In Praise Of Mad Norwegian ( @MadNorwegian )

Just a quick note here to mention, once again, the absolutely exemplary customer service provided by Lars Pearson of Mad Norwegian.

I’ve already pointed this out before, when because it took him a whole week or so to get a book I ordered shipped, he threw in a free copy of another book as well (I hadn’t even noticed the slight delay), but this time he’s gone one better.

I had a fit of generosity while Plok was over here — he liked The Book Of The War so much, and I was so flush with cash that week, that I thought “I’ll buy him the whole set of Faction Paradox books as a Christmas present”, so I ordered them while he was here.

Unfortunately, there was a mix-up and the books (which I already had) were sent to my house (the billing address) rather than to Plok’s. Which is a bit of a problem on all sides, really — they were shipped from the US, and Plok is in Canada. As we only paid Canadian shipping, that meant Pearson would have lost out, and it also meant we had to try to find some way to get the books to Plok.

I emailed Pearson about this to let him know, just in case there was something in his processes he needed to change, and started making arrangements to post the books to Plok from the US when we’re over there.

Pearson didn’t reply to my email — but he sent replacement copies of all seven books to Plok, who got them today.

Mad Norwegian is an extremely small press, and must have lost a fair bit of money on the deal, and I think would have been entirely within their rights just to say “Sorry, can you post those copies on?”

Instead, they did the right thing, again. So I’m going to ask any of you who are looking to buy a Christmas present for the TV-SF fan in your life, to visit MadNorwegian.com and pick up one of their TV episode guides, or the Faction Paradox novels. Their books are generally of exceptional quality — of the ten or eleven books they’ve published that I’ve read, the only one I didn’t like was Chicks Dig Time Lords, and that one won a Hugo so plenty of other people thought it was very good.

Customer service that good deserves rewarding.

(ETA for some reason when I said “ten or eleven” there I was counting About Time as one book rather than six, because I’m a fool. So “fifteen or sixteen” is closer)