The State of Things
Added on 19 May 2017
Oh, you’re thinking, the state of things, that sounds interesting.
This isn’t the state of things in the world, though. The rank awfulness of virtually everything on the planet is being well documented elsewhere. From one spunktrumpet to another, the leaders of the world are gradually dragging us all down into the pits of Hell.
No, this is just the state of things in this little corner of the Internet.
Regular readers – believed recently to have doubled in number to 4 – will know that a couple of months ago, renegade digital publisher Blasted Heath – publisher of virtually all of my titles – went out of business, leaving debts of something in the region of $400trillion.
On the face of it, this seemed pretty bad, but behind the scenes, moves were afoot to transfer all those titles to Freight Books, publisher of Song of The Dead. Given that Freight would have been bringing a new slant, new covers and slightly bigger marketing budget, this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
And then the publisher at Freight left the company, and all publishing plans – bar the most imminent – have been put on hold, until they decide how they’re going to keep the business going. This most immediately affects The Boy In The Well, the second book in the DI Westphall series. It had been due in September 2017. Now, we just have to wait and see.
They certainly won’t, any time soon, be taking the former Blasted Heath ebooks.
So… I had two publishers. One died. One’s struggling. New book publication canned. Online back catalogue publication canned.
OK, that’s the part in the movie where everything seems lost. However, uplifting shift from minor to major chord… and I have another new crime series coming at the end of the year. Introductory novella, and Book 1 already written. Glasgow police procedural, featuring DI Pereira and DS Bain. My first female lead character, which is about time, after the endless stream of middle-aged, miserable men.
The novella, Cold Cuts will be out in November 2017, and Book 1, The Judas Flower, in December 2017. They will published as ebooks in English and German, and will also be released as a German-language audio book.
Meanwhile, work is underway here at Long Midnight Publishing HQ to get all those old Blasted Heath books back up and available online. A slow, time-consuming process. The Barney Thomson series is back, although it still requires some work; and the two Jericho novels have now been posted. Work on updating those pages, and on getting all the others online and available, is scheduled to last until autumn 2019.