It’s been a busy couple of months since my last newsletter, and following Thriller Fest in New York. Last time, I reported that I fell ill just before I was set to fly and I was gutted that I couldn’t go back to one of my favourite cities in the world. Hopefully I’ll find the time to revisit it next year.
In the meantime, I’ve been working on my next book, tentatively called What Lies Between Us. It’s been reviewed and critiqued by my Thomas & Mercer editors and after two rounds of re-writes following my submission, the next stage is what they call the line edit. That’s where an editor goes the through the book line by line, searching for inconsistencies, looking at my writing style and language use in every single sentence.
For example, if I wrote “the sun sets in Northampton at 9pm in August,” they will double check to see if that is accurate. Now can you imagine doing that over 110,000 words? I don’t envy their attention to detail!
Getting a book from my computer to bookshelves is a long process even after I have written ‘The End’ and pulled together the acknowledgements.
Myself and of course the team at Thomas & Mercer are really excited about the release of this book. Tonally, it is more along the lines of When you Disappeared than The Passengers, with some of the darkness readers enjoyed in The Good Samaritan. It is about two women who share a house – one lives on the ground floor and the other on the second floor. They dislike each other but ever second night they meet on the middle floor for dinner. Over the course of the book, we discover who they are what has led them to lead this peculiar existence.
I can’t wait to see what my publishers have done with the cover design. They have asked me for my ideas of the types of covers that I like so I have sent them screengrabs of some of my favourites. There are a lot of strong covers out there so I hope mine will stand out in the crowd.
Last week saw the USA and Canadian release of The Passengers. My US publisher, Berkley, arranged for me to do fourteen interviews in one day for release day. They were with different radio stations across New York, Utah and Ohio and also a selection of Podcasts. By the end of the day I was sick of hearing my own voice!
Also, it was amazing to see the book was a top pick of the week in the New York Post.
Berkley also did a fantastic job of asking some of my favourite bloggers to post pictures they had taken and uploaded onto their Instagram pages along with reviews on other platforms.
I am eternally grateful to my readers and followers on social media for all their enthusiasm for The Passengers. If any of you have read it and would like to leave a review that would be great as they all help to bring the book to a wider audience. Here is a link to the main websites where you can review the book: