Publication Day!

Nine books in, it still doesn’t get old. The day when your baby finally goes out into the big wide world is always special. As per usual, I think THE RIDDLE OF THE FRACTAL MONKS is my best one yet, and it’s certainly had some nice advance reviews on Goodreads, so it would be nice to think that the series will draw in a few more readers. It’s at times like this, when bricks and mortar stores are closed and Amazon aren’t accepting any new physical books, that I’m unexpectedly grateful that Farrago are an ebook-led publisher. However, there will be a paperback available soon, so watch this space (or rather, this space) for signed copies. But if you can’t wait until then, here’s the link for the Kindle version.

One thing I did get round to doing was to fix an egregious typo in the trailer that I published back in February. I agonised about this for ages, wondering if anyone would actually notice and whether it was worth losing those precious hundred or so views that it had so far accrued. But in the end, I realised that the mistake was actually holding me back from making more of a fuss about the video, so I finally bit the bullet yesterday. Here’s the amended version:

I’m still quite proud of it,

Just out of interest, did anyone spot the typo in the previous version?

Nope. I didn’t think so. But I knew it was there. Right slap bang in the middle of that Star Wars-style crawler summarising the plot, Tom Winscombe’s girlfriend was referred to as ‘Lucy Chan’, when she’s actually called Dorothy. Yes, I actually got the name of one of my main characters wrong. Impressive, huh?

It gets worse.

The reason I got it wrong was that I’d lazily copied it from the description on Amazon, which was also wrong. This was wrong because the blurb on the back cover was also wrong. And the blurb on the back cover was wrong because I’d got it wrong when I sent it in to my editor. Now I’m pretty certain that the reason I got it wrong was because Tom’s girlfriend at the start of THE TRUTH ABOUT ARCHIE AND PYE was indeed called Lucy. But she (spoiler alert) doesn’t even appear in the new one, so I have no idea what I was thinking.

Anyway, the good news is that I spotted it in the trailer – admittedly some time after I’d published it to YouTube – but in plenty of time to alert my publishers so that they could fix it everywhere else.

I’d be willing to bet that this happens more often than you might imagine. Blurbs are notoriously last-minute things. I was once given a book to review (no clues!) that had no less than three obvious typos on the back cover. Closer to home, I would invite you to take your copy of MRS DARCY VERSUS THE ALIENS, turn it over and marvel at the unconventional spelling of PEMBERLY (sic). How could I have got that wrong? My attention was, incidentally, drawn to this by the only one-star review that the book received on Amazon. Ah well.

Anyway, none of this matters now, because it all got fixed, and in any case the actual text has been subjected to Farrago’s army of brilliant editors, copy-editors and proof-readers to ensure that it all makes some kind of sense. Or at least the right kind of nonsense. I think you’re going to like it.

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