Is it possible to:
Reach your genetic potential in 6 months?
Sleep 2 hours per day and perform better than on 8 hours?
Lose more fat than a marathoner by bingeing?

Indeed, and much more. And it is all revealed in The Four Hour Body.

Tim Ferriss Four Hour Body is already proving a big hit in the US and we are proud to say we will be publishing it here in the UK on 4th Feb – you can pre-order now on amazon to get your hands on a copy as soon as it is out.

If you are elsewhere in the world, our international editions will be released on the below dates with Europe, Asia and the rest of the world (excluding Canada) in January:

• Australia – 3rd Jan 2011
• New Zealand – 7th Jan 2011
• South Africa – 1st Feb 2011
• India – 10th Jan 2011

Meanwhile you can see the trailer for the book below.

Last year, my New Year’s resolution was simple and achievable: go to Hong Kong to visit my friend. In April 2009, I headed out to the “Pearl of the Orient”, explored the city, marvelled at the night skyline and stocked up on cheap specs in Guangzhou.

This year, it’s a bit more complicated. This is the last year of my 20s and I have decided that it is pretty poor showing that I still cannot drive. I did take my test twice when I was 17, but failed both times. The first time was in the Bronx, in a class of 20. Two people passed. One was a friend who wore a very short skirt to the test that day. The following summer she almost killed me twice in her car. But I was not bitter, I swear. The second time I drove to the test site out in the sticks. I got up to 65 miles an hour for the first time ever, having learnt in Manhattan where the speed limit is 35 (and traffic usually means you don’t go faster than 10). When I got out to the depths of Brooklyn, I forgot to drive slowly, missed a yield sign and failed in under 5 minutes.

I kind of gave up after that.

But now I am older, wiser, more mature. Well, older, anyway. I’ve applied for my provisional license and begged, borrowed and stolen money for the classes. I have ordered my theory test stuff and my ‘Hazard Perception DVD’ (which, funnily enough, I used to sell and provide tech support for when I worked at a call centre in Norwich, yet have never actually seen in real life). I am determined that 2010 will be the year that I learn how to drive.

What are your New Year resolutions? We are running the same competition as last year. If you let us know your resolution, our favourite (UK based person who doesn’t work for us and posts before the 15th) will get three books to help them on their way. We’ll also be recommending books for everyone who comments, so make sure you let us know what your plans are!

Katie - Digital Marketing Executive

Day 36

We gather in the canteen to celebrate the publication of the fabulous The Tent, the Bucket and Me – with not only author Emma, but also her utterly awesome mum and dad! It’s like a family picnic where we’ve all had to retreat inside (which is, after all, what happens at every family picnic I’ve ever been to). We have erected a tent (last seen in action at Latitude), and BQL has made Welsh Cakes. None of us has any idea what they’re supposed to be like – they seem to be a cross between a scone and a garibaldi.

Now, it would be a dereliction of my duty not to point you to Emma Kennedy’s very brilliant blog, which we’re all hooked on, as only she should be allowed to tell you the reaction of The Family Kennedy to the Welsh Cakes, which were made to Emma’s Aunt Peggy’s secret recipe. She told us afterwards that literally no-one in her family dares to make them, so Lou had done A Very Brave Thing Indeed.

Off to the Charlotte Street Hotel afterwards to see my friend Dominic’s new BBC drama Freefall. It’s got all sorts of starry types in it, including Aiden Gillen from Queer as Folk, Dominic Cooper from Mama Mia, Rosamund Pike from one of the Bond films and even Sarah Harding from Girls Aloud! Crikey.

It’s a drama about the recession (yeah, I know). It starts off in the heady days of late 2007, when I was buying overpriced flats in the hopes of turning a fat profit, Property Ladder-style, 2 years later. Aiden Gillen plays a horrible banker (boo!); Alfie Allen (brother of the more famous Lily) works with Dominic Cooper, who is a somewhat-under-scrupled man selling discount mortgages to people with ropey credit ratings (double boo!) He sells the dream of a better life, with a nice house and a flash car, to an old mate of his who’s currently living quite happily in a council flat with his wife and 2 kids. Can you guess where all this is going? Yes, yes you can. Very much so.

By the end of it, I wanted never to buy anything ever again, and to go back to renting, now that my flat is obviously a total albatross, even though my tracker mortgage has gradually reduced in price so much that the bank is practically paying me to live there. It’s all very Affluenza, and makes you wonder how the bankers got away with it for so long, making millions out of shuffling debt packages around different investors (although, is that what they were doing? I’m still none the wiser after all this time – there was a lot of talk about ‘warehouses’ in the film, and I couldn’t work out if they were literal or metaphorical, which didn’t help).

As Dom’s films are rarely in possession of a happy ending, it’s unsurprising when one of the characters tops themselves, but I’ll leave you to find out exactly which one it is. Ha! Good times.

Drinks saved: one and a half. Even more tempted to drown sorrows afterwards in wine as it was free, but resisted.

(more…)

Day 29

Not much going on today – I do manage to drag myself to the gym after work, though, followed up by the reward of a new series of The Apprentice. God, I love that show. The ‘business’ acumen demonstrated by the contestants (this evening’s classic of Mona enquiring ‘what’s that?’ when presented with a duster suggested that perhaps the team she was leading might not be the winners of the cleaning task). Margaret and Nick’s mad eye-rolling and brilliant asides. The dizzy heights of ludicrousness that the wannabes manage to scale when saying how brilliant they are at ‘business’ (one of the girls memorably describes herself as ‘a rough, tough, cream puff from New York’ – I think she might be better off on America’s Next Top Model). It’s also the best show for texting your mates as you’re all watching it, giving those of us who live on our own that community feel. Shouting at the telly doesn’t get any more fun than when you’re watching The Apprentice and wondering who on earth would want to work for Sir Alan anyway, and why, when he’s advertising how brilliant actual apprentices are on one channel, he seems hell-bent on finding the stupidest person in Britain to employ (‘for a six-figure salary’, no less) on another.

Drinks saved: none – you’ve gotta be sober to pick up all the total corkers on The Apprentice. (more…)

Day 22

Jasmine Birtles, the Money Magpie, comes in to give us a talk on ‘How to be Rich Without Really Trying’ at lunchtime. That’s my kind of thing – none of this Dragons’ Den, flogging half your company to people who’re already super-rich nonsense. Baking Queen Louise and I hatch a plot afterwards – watch this space!

Go out for a Thai meal with a friend after work, which finishes quite early, so back home in time to watch a bit of telly.

Drinks saved: 1 glass of wine (more…)

Day 15

Emma Kennedy, author of the pant-wettingly hysterical The Tent, The Bucket and Me, which we have all been obsessed with for months, comes in for a Sales/Marketing/PR update. Our entire department has a bit of a girl-crush on Emma; we’re stalking her through her utterly brilliant blog, she’s now on Twitter and hopefully is expecting a visit from Aslan because of her pre-orders on Amazon. We beg her to bring both her parents (the joint heroes of the book) and her beagle, Poppy, in on publication day, when we’re going to have a celebratory tea in our canteen, complete with her Aunt Peggy’s legendary Welsh Cakes, which Baking Queen Louise is going to make. We’re all a bit doolally with excitement afterwards.

Going to the other extreme, in the evening I go to see Watchmen at the Ritzy in Brixton. It turns out to be one of the most cataclysmically boring films I’ve ever seen (it manages the unlikely feat of being literally twice as boring as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – a film during which, by the end, I felt like I really had lived the titular hero’s entire life along with him).

Having no knowledge of the source material (why would I, I’m a girl) and having deliberately not read any reviews (sometimes I just like to judge things on my own, and not be dictated to - radical), the whole thing was utterly incomprehensible and was the longest two and a half hours of my life. There’s a bit near the end where one of the characters says, ‘Nothing ever ends’ and I had a crazed moment of thinking that I really was going to be stuck watching this thing till the arrival of the Apocalypse. When it finally did end, me and the girl sitting next to me basically both shrieked, ‘OH THANK GOD FOR THAT’ and then bonded over how utterly awful it’d been.

Drinks saved: a glass of wine over dinner beforehand. Sorely tempted to leave the film halfway through, get an enormous bottle of wine from the bar and drink myself into oblivion through the rest of it, mind you. (more…)

Day 8

An awful day – we find out that Random House is having to make redundancies (this comes after we’ve heard from several friends at HarperCollins that they’re either being made redundant or in a pool for their jobs). To be fair, with everything that’s going on in the world at the moment, it’s not entirely unexpected, but I for one had been playing ostrich and sticking my head firmly in the sand, whilst also putting my fingers in my ears and shouting, ‘La, la, la, I can’t hear you’ every time Robert Peston appears on the news at ten.

I knew one of my colleagues had a meeting with our MD scheduled this morning, and we’d been texting each other last night, worrying about it, but we hadn’t heard yesterday that anyone else had been called in. I come out of our weekly jackets meeting and my colleague takes us and the rest of the team into our boss’s office and tells us about the redundancies – including his. We’re all shell-shocked, all the more so because he tells us with such calm dignity and is being so positive on behalf of the rest of the team.

We spend the rest of the day in various meetings talking about what’s happening and finding out about other members of staff who’re affected, whilst feeling kind of numb and helpless. A few of us go to the pub after work to try to work out how we feel and offload a bit. Tempting as it is to down the better part of a bottle of wine in order to take the edge off, I stick to the lime and sodas; God knows, I’m feeling weepy enough without adding booze – a depressant – into the equation.

Drinks saved: at least 2 large glasses of red

(more…)

The winner of the Ebury new year’s resolution competition has been selected and it was a pretty tough choice! There were quite a lot of “I want to quit smoking”s and “I need to lose weight”s, but there were some very funny ones in there too. For example, we loved this resolution from Louise: “Be early/Be on time/Try not to be late/Try not to be late every day…”  A few of us are struggling with this one as well, so we sympathise.

And we also thought Sue’s green suggestion was fantastic: “To do my bit for the planet. I will make all my friends on facebook a ‘green’ carrier bag from recycled or leftover fabric - that’s a lot of bags!” It wasn’t the winner, but this is still a great idea. Let us know if you go ahead with it (and we want a bag too!)

The most “on-brand” resolution came from Darren whose resolution is: “like the Jim Carrey film, I want to say “yes” more.” Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows much we are always singing Danny Wallace/Yes Man praises!

But in the end, we decided to go for Jo Jones’ resolution:

“If someone hasn’t got a smile - I’ll share one of mine!
To be positive and savour a daily thought of what I have to be thankful for. (If you think you’ll have a bad day it’s enevitable you will)
To enjoy being a moneysaving person to see me through the credit crunch as painfree as possible. (Might have to ask that Martin Lewis to marry me)”

It’s upbeat, it’s timely and (best of all), we have 4 perfect books for her, instead of just 3.

To keep her positive spirit, we’ll be sending her Happiness: The Thinking Person’s Guide when it comes out in May. This is an incredible read which “will teach you how to rewire your brain to feel more joy”. Which can’t be a bad thing.

Being a money saver already, Jo probably already has all of Martin Lewis’ books, so to help her save even more money, we’ll be sending her Jasmine Birtles new money-saving and -making bible, The Money Magpie. Jasmine’s website Money Magpie has been growing quickly since it launched a few years ago, and her first book is full of brilliant practical advice on ways to save money.

Sadly, Martin Lewis is already taken, but we’re sending you two great dating books to meet the man of your dreams. Better Love Next Time, to help you overcome any issues from past relationships; and The Four Man Plan, a very different (and fun!) look at dating.

Congratulations Jo, and we hope you enjoy the books!

Katie - Digital Marketing Exec

New Year’s is a time for hope. People gather together in the middle of winter, perhaps by a roaring fire, and they “make merry”, glad to have what they need to make it through to the Spring – shelter, food, warmth, loved ones, and a hot rum toddy or two. Time slows down in the winter, and there’s a chance to ponder one’s life from the safety of a snug cocoon. It’s a good time to imagine a new you, and take stock of the old one. And that applies especially to relationships.

Whether you’re currently in a relationship or just dreaming of one, a good New Year’s resolution might be to finally deal with your baggage, so you can really make a fresh start. Many of us are hampered by the past, and that tends to make history repeat itself. But if you shake off the false lessons of the past and learn its true ones, you can propel yourself into a place where new things are possible. (I’ve explored this process in detail in a new book, Better Love Next Time.) If you’re already in a relationship, and you basically believe you and your partner are real allies, it may be time to be thankful for that and vow to make the most of it, by learning how to avoid the mistakes that happened before. A time for good will towards the main person in your life. These are hard days for many of us and they make us appreciate what we have.

If, on the other hand, you want to start a new relationship, it’s a good moment to really get ready for that step, by making peace with past relationships that may still be in your way. Peace and good will – I guess the season has gotten to me after all…

J. M. Kearns - author of Better Love Next Time

Most resolutions are based upon starting or stopping something. Now both of those things become pretty big committments in our mind, which inevitably makes them harder to see through.

All great achievements are the result of many small achievements - so why not make a promise to just do something a little bit more or less. Once we start to get use to making small promises we keep - I’m talking one cigarette less or taking the stairs one more time that week - we get a chance to celebrate something. Once we start celebrating what’s good about us, we start to feel good, once we feel good, we are more likely to keep doing things right!

Keep focussing on what you’re doing right - now matter how small and how much you are doing wrong! Allow yourself to feel good, and it will be reflected in your actions.

Jamil Qureshi - Author of The Mind Coach

Visit Jamil’s website