Connie Brooks at Battenkill Books said she received more than 120 pre-orders for Talking To Animals: What We Understand About them, What They Understand About Us over this past weekend as the result of a single blog post I published over the weekend.

The orders have come in from all over the country and Canada.

Connie showed me the swelling folders containing the advance orders, I was excited. Next Spring, I will be reading them and signing the books and personalizing them. We will also be giving people who pre-order the book tote-bags and picture postcards of Bedlam Farm and a limited number of Maria’s potholders.

She said it was a record for one or two days,  much larger than other pre-orders so early on, so far from the publication date – in this case May of 2017. “There is a lot of interest in this subject,” she said. I was glad to hear it. I am pretty much alone with my blog and Facebook in this campaign, publishers leave the promotion of books pretty much to authors now,  and I am going to give it my best.

I believe in this book and i believe it will find an audience among animal lovers who wish to understand their pets – and horses and donkeys and sheep and barn cats – in a new and wiser way. Animals are in peril in our world, climate change and human greed is destroying their natural habitats and the animal rights movement is too often trying the force them away from work with human beings.

We need to talk to animals and listen to them so we can better understand what they really need and how we can keep them among us, not drive them a way to isolated private preserves and the ranches of the rich where they will never work or be seen by the vast majority of people again. We need to find humane ways to work with them so people can re-connect with them, so they can heal and keep their wondrous partnership with people intact.

The book details the techniques Maria and I have used over the past 15 years – visualization, body language, emotion, food – to talk to animals, and also to actively listen to them rather than project our thoughts into their heads. I am glad there is already interest in this book, I will fight hard for it.

You can pre-order the book through Battenkill Books, which has set up a special page on their website.

Battenkill takes Paypal and credit cards, and I will personalize each book as requested. If you like talking to courteous and knowledgeable humans, as I do, there are several at Battenkill Books and they will help you and be happy to talk to you. 518 677-2515. Many people who call the shop for my books end up coming back again and again for other books. It is essential that bookstores like this survive and prosper, Connie is doing well.

This is precisely the kind of independent bookstore we want to survive and need to support. Amazon is doing fine. Thanks so much for your interest. We are just getting started.