Big day at the Book Fair, plus Dark Hollow

The London Book Fair was an amazing experience. For those who don’t know, it’s a massive book-publishing trade fair held each April in Earl's Court, and in terms of its importance to the industry, it is these days regarded as being second only to the Frankfurt Book Fair.

With that in mind it was quite an amazing (and humbling) experience to go down there this year as a guest and see posters everywhere depicting STALKERS and my next novel in the Mark Heckenburg series, SACRIFICE.

Below right is a shot taken during the fair, in which I sit on a panel with two fonts of wisdom on various book-related matters, authors Andy Briggs (on my left) and Conrad Williams (on my right). Top literary agent, Julian Friedmann, (seated far left) is the compere.

On the subject of STALKERS, it is still selling well. We’ve now passed 110,000 sales, which is something I could never have dreamed of when it was first bought by Avon Books, and on top of that, we’ve now sold it to Piper-Verlag, based in Munich, so a German language version of the book will be coming out at some point soon. Meanwhile, pre-orders for SACRIFICE are pretty exciting too. They’ve just breached 7,000, which isn’t half bad, I suppose, considering the book is only due for publication in July. I can also at this stage exclusively reveal (though it's possible I may have mentioned this already on Facebook, that the third book in the Heck series will be called HUNTED, and this, I think, is scheduled for publication next February.

Still on the subject of Avon Books and HarperCollins, I’m pleased to announce that a brand new short story of mine, HIM! – though it leans towards being a novella, in terms of length – is included the publisher’s brand new crime-oriented e-anthology, THE PERFECT MURDER. More info on when this is available soon, though the antho will contain work by some of Avon’s current hottest-selling crime and thriller authors – folk like Jacqui Rose, Mark Sennen, Luca Vesta and Mike Russell. What’s more, the rumour is that it will be available absolutely free – at least for a time. So it’ll be well worth keeping your eye open for that one.

On a totally different matter now, the financial keystones are finally falling into place for the movie adaptation of Brian Keene’s best selling horror novel, DARK HOLLOW, which I co-scripted with Paul Campion, and there is a distinct possibility that we could enter pre-production in July, with the shoot perhaps scheduled for August and September.

And just to prove that this blog isn’t always just about me, here are the terrible twosome – Brian on the left and Paul on the right, captured cooking up some promo stuff for the movie.