'Bigolas Dickolas' Becomes Biggest Name In Publishing After 'Trigun' Fan Account On Twitter Singlehandedly Helps Novel Become A Best Seller

Amal Et-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's 2019 novella This Is How You Lose The Time War had a respectable run in the years since its initial release. It was well-received by critics and was nominated for several literary awards in the 2019-2020 season. According to Et-Mohtar, it was doing "OK" on Amazon's "Queer Romantic Time-Travel Fiction" chart, which she and Gladstone were thrilled by. Then along came Bigolas Dickolas.

Early Sunday morning, Twitter user @maskofbun, who dedicates most of their posts to the 90s anime Trigun ("Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood" is a play on the name Nicholas Wolfwood, one of the series' characters), aggressively recommended This Is How You Lose The Time War to their followers. While passionate recommendations are often standard practice in standom culture, Mr. Dickolas's tweet caught algorithmic fire. 124,000 likes later, the book had gone viral.

At the time of writing, This Is How You Lose the Time War is number 3 on the Amazon best seller chart for all books, beating out several Mom-help books, a Taylor Swift biography, and Oh, the Places You'll Go! by Dr. Seuss.

This Is How You Lose The Time War follows dual protagonists Red and Blue as they travel back and forth in time to alter the fates of their respective warring empires. The pair leave messages for each other through time and eventually fall in love, but their relationship is complicated by their nations being at war.

According to El-Mohtar's read of her book's sudden success, Bigolas Dickolas's tweet inspired scores of people to chime in "to say how much, how passionately, how violently they love the book, and it blew up."

"[T]he upshot of it all is that corporate marketing people at Simon & Schuster now know the name Bigolas Dickolas," she wrote. She's not wrong.

El-Mohtar's newsletter rightfully notes the surreality of her book's sudden viral fame. The book is four years old, an age when all but the most popular new books are essentially put out to pasture. Furthermore, Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood had, by El-Mohtar's account, about 12,000 followers at the time of their aggressive recommendation (they now have roughly 26,000). A recommendation from a relatively humble anime stan account isn't exactly an "Oprah's Book Club" sticker.

"To say this doesn't usually happen is to invent a new category for understatement," she wrote.

And yet, the story has become a wholesome media sensation. Slate, Kotaku, Gizmodo and several other publications have written about the phenomenon, adding to the word-of-mouth momentum that is catapulting Time War up best seller lists.

For their part, Bigolas Dickolas seems to be enjoying the effect they've had on the literary community, albeit they also seem a bit bewildered. El-Mohtar has apparently been wanting to pay homage to Bigolas Dickolas right back, including a meme in her newsletter that photoshopped Dickolas's recommendation onto her book's cover.