Touch: New Edition

Avon will be releasing Touch in a new ebook edition with a sparkling new cover (well, maybe not sparkling... more, er, creepy and disturbing) on the 24th January. For those who have already bought the book, the new edition has only a few minor changes to tighten things up and correct a number of copy errors. For those that haven't bought the book you can pre-order now and the ebook will be automatically delivered to your Kindle on the release date. And of course if you want to pre-order the paperback (out 11th April) you can do so here. The cover for the paperback isn't finalised yet, but it will have a similar style but altered colourways (that, apparently, is graphic speak for "it will be a different colour").

Good News re Book No. Two

When I made my little announcement of a deal with HarperCollins/Avon a few weeks ago I had to bring the disappointing news that the second book would not be published until 2014. Well, the good news is that the publication date has been brought forward. The paperback will be published on September 12th 2013 with the ebook out sometime in July (exact date to come). It's still a way off but a lot better than 2014!

The true detectives amongst you will have noticed that I haven't been referring to the book's title. That's because there's a little, ah hum - shall we say debate? - about the best one going on. When I've decided what it's to be I'll let you know.

One consequence of the new publication date is a revised deadline for when I need to deliver the second book. All of which means I'm going to be editing over Christmas! Oh, well, it will beat watching cr*p TV!

Paperback publication date

It's a long way off, but the paperback version of Touch is going to be published in the UK by Avon on 11th April 2013. I know a lot of people have been waiting for this (including me) so at least there is a date in the diary now. Pre-orders can be made at Amazon or at your favourite bookshop (ISBN: 0007512090). Not quite in time for Easter but at least that means you won't get chocolate egg on the pages ;-)

News on the cover, etc. as soon as I get it...

Big News For Charlotte and Co.

I am really pleased to announce that Touch and the next two Charlotte Savage books are going to be published by Harper Collins imprint Avon. Story from the Bookseller, here.

 It was a tough decision as to whether to jump from my own little self-publishing boat on to the deck of a giant ship like Harper Collins, but in the end the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Avon have had a record of success with crime and thriller authors such as Scott Mariani, Jacqui Rose and Neil White (the latter now with Sphere) and I hope they will be able to improve and guide the CS series through the next few books by lending editorial help and marketing power.

Although Touch has sold phenomenally well on Amazon, getting sales beyond the Kindle is very difficult for self-pubbers. Many people have contacted me about paperback versions of Touch, but even with the advances in POD technology the finished product is just too expensive. In addition trying to get paper copies into bookshops is like banging ones head against a brick wall: both painful and fruitless.

So what are the disadvantages? Speed, for one. Touch will be republished in January as an ebook and the paperback will come out in April. Chains, which I know many people have been waiting for, will not be out until January 2014. Yes, that does seem an awful long way off and there will be many of you disappointed, even angry. Unfortunately publishing, like any other business, has schedules to keep to (something akin to managing a railway - you can't just put an extra train onto an already busy track) . This is something that other self-publishers have had to contend with too, so I am not alone in this experience.

As a crumb of comfort (only a crumb, I am afraid) I can tell you that there will hopefully be another Mark Sennen ebook out on Kindle (and other platforms) sometime in 2013, but this will not be a full Charlotte Savage novel. Can't say more at the moment, but watch this space.

Finally, I want to say a big, BIG "thank you" to everyone who has bought Touch. You've helped secure the future for the series and ensured that many people beyond the Amazonverse will be able to read the book.

What Do You Tell Your Kids?

'Who's that little girl, Daddy?'

Hmmm. I struggle to think of something to say as my daughter looks over my shoulder at the BBC news website. I flip the lid on the laptop down and mutter that 'she's a child who has gone missing in Wales.'

More questions, deflected by the arrival of dinner. But I know that I'm going to have to say something...

And when the news comes out that this is now a murder inquiry - not much surprise there - I realise that April can no longer just be somebody lost in the hills around Machynlleth. She's a victim and I know my children will have a hard time understanding the 'how' and the 'why' of it all.

I get to thinking about how I can keep them safe, alert them to the dangers. Not 'stranger danger', that's just for fiction. In real life, as the week's news shows - Jimmy Saville, teacher Jeremy Forrest and his trip to France with his underage pupil, Mark Bridger - the danger isn't from strangers. It's from the person next door, along the street, a familiar face. In the majority of cases, shockingly, from someone in the family.

It's probably why we like stories about serial killers. They're real 'baddies', cardboard cut-out villains no different from the monsters in a fairy story. Far easier to focus our minds on the danger from those sorts of people who can be demonised. They're perverts, psychos, nutters. The unpalatable truth is that the chance of a Ted Bundy character harming your children is miniscule. Any threat is likely to come from much closer to home. How on earth do you warn your kids about that sort of danger without destroying utterly their sense of security and well-being? At the moment I am lost for words...

Manchester

I've been wondering what, or even whether, to post on the tragic events in Manchester. For the majority of us who have no real understanding of the police any words we say can seem trite. We can, though, read the thoughts of serving police officers such as Sergeant Gary Watts from Falmouth who gives us a insight into what it is like when an event such as this happens. Thanks, Gary.

http://voiceofanofficer.devon-cornwall.police.uk/2012/09/why.html

Good Old Waterstones!

Touch has slumped in the Amazon charts thanks to the preponderance of the 20p ebook. However, in the Waterstones' chart it has managed to reach number three. How and why is a mystery but it is at the moment giving Fifty Shades, which is at number five, a good old fashioned spanking (groan - who wrote this copy?).

Charleston Harbour, Cornwall

On my recent trip to Cornwall I visited Charleston Harbour, home of Square Sail, a company specialising in providing ships and settings for marine filming. The company's credits amount to dozens of films and TV series including Alice in Wonderland, Hornblower, 1492 Conquest of Paradise, Clash/Wrath of the Titans, Longitude and Shackleton. If you have seen any of those films/series you have seen ships provided by Square Sail, some times the boats having undergone remarkable transformations to be historically accurate. Last year the harbour and boats even featured on Dr Who.

Sadly the harbour's future and the sailing boats moored there are in doubt as the company is for sale (see story).  It is a fascinating place and if I should win the lottery this weekend I will be putting in an offer.

Sitting in front of my keyboard I am struggling to see how I can use the setting in a Charlotte Savage thriller. I might have to begin an historical novel just to get it in!

Another Milestone.

I have been somewhat lazy over the summer as regards posting to this blog. Work besides writing, the school holidays and such have got in the way. However, autumn is nearly here and I will be working hard on  the CS series and also updating this blog more often.

Recent news is that Touch has now sold over 70,000 copies in the UK, a figure beyond any I could have imagined.

Many people have been asking me the question: 'What has happened to book number two?' The answer is it is almost finished. Alongside that bit of news there is another piece which is very exciting. For the moment I will have to keep stum, but I hope to be able to let you know in the near future.

60K!

Sadly not my income for the year (I wish), but the number of copies Touch has, as of today, now sold: sixty thousand (falls off chair in amazement). Took a little while to reach this latest milestone and I wondered if we would do it before the book was a year old... but we have. At every new milestone I can only repeat myself: thanks to all readers who made this possible.... Oh, and thanks to Charlotte as well. She really wouldn't let me forget it if I had left her out!

200 Days!

Two hundred days in the top 100. Incredible.

Number One!

Touch has unexpectedly risen to the number one slot in thrillers on Amazon. A great Easter present for DI Savage and her colleagues, cream eggs all round.

Review of Graham Hurley's Happy Days

So, here we are. At the end of the line. They say to travel is always better than to arrive and that is nowhere more true than in this instance because the destination can bring only sadness. Graham Hurley’s superlative Faraday and Winter series is over. I haven’t felt this way since I finished Blue at the Mizzen, by Patrick O’Brian. A very different genre, but an equally compelling story arc. As a crime writer myself I would be happy to produce something a tenth as good as this body of work.

In my view the series has been about humanity. Not a surface-thin political vision wrapped up in soundbites and glossy brochures, but a deep-down sense of what is right and wrong, of what it means to be human, to live and learn, to change. That’s heady stuff for something that is ‘only’ crime fiction, but then this is what sets Hurley apart from the crowd, his work head and shoulders above the rest.

Way back in book number one, Turnstone, we met Joe Faraday, who appeared to be the liberal, caring character who would hold up our ideals - ‘Hurley’s decent, persistent cop’ according to the Guardian. But as the story evolves, book-by-book we can see Faraday losing it, becoming ineffectual against the tide of awfulness sweeping the country, his actions make no difference. Thank goodness the books concluded before the riots of 2011. Whatever would Faraday have made of them? (he would have become even more depressed, one imagines!)

On the other side of the fence - eventually the ‘Dark Side’ - DC Paul Winter was, at first sight, Faraday’s opposite, his nemesis. Now, after the final book, I look back and conclude that Winter was the more human of the two, the character whose moral trajectory took him on a journey where he discovered not only the nature of good and evil, but where he found himself and learnt the hard way - the only way - the difference between right and wrong. In the end Winter is the character we can learn from, for despite his failings, he achieved, in his own way, redemption.

And anyway, forgetting all the waffle above, if you had to choose which one to sit down and have a drink with... no contest, is it?

I look forward to D/C Suttle’s move to Devon, my only concern being that is where my own series is set. It is something akin to going down the local tennis club to find your opponent is Roger Federer, or going out on your morning run and having Usain Bolt jog along beside you.

What else to say? I’ll sum up in the only way appropriate. How was it for you?

Cushty, mate!

30K Milestone

That's not the thirty kilometre milestone, which wouldn't make any sense. It is the 30,000 copies of Touch sold milestone which was passed this weekend (this figure is on Amazon UK only and does not include Waterstones, Tescos, WHSmith and other sites). Pretty amazing and once again I have to say "thanks" to everyone who has read the book. If you've enjoyed it then I hope you will read the next book when it comes out.

Happy Days... Or Not

I've just bought the final book in Graham Hurley's brilliant - no, make that superlative - Faraday/Winter series. Happy Days is the twelfth book and if you haven't read any then I recommend you start at the beginning. Of course in twelve books there are one or two not quite as good as the best, that's inevitable. For me the series really took off when DC Paul Winter went over to the 'dark side' and joined Bazza MacKenzie. The devil plays the best tunes and so it has turned out, with Winter and MacKenzie becoming the stars of the series. There's more than one reason why Happy Days is a little sad for fans (those who have read Borrowed Light will know one of them), but the good news is that one of the minor characters, DC Suttle, will feature in a new series. The young DC is moving to Dartmoor, of all places, so maybe I will bump into Hurley some time when I am doing some research up on the moor. Actually, I quite fancy Suttle walking into Major Crimes in Plymouth and meeting Savage and co..

Hurley has talked of realism in his novels; my style is different, more of a cross between police procedural and thriller, but I do try to get the police work as accurate as possible (within the confines of the story - poetic licence and all that). However, I don't have Hurley's wealth of contacts in the police that he has built up over the years... yet! In truth realism means not getting things wrong, rather than including all the details; to do that would be to send the reader to sleep and no writer wants to do that... authors of manuals for insomniacs aside.

20,000 Sold!

Yesterday Touch passed twenty thousand copies sold. I am both amazed and delighted and wish to thank everyone who has bought the book in the last few months. Every one of you has contributed something to ensuring DI Savage will return in the second book of the series, Chains.

When Touch came out at the end of July I would have been pleased if it had sold one thousand copies, so to reach a figure of twenty times that amount is very satisfying and has spurred me on not only to finish the second book, but also to begin plotting the third one. And after that... who knows? But I am pretty sure Savage will be around for some time to come.

Happy New Year

A belated Happy New Year to all my readers. If you had a good 2011 then I wish you more of the same in 2012. If last year wasn't so kind to you then I hope this year turns out better.

The sequel to Touch is nearly ready for publication. Before that a paperback version of Touch will be available (from Amazon and other outlets) so I hope people who have missed out on reading about DI Savage and her colleagues because they do not have an ereader will have a chance to catch up!