Hometown - 21/07/2016

I’ve been meaning to blog for the last week or two but have focused instead on working on the editor’s comments for Hometown and fixing my numerous mistakes—possible favourite being the moment a character took a bottle of beer from a fridge which then became a can of beer on the next page—and giving it a final read to make sure everything is sorted. Now that everything's done and the book has been improved, I can take a breath and appreciate what this all means.

For those who’ve been paying attention, you’ll know Hometown was published a few years ago as an ebook by an American publisher who have since closed, meaning that version has been unavailable for a while. When the rights reverted to me, I had no idea what would happen with the book or if anything actually would. Of course, I could have just done it myself within days of getting the rights back but that would have been a mistake. So I did my research, checked out a few publishers I liked the sound of and sent off the opening chapters without much hope of it going anywhere. The email that came back from one to request the entire manuscript was a very nice surprise, and again, I sent my stuff in without much hope mainly because nearly all writers think the reply will be a polite stick your book up your arse to any submission.

That didn’t happen.

Caffeine Nights replied a little while later to say they wanted to publish the book which was of course just ducky with me. I’d changed the title from the original to the name of the main character prior to my initial email but that didn’t feel like a great idea simply because it didn’t give a potential reader much of a clue about the story. All right, that’s worked for Stephen King more than once, but I’m not Mr King so the title changed again to Hometown which sums up the tale in a nice, concise way.

A year later and here we are. Hometown, originally my first published novel, will become my first published novel in print on the 21^st July. And, as a bonus, it’ll be roughly 7000 words longer than the first release, making it (hopefully) a richer, more developed story.

I’m thrilled to have my dark tale of regret, grief and friendship brought back to life and looking forward to hearing what people think of it.

UK release Hometown

US release Hometown