The plan was a good one.
- Step 1: sell the Fiona Griffiths series to the biggest publisher in the US.
- Step 2: get great reviews.
- Step 3: let the biggest publisher in the US do the rest.
And the plan was kind of going OK. Step one – yep, check: Penguin Random House bought the first two books in the series. They published them beautifully, both as e-books and in print.
Step two – yep, we were good there too: the reviews, from critics and readers alike, have been great.
Unfortunately, though, for reasons I still don’t really understand, PRH didn’t want to continue and my nice little plan crashed and burned. Mostly I think they couldn’t figure out how to make $27 hardbacks work in a market which is flooded by $4.99 ebooks . . . and they weren’t happy to take the obvious step of ditching the product that people didn’t want and maximising sales of the one they did.
Anyway. Things didn’t work out. PRH were great while I worked with them, but they didn’t want to continue with our existing relationship and I sure as heck didn’t want my lovely American readers to go without their fix of small, somewhat crazy Welsh detectives.
So I’m going solo. The third book in the series is The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths and it’s coming out on January 29, 2015. If you want to pre-order it from Amazon, you can do so here. It’ll be out on iTunes and B&N and everywhere else at the same time. If you prefer to read in print (which I do) then I’m making a $15 print edition available too, (only via Amazon, I’m sorry to say — getting wider distribution proved too complicated for various reasons.)
The book already has some great reader reviews – mostly from US readers who loved the series so much, they had the third book shipped out from the UK. Needless to say, I adore feedback from all my readers – positive, yes, but the negative stuff too – and I’m really thrilled this book seems to be hitting the right buttons.
Oh yes, and a word about the cover image for this new edition. The cover comes from a really talented Romanian designer, who wanted to say “Dead” and “Strange” and “Wales” all in one simple image. So: a tree seen from a “corpse eye view” through a pane of rainy glass. It’s a love-it-or-loathe-it cover, but I personally love it. I hope you do too.
I can’t wait for you to read that book – and don’t forget to let me know what you think of it!
