Launching A New Book: What’s Your Category?

Sorry. It’s been awhile since I’ve written a detailed post but I’ve been rather busy. For about a year now, off and on I’ve been editing a novel I wrote when I first started writing. At the time, I wasn’t even sure how to write sentence properly, let alone tackle a novel. I had read a few books on ‘How To’ write to be published when I started writing Seeking The Dark in 2005. Though, back then the novel was going to be called, We, the Ancient Ones.

The idea started with a short story about a girl on a bus, who wasn’t all she seemed to be. My dear friend Lisa Moulds was the first person to read my early attempts at writing short stories. How she managed to pick her way through the badly written story, I’ll never know, but her comment gave me the encouragement I needed. Lisa wanted to know more about the girl on the bus, and so began my writing career. Though, writing Seeking the Dark was a huge learning curve for me, with it’s three title changes, and many edits, the plot is more or less unchanged and much stronger than I first wrote it. As for the girl on the bus, well, she took a taxi in the end.

My New Release: Seeking The Dark

A few days ago, in the Dark Fantasy Facebook Group I belong to, a question came up which I found relevant to a problem I’ve struggled with, and find very frustrating. It’s when your book doesn’t fit into a certain category.

With all of my books so far I find it hard to pin them down to being one thing rather than another. I’m not even sure if I can class my writing as a crossover between two different categories. I’m sure all writers feel the same when their work isn’t typical of a certain category. When advertising my first novel, Stone Angels on the promotional sites I selected Horror as their crime categories didn’t list anything which was suitable for my novel. Stone Angels isn’t a cozy crime, nor a police procedural so I listed it as horror, but I wasn’t sure that a true horror fan wouldn’t class it as horror. There wasn’t any blood, guts and terror in the truth sense of horror, though James Ravenscroft was cold and twisted.

Now my editing of Seeking The Dark has reached an end my publisher asked me to search out some ideas for a book cover. I went on Amazon and looked at the sort of covers that appeared on books listed under a similar theme to my book and was disappointed. Once again my book didn’t fit in. I realised I needed to think outside the box otherwise the picture on my cover would be like all the other books in the same category, neck biting, bloody fangs, half naked bodies with bloody mouths. The trouble is Seeking The Dark isn’t your typical Vampire novel. There’s no love-stricken immortal being mooning over an aging human.

So in my quest to find a suitable book cover I selected the one you can see above. I’m hoping it is moody enough to entice readers of vampires and horror books as well as readers of mysteries too. After all book covers are the shop windows to the story. I hope you will take a risk and be delighted with the tale within Seeking The Dark. The book’s launch date is the May 13th but you can pre-order it if you wish on Amazon.

Click On this Link: Seeking The Dark: Blurb

Immortality comes at a price. So too does betrayal…

Investigative journalist, Jacob Eldritch, is obsessed with solving the mystery of the Dead Men Sleeping, a series of unexplained deaths, but he isn’t aware that the Dark force is gathering strength. One evening, he spots a man leading a white-haired beauty through the crowds at his local bar.  A few days later, he sees her again at a hotel, in the company of a different man. A week later, both men are dead and the police add their names to the unexplained death list.

While conducting some background research at the library, a young girl doing her homework gives Jacob an unexpected clue. This turns the mystery of the Dead Men Sleeping on its head when he discovers they’re linked to the death of a Whitby ship owner two hundred and twenty-four years ago. Jacob must fight the Dark as it closes in, but will he survive?

Click on this link for Amazon: Seeking The Dark