New book - Escape Velocity

I have a new book on sale today, Escape Velocity. As the title might hint, it's a science fiction novel. Here's a taster of what it’s about -

Sam Grainger, rocket scientist, gets a phone call from his wife Jennie one evening. Which would be perfectly normal if she hadn't been dead for over a year.

Sam's convinced the call is a hoax, but before he can investigate, a much larger mystery presents itself - parts of the world have started to vanish, and Sam is asked to join a team to investigate.

Once he's reunited with Jennie, Sam learns that the world isn't what he thought it was - and neither are he and she. Worse, some very ruthless people are determined to make sure the secret doesn't go any further.

Racing to stay one step ahead of their enemies, Sam and Jennie learn that the key to mending the holes in the world may be the spaceship they worked on before Jennie died. Which wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t have to steal it...

You can buy Escape Velocity (or borrow it, if you’re an Amazon Prime member) from the following URLs:

Amazon US UK Germany France Italy Spain



I've enrolled it in the KDP Select programme, which means that (for now, at least) it's available as an ebook only on Amazon. I've expressed concern that Select is not good for readers or writers, but a couple of things persuaded me to try it with this book. Firstly, most of my sales come from Amazon anyway, so I'm not cutting myself off from a large number of existing readers here. Secondly, Escape Velocity is currently a standalone title, so I'm not cutting off a large number of potential future readers either. The story's ending leaves the door wide open for a sequel, but I currently have no plans to write one. Even if I did, I have at least two other books to write before I could start it.

That leads neatly into what I know you're thinking - what about Adramal and Lelsarin and Alesin? Where is Dust & Water (book 3 of The Barefoot Healer)? Well, although I called Escape Velocity a new book, I actually wrote it before I started Death & Magic (the first Barefoot Healer book). I thought it was good enough to be published, but the legacy publishing industry (obviously) disagreed. So I put it away for a few years, while I wrote Death & Magic, and then Plague & Poison. As I was beavering away at Dust & Water, I came across various blog posts by authors much more famous than I, to the effect that the best marketing for your writing is... more of your writing. That is, the more books you have on the market, the better, as it creates more opportunities for readers to discover you.

So I decided to release Escape Velocity. I thought it just needed a little proofreading, a cover, a blurb, a conversion to Kindle format, and then in a week I could get back to Dust & Water.

That was three and a half weeks ago.

I decided to delete a large chunk of the first chapter that wasn't working, and had to make sure the information in it got slipped in elsewhere. I also decided to rewrite a scene about two-thirds of the way through, where Jennie does something that proves very useful later on, but which didn't make much sense for her to do at the time. That meant careful reading of the final third of the book to make sure all the back-references were consistent. I also had to reconcile two different versions of the book. When I was trying to get an agent for it, I created a new copy with all my notes stripped out, but then continued tinkering and, for some reason, wasn't consistent about which version I edited. Just as well OpenOffice can compare two documents and tell you where they differ... The cover was trickier than I thought too, but maybe that's a tale for another blog post.

Tomorrow, or maybe the day after, I'll resume work on the first draft of Dust & Water. This is currently at 30,000 words. If I stay true to form, that means I'm about a quarter of the way through. Wish me luck, and in the meantime, enjoy Sam and Jennie's company...