Mere Anarchy' is a little different from most books. For a start, you can't buy it in the shops. In fact you can't buy it at all. Basically we give away copies of the book as gesture of thanks to anyone who has given a donation to The First Base Agency. Confused? Course you are. Let's do this thing step by step.

THE BOOK

'Mere Anarchy' is Mark Frankland's fifteenth book. Over the last ten tears or so, over 100,000 copies of Mark's books have made their way into the hands of readers all over Britain. What kind of a writer is he? Not high brow and arty, that's for sure. There are a couple of extracts from the book on this page. Have a read and you can make your own mind up. Who is he like? Readers tend to compare him with Frederick Forsyth or Robert Harris or Gerald Seymour. His great goal in life is to be compared with John Le Carre, but he has a way to go to get into that kind of league. Most readers seem to have problems putting his books down once they pick them up. An old cliche sure, but quite true. Frankland's stories tend to emerge from the darker side of modern life. The shadows. Terrorism, organised crime, drugs, sink estates, the grey areas of life. You won't find Jack Bauer or Jason Bourne in a Frankland book. 'Mere Anarchy' is a little different from previous titles in that it is set in the future. 2016. It paints a picture of a Britain where the money has finally run out: not a pretty picture. A scary picture. A picture that could easily turn out to be a true picture. It takes the reader on a journey through a place that has started to be called Broken Britain.

THE FIRST BASE AGENCY

The First Base Agency is a small, independent charity based in Dumfries, South West Scotland. We run a wide variety of projects, all of which are seeing increasing demand as the recession deepens. We support families affected by a loved one’s drug and alcohol misuse, young women at risk of violence and veterans drinking or taking drugs to blot out memories of battle. Every year we give drug and alcohol awareness presentations to over 2500 school pupils and issue over a thousand emergency food parcels to those in need. If you like, our front door opens onto the Broken Britain we all hear such a lot about. It is hard to predict how bleak things are about to become in Broken Britain over the coming years. It is a little easier to predict that the demand on our services at First Base is about to go up and up and up. The Thatcher hurricane that ravaged large swathes of the country in the eighties left a thirty year legacy of addiction. Few places can match the kind of smack problems found in the old steel milling towns and coal mining villages. Since those days we have all become much more hard wired to look to pills, powders and potions to make us feel better when the going gets tough. Many feel that the next few years will make the mid eighties look like almost halcyon. If they are right, the the First Base Agency needs to cobble together every penny of cash that we can to keep the doors open.

RAISING CASH

Readers of Mark Frankland books have always had one big thing in common - they love to lend out copies to their friends once they have finished. This is nothing new of course. It has been going on since Gutenberg came up with the idea of the printing press all those years ago. Maybe Mark's books tend to get lent out more than most since they are so hard to get hold of in the shops.

Anyway.

We need to put a stop to this! So have a chew on this. If you read 'Mere Anarchy' and reckon it warrants passing on, please DON'T lend it! Instead urge a friend to go to

www.justgiving.com/first-base-agency

All they need to do is to give us a donation and we will immediately e mail them to get their 'snail mail' address. Once we have their details we will send them a signed copy of the book. Done, dusted and wrapped.

So. How much?

Anyone can donate anything they like. If somebody sticks 50p on the site we will send them a copy. We kind of hope donors will stick on £6.00 + £2.00 P&P as in £8.50. Hell, we kind of hope Bill Gates finds his way to our page and bungs on $10,000,000, but to be honest we are not holding our breath.

SO WHAT CAN YOU DO?

In a word; Loads.

First up, get yourself onto www.justgiving.com/first-base-agency and make a donation. Then we will e mail you for your details and send you out a copy. Read it. Rate it. If you hate it, call us every name under the sun. If you like it, then tell everyone you know. Tell them at work and in the pub.

Maybe you could e mail you mates with the link to www.justgiving.com/first-base-agency.

Maybe you could share the link with everyone on Facebook or Myspace or Bebo.

Anything.

You see, here's the bottom line as our beloved American cousins are so keen on saying. Running the First Base Agency lock, stock and barrel costs £80,000 a year. Let's say the the average punter donates £8.50 on the site. Once that happens our beloved governemnt throws in about £3 in the form of Gift Aid. Which of course rounds things up to £11.50.

So here are the maths. If we can some how manage to move 4000 copies of 'Mere Anarchy' through our Justgiving site we will cover more than half of our annual running costs. On the one hand, that looks like a pretty big ask. On the other hand, maybe it isn't. Mark has sold over 20,000 copies of his novel 'The Cull' which shows what is possible.

At First Base, we are not great believers in whinging on at the Governement. Gimme, gimme, gimme. There isn't much point anyway. Every man and his dog knows that the Government is all but broke. We prefer to look to Joe Public to help us to do what we do. Hopefully this new venture of ours will work. If it doesn't, it won't be for the lack of trying.

Hopefully you will give us a lift.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

WHY NOT BECOME A FIRST BASE AGENT?


OK. The picture is a bit of a stretch. The hell with you country needing you, the First Base Agency could do with you giving us a lift. Do we expect you to put on a heavy woollen uniform that itches like buggery? No. Do we expect you fix your bayonet and leap out of a trench to become target practice for a machine gunner from Cologne? Absolutely not. So let's face it, we are asking a whole lot less than good old Kitchiner asked all those years ago.

So what are we asking?

Well, if you have read 'Mere Anarchy' and you think what we do at The First Base Agency is a good idea, maybe you will sign on the dotted line to become a First Base Agent.

Thankfully this does not involve donning a disguise and sneaking into a mosque in Oldham to uncover an Al Queda sleeper cell. It is all rather more mundane I'm afraid.

Do you think you might be able to sell a few copies of the books to your friends? If you do, then how many? Maybe 5? Or 10? Hell, maybe even twenty.

Let's say you think you can sell five copies. If so, then drop me an e mail at mark@first-base.org with your name and address. We will send out five copies of the book. You sell them, hopefully for £6 each and then you put the proceeds onto our site at www.justgiving.com/first-base-agency This then spurs the Government into action and they donate 35% of whatever you have raised. When you deliver the copies to your friends maybe you might encourage them to be a First Base Agent themselves.

We would like to think this will give all our agents a better sense of achievement than the guys who heeded Kitchener's call back in 1915! What's more there is absolutely no chance of being mown down by a hail of bullets fired by a machine gun operator from Cologne.
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