This article was in The Bookseller yesterday:
Transworld has brought forward the release date of The Joy of Tax by Richard Murphy — the creator of ‘Corbynomics' — and is exploring plans to launch the book at the Labour Party Conference next month.
Murphy is a chartered accountant and is the author of Labour leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn's economic policy.
The Joy of Tax, bought by Transworld publishing director Doug Young in September last year, was originally due to be released on 19th November, but Transworld has brought forward the release to 1st October.
The publisher's publicity director Patsy Irwin told The Bookseller that the company was exploring plans to launch the book at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton at the end of September, where the new leader of the Labour Party will be announced.
Irwin said: “Of course, some details may change if Jeremy Corbyn doesn't win the leadership, but either way, there's an awful lot of interest out there in the idea of Corbynomics and Corbyn himself is publicly acknowledging Richard Murphy as instrumental in the creation of the policy. So we are putting everything in place to give the book its best chance out there.”
Murphy has already made a series of radio and newspaper appearances talking about Corbynomics with Transworld, which has secured a quote from journalist Owen Jones for the cover, planning more publicity in the run up to release. Independent bookshop City Books will be selling copies of The Joy of Tax at the conference.
In The Joy of Tax Murphy explores the idea that by embracing tax a fairer society can be created.
Young told The Bookseller that he bought the book after the success of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press, translated by Arthur Goldhammer), which led him to believe that people are willing to read about economics.
“This is an important issue, and it's a different way of talking about tax,” said Murphy.
The article is in a sense not quite right: I authored ideas that were adopted by Jeremy Corbyn is the correct way of putting things, but that's a minor quibble.
The bigger concern is I still have four chapters to copy edit. I have a feeling I know what I will be doing this bank holiday weekend.
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Well I can’t say I blame your publishers for wanting to exploit your ever widening forum of fame and recognition, Richard. I’d do the same. But I don’t envy you a weekend spent copy editing (as someone whose done plenty of that over the past ten years).
Incidentally, as a long time reader of this blog – and a fairly rare commentator now – I note the many, many new names/aliases commenting over the months since your became the face of Corbynomics. I’m assuming the traffic on the blog has increased accordingly? I haven’t seen you publish any figures recently, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who’d be interested to see them (if you have a few spare minutes!).
Ivan
This will be the second highest month in the history of the blog – and totally aberrational for August. Heading for 200,000 reads this month and maybe (at average rate) 1.8 million reads this year
Richard
Superb! (or “Result!” as younger people would say) 🙂
Agreed Ivan, Richard’s blog seems to be on fire with so many new contributors and readers. My son just attended your event tonight with Bill Mitchell and Ann Pettifor. As he said to me now, by phone, ‘my gain your loss’ – I was disappointed not to be able to travel for tonight, things cropped up I could not leave. The recent two weeks have been a great set of discussions on TRU, exhilarating stuff on GQE, PQE, MMT etc. I have been arranging sessions “To train collectively in talking persuasively” in our region, this seemed to resonate with my son’s report back from tonight’s meeting. This cross party movement you are a part of connects to a narrow [maybe not so narrow in light of the above huge readership] spectrum of readers/thinkers, perhaps entrenched in the middle-class, activists and intellectuals – time to communicate these ideas widely and jump over the big four media empires, Corbyn has shown the thirst amongst the people, so has Lucas and Bennett. This is the challenge and you’re showing a way to be successful at spreading the dialogue and narrative – thanks; plenty of energy, eagerness to communicate, challenge robustly, intellectual leadership and ability to deliver!
Finally, when you have the energy to swing by south Wales send me an email I’ll make arrangements. Hwyl.
Great to meet your son tonight
I hope he passed on my thanks for your comments
I will be in Wales Someimes, no doubt
I suspect I will be travelling a lot more in the next year
Best
Richard
Yay!
Chuffed – vindication for all you put on to this
Well done Richard – keep up the good work!