I attended the London Book Fair yesterday, for the first time ever as a guest speaker, and to my delight was given the information that STALKERS, my debut crime novel from Avon Books, has now sold over 100,000 copies.
It was a bit of a surreal experience to go to so grand an event as the London Book Fair and find that a book of mine was a big talking-point, to see posters up everywhere and have people I didn’t know stop me in the aisles and offer congratulations.
In the two months of its existence, STALKERS has accrued 286 reviews on Amazon, most of them glowingly positive – we seem to be sitting in a semi-permanent state of four and a half stars out of five. Though there have also been one or two bewildering comments. One of them states that the book’s description of the Isle of Man reads like a travelogue. I’m not sure what that is referring to – nobody in the book goes anywhere near the Isle of Man. In addition there are a couple – a small minority – of so-called reviews which contain several downright lies. For example, some chap who shall remain nameless advises everyone that STALKERS is filled with incidents in which helpless females are saved by the male hero.
Garbage, frankly. Utter garbage. Skeptical reviews, I don't mind, but blatant misrepresentation gets my goat. The guy in question can’t even have read the bloody novel. If anything it’s the other way round – we consciously subvert the norm in STALKERS, utilising female characters who are exceptionally tough and resourceful. And it’s quite gratifying to see that a follow-up post to the review in question makes this point emphatically.
Anyway, further good news – and perhaps this is the more important development now – the second in the Heck trilogy, SACRIFICE, the new cover of which is posted above, is doing pretty well in terms of pre-orders. I haven’t got that precise figure to date, but many thousands have now been placed and it’s shooting up the chart.
On top of that, the first draft of the third book in the series is now nearing completion. And here’s a quick exclusive: it will probably – I say probably, though late changes can always happen – be entitled HUNTED.