My clever plan to promote the French translation of my book Old Man Sailing turned out to be not so clever after all.

Arriving in Les Sables d’Olonne, the singlehanded sailing capital of the world, I envisaged becoming the epicentre of some sort of media storm.

It turns out there is far more sailing news in France than there are media outlets to cover it. In the end, all I got for the 700-mile round trip was this piece in the local paper – mildly encouraging – but hardly the glare of publicity.

Consequently, just three people have bought the Audible edition, but nobody at all has ordered the paperback or downloaded it to their Kindle.

So: Plan B.

Plan B is to offer the book as a free download and ask all 10,000 people who bought the English edition to now download the French. This will kick it so far up the bestseller lists that the Amazon algorithm will pick it up and start flashing it onto the screens of potential new readers.

Of course, if you have already read the English edition (and you liked it), there would be nothing to stop you from awarding five stars to the French – don’t worry, I wouldn’t expect you to read it.

I don’t think there is anything immoral in this – after all, the translation is a triumph (so I’m told).

Of course, most readers will never see this plea, so it is all the more important that those who do see it will actually go ahead and download the book (important to me, that is). So, please would you do that now, before you forget? Just search for “ Le vieil homme hisse la voile: Certains rêves prennent une vie ” (copy and paste it to get the accent) on your Amazon marketplace and click the Kindle edition. You should see an option to “Buy for £0.00” (not the Kindle Unlimited if you have subscribed to that).

If you never read it and would like to read it in French (or you would just like to help), this is your chance.

As a special thank you, I have been labouring away, recording the entire oldmansailing blog as a series of podcasts. I have managed four so far and am still fighting the technology. Since the blog has been going since 2018 and each podcast runs to 40 minutes, this may prove to be a life’s work.