Regrettably we have had to withdraw for a while most of our site specialising in books by and about Sir Winston Churchill: the-churchill-file.co.uk

The purpose of this site was to provide a series of short articles about many aspects of Churchill’s life and to list books both by him and about him.

The site was in the process of development. We had decided to release it slowly and allow it to grow gradually, rather than wait until it was large before making anything available. In line with this approach we had not yet promoted it heavily; traffic through it was very light, and although people had used it as a route into our main site no-one had bought books from the site itself. At the present stage we were not worried by this, but it turns out that we should have been!

Most of the links to books for sale were not to our own stock but to the listings of thousands of booksellers around the world on the AbeBooks service. Now AbeBooks is a very good company with which we have a good relationship in other areas of our business. On this site, however, we were not selling our own books via their excellent listing service; we were using their affiliate programme which unfortunately they do not manage themselves but use a company called Commission Junction.

Commission Junction decided that as we had not sold anything through their system they would consider our account to be dormant and close it down. Now I suppose it is understandable that they would not want a long list of businesses generating no income for them. Sadly, however, they decided to cancel our account without telling us that they were about to do so or, indeed, informing us that they had done it.

We are, we believe, righteously angry! It is true that they were acting in accordance with the fine print of their contract but the arrogant, high-handed, unilateral manner in which they did so was, in our view, unconscionable. There is little or nothing we can do about it apart from saying that we shall not be seeking to reinstate that arrangement and could never again trust a company that behaves in such a manner toward its customers.

When the site is relaunched it will have links to Churchill books on the Biblio.com listing service. Meanwhile, just the front page of the-churchill-file is still in place with links to our own secondhand shelf stock, and to new Churchill books on our main BrunleaBooks site. It also has a link to a wide variety of high-grade posters, art prints and photographs of Churchill at many stages of his life.

Yours bookishly,

- David Murray -