Sorry for the delay in posting this week. We were away for the sweltering Bank Holiday Weekend, in a wonderful historic location which I intended to blog about (and will next week). However, this intention was overtaken by a dramatic development – namely, the terrific news that the Quinton series e-books are available once again! The lovely people at my new publisher, Canelo, launched them on Monday, and they’re all now available again on Amazon UK. Things are pretty hectic this week, so I haven’t had time to check across all platforms and other national sites, but if they’re not available to you yet, they should be soon. As for the situation over hard copies and audiobooks, I’d refer you back to this previous post. Canelo have got some great ideas for special promotions, etc, in the coming months, so keep a lookout for them!
For my part, it’s back to work with a vengeance over the next few months, pretty much doubling the length of my first Tudor naval story to turn it from a novella into a novel. This is a pretty unusual situation for an author to be in, as we usually face irate publishers demanding swingeing cuts to the inordinately vast number of words we started out with, every single one of which we’re convinced is absolutely essential to our precious, untouchable story. This, of course, is a load of old [insert rude description of your choice beginning with either ‘b’ or ‘c’]. So it’ll be an interesting experience to do the exact opposite of what novelists normally do, and I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going. In the meantime, if anybody’s going to be in the vicinity of Hitchin library in Hertfordshire on Saturday 9 June at 11am, I’ll be talking on ‘The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Writing Nautical Fiction’. However, long-time readers of this blog should already have a pretty good idea of some of the things that are going to come up under both counts!