ALDC has just published a new collection I’ve edited: Top Tips for Local Campaigners, packed with 160 tips.

Here is how my introduction starts:

I don’t want you to read this book.

That may seem an odd request for an editor to make at the start of a book. But if you just sit down, read it, think a quick thought afterwards about what you made of it and then leave it at that, the book will have been a failure.

This is not a book to sit and read like a novel or history.

It is a practical manual – to be picked up, used, put to one side, leafed through again, left alone for a bit, urgently hunted for at a moment of crisis, remembered, filed away and brought back into use.

Put at least some of the tips to practical use and the book will have been a success even if you never read all of the words. (The words are all worth reading by the way, just in case you were wondering.)

ALDC members have all been sent a copy for free. If you are not an ALDC member, or if you want to even out the literary balance at home and have one copy for each room, then you can buy further copies for £4 (£3.20 to ALDC members) from the ALDC shop.

Not sure? Try out this taster first.

Long-time readers of my blog posts may be amused to see that Nick Clegg’s foreword uses the phrase “community politics”. It’s one way to get the phrase mentioned!

* Mark Pack is Party President and is the editor of Liberal Democrat Newswire.