KEVIN DUFFYBLUEMOOSE BOOKS, CO-FOUNDERFor this month’s Featured Press Spotlight we met up with Kevin Duffy, co-founder of Northern book maverick Bluemoose Books, to talk new releases, post-pandemic publishing, and the importance of indie bookseller support.
I mean, it’s lovely to get that validation and recognition but I think as an independent publisher we exist in a parallel publishing universe. We can’t get involved with the bestseller charts or The Bookseller or what the Big Six are doing because we can’t compete with the volume that they’re producing. So we carry on doing what we do best, which is find great new stories by great new writers... I think it has to be quality every which way. |
JR: First of all, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your background and about how you got into the publishing world. I read somewhere that you were initially in sales for another major publisher, is that right?
KD: Yes, so I got my English degree and then moved back to Stockport and had various jobs. I wrote the history of Bramwell Hall while I worked for Bramwell Hall, which is a Tudor hall just outside Stockport. I worked in a jigsaw factory for a year with eight brilliant women. That was my real education. That was an eye-opener. And then I went to London and worked in a Library supply company called Cromwell Books. So that was my first introduction to the book world. And then I got a job as a sales rep for London for Headline. Headline had just started in 1987, so I was one of the first reps to start with them. And I worked at Headline until 1990. Headline was started by Tim Hely Hutchinson, and then was bought by Hachette which as you know is the second-largest publisher in the world. But yeah, my first introduction was going around and talking to booksellers about upcoming books that Headline was publishing. So that was the start.
And then I moved back to Leeds in 1990 when Hetha was pregnant with our first son Leo, and I worked in boilers. I actually sold the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth House their boilers. They bathed in hot water delivered by my very own hands. But then I got back into publishing with Maxwell Macmillan and that was business and academic publishing. And then moved over to business publishing, then with Chrysalis, and that was more non-fiction, monographs, art, and philosophy stuff. And then I stopped working with them in 2013, but by that time, in 2006, Hetha and I had started Bluemoose Books to find new writers, mainly Northern writers who weren’t getting an opportunity. Because as you know, publishing and access into publishing - publishing companies, established publishers - is really difficult. But for new writers to get their work published is nigh on impossible if you haven’t got an agent, or if you don’t know someone etc. So that was the reason why we started Bluemoose. I’d been writing as well. I’d won a national writing competition and I’d written a book, a comedy about hippies moving into Hebden Bridge, and I got signed up. But it all went downhill from there because no one wanted to publish a comedy book. So we started Bluemoose really, I mean it was not a vanity project, you know, we remorgaged our house to publish my book, but I didn’t want it to be just mine. So we published Anthills and Stars which is my book but also a book by a Canadian author called Nathan Vanek, a book called The Bridge Between, and we made enough money from those two books to continue. And eighteen years hence we’re still here. So it started off as trying to find new writers and give them my experience and we’ve moved on and obviously, we’ve become reasonably successful and so our authors are from all over the world now and not just from the north. So that’s how we started. |
JR: I know you’ve established yourselves as a huge name in indie publishing in the UK, and I guess some people might assume that you’ve expanded into quite a large team but am I right in thinking it’s mostly still just you these days?
KD: Yeah, it’s me in the front room, I’m sat on the settee. I’m the only full-time employee. We’ve got four brilliant editors who are freelance and are working on books all the time. We’ve got two virtually working full-time. I think that‘s one of the reasons why we’re reasonably successful, and I think this is the same with most indie publishers, we spend an inordinate amount of time on the editing and the career development, the development of the writer. We will spend eighteen months on a book before it’s published, minimum. We’ll have a structural edit for twelve months and then we’ll bring another editor in to do copy-editing and we’ve got four people who’ll do proofing.
So before the book gets to the bookshop and we know we’re competing with the Big Six and other indies, we do spend a lot of time on production. The production value of our books is very high. We’ve got some great designers because you can tell a book by its cover, and our books have got to stand out. So yeah, I’m the only full-time employee. And I think we’ve grown through forensic editorial and sales and marketing, in finding the books people want. I know that sounds very simple but it’s what we’ve done. But we don’t publish more than ten books a year. We never will. Because I think you can lose quality - and I like, perhaps I’m a bit of a control freak, but I like being involved with every book. And we have to be passionate about every book. I always say to our debut authors, it’s like being in a punk band. You’ve got to play all the boozers, all the libraries around the country, before you make it. You’ve got to earn your stripes as it were. |
JR: And do you think your sales background has shaped that kind of DIY aspect of Bluemoose then?
KD: I don’t like to word DIY because that sounds like we’re sort of knocking something up. You know, you’ve got to be professional at every point of the publishing process, you know. We are really on it. But yes, sales and marketing, I know quite a few indies who have some great editorials and they’re publishing great books but they miss out on sales and marketing. Because there’s no point just being a library, having some great books. You’ve got to get those into readers’ hands.
That’s where I think my background in sales and marketing does help, because when we started Bluemoose I knew all the main buyers for the library supply companies, I knew all the main buyers for the wholesalers at that time, which were Bertrams and Gardners, and I knew most of if not all of the managers of bookshops for Waterstones in the North, and Dillons at that time. But also quite a lot of the independent booksellers as well. And if you have that relationship, as you know, if you’re buying books it’s about trust, isn’t it? There’s no point in me getting hundreds of books into a bookshop if I’m going to get them all returned, so you have to be selective when you’re selling. And that’s where the trust is, and it’s a relationship. And I think that’s why some of our books, like The Gallows Pole or Leonard and Hungry Paul, or hopefully Christ On A Bike which we’re just publishing at the minute, become bestsellers is that handselling from booksellers like yourself. Because I think indies, independent publishers like independent booksellers, we’re a bit non-conformist and kind of iconoclast, and I think we booksellers find a book that they just fall in love with they hand-sell it to the rest of the industry. And Penguin or whoever, who has tens of millions to spend on marketing, can’t compete or beat a bookseller falling in love with a book and handselling that book to their customers. And that is the gold standard. I think that’s what we do and I think quite a lot of other indies do much, much better than the big publishers. Because their lists are so huge. I remember, psychologically, when we were at Headline we would have a hundred books a month and there’s no way a bookseller would buy a hundred books from you. They just don’t have the budget. So then you kind of have to pick four or five that you would show them, you know. And that’s so demeaning to other writers on that list. So when you’re a small indie just publishing between six and ten books a year - I know that when you go into a bookstore or send some information out and I’m putting everything, one hundred per cent into trying to convince that person to buy that book. |
JR: It seems indie bookselling has become a reliable community for small presses. I spoke to Stefan at And Other Stories and he had the same opinion on how the relationships you can form with individual booksellers can be crucial.
So on the other end of that spectrum, you’re getting amazing international and critical recognition. Even just in the UK, looking at the awards, obviously you’ve got the Northern Publisher of the Year, but the books themselves have been winners or shortlistees of the Royal Society of Literature, The Walter Scott Prize, The British Book Awards, and so many more. You’ve mentioned Leonard and Hungry Paul, The Gallows Pole.
Do you think the attention has changed the way Bluemoose works within the larger publishing world?
So on the other end of that spectrum, you’re getting amazing international and critical recognition. Even just in the UK, looking at the awards, obviously you’ve got the Northern Publisher of the Year, but the books themselves have been winners or shortlistees of the Royal Society of Literature, The Walter Scott Prize, The British Book Awards, and so many more. You’ve mentioned Leonard and Hungry Paul, The Gallows Pole.
Do you think the attention has changed the way Bluemoose works within the larger publishing world?
KD: No. I mean, it’s lovely to get that validation and recognition but I think as an independent publisher we exist in a parallel publishing universe. We can’t get involved with the bestseller charts or The Bookseller or what the Big Six are doing because we can’t compete with the volume that they’re producing. So we carry on doing what we do best which is find great new stories by great new writers and edit the hell out of the books and put a great jacket on there and make it the best it can be before it hits the bookshops. I think it has to be quality every which way. The quality of writing, production, and just getting the books to the right people within the industry, which includes independent booksellers.
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JR: Let’s just talk about the submission and selection process then. You’ve already said that you select intentionally quite few titles per year, and the platform you’re creating especially for working-class writers is so crucial. How long does that process usually take for you? From submission right through to getting it onto the shelves. Can that normally take a couple of years?
KD: Yeah, so I’m the first set of eyes to read it and I’ll pass it on to two or three of our editors and if we all agree that there’s something in this writer and this story then we’ll publish it. So the standard contract, which I always ask our authors to run past The Society of Authors to make sure they’re happy with everything, we say that within two years we’ll have it on the bookshelves. So within those two years, as I said, the first eighteen months of those two years are just editing, designing, talking about it and getting people excited about the book. But yeah, two years. We have turned around books within six months as we did with Ghost Signs by Stu Hennigan, which is about the pandemic which we published last year and was shortlisted for The Parliamentary Book of the Year Award. So books can be put out very quickly but we’d like to work with the author over a minimum of eighteen months.
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JR: So how have things changed for Bluemoose Post-pandemic? You’ve described indie presses in the past as the coral reefs of the publishing world, you know, vital but at risk. With rising prices and all the pressures mounting on small presses after the pandemic, how has that affected the way that you operate day to day?
KD: At the start of the pandemic, I think like quite a lot of independent publishers, we thought we were going to go bust because all the bookshops were shutting. But bizarrely we had a brilliant 2020, 2021 and 2022. I think the cost of living crisis now in 2024 is going to be the hardest year for indie publishers and booksellers as well. As you said, with the cost of paper, price-wise. But because, as I said before, we forensically curate our list, you know eighty per cent of our sales list is backlist, and that means we’re sustainable for the next however many years, ten years. And because we’ve got a very strong backlist it means that - you know, because we’ve licenced Ben Myers’ backlist to Bloomsbury and we’ve licensed Nod to Titan Books, and we’ve got several which we’ve sold to publishers in translation, especially in Germany, so we get a percentage of that. So our royalties and licensing means that we’ve got a decent sum coming in every year now and it’s only getting bigger.
We’ve got three books in TV and film production at the minute which are Nod, Leonard and Hungry Paul, and Should We Fall Behind by Sharon Duggal, and it just means that when they hit the screens we will get some income. So our backlist and our licencing and royalties. But that’s taken time, you can’t do that within year one. But it just means that like, as you will know as a bookseller, I don’t know if it is eighty per cent but the vast majority of your sales will be backlist sales and I think most bookshops or publishers are driven by backlist and in effect frontlist is just jazz hands, you know. Waving and saying look at me, this is what we’re doing. But you’re directing people to the books you’ve already published and that’s how you make your money. Once that first print run has gone, or once the major costs have been sorted you can make a bit more profit on the backlist. So, again because we don’t have huge premises our costs are It’s really weird, the publishing industry demands growth, growth, growth. But as you know, as a bookseller, we do publish too many books in this country. There are too many books published. We will never publish more than ten [a year] and I think you can still grow as a company. But perhaps not. And you know, we don’t want to be Penguin but if we’re growing five per cent per year, that’s fine. We’ve got no shareholders to satisfy. You know those rapacious demands of the shareholders. I think it’s Tom Weldon, the CEO of Penguin UK, who keeps coming back and saying they’ve got to grow by ten per cent every year and they’ve got to give at least ten per cent to the shareholders. The pressure on them to produce bestsellers all the time is just phenomenal. I would hate to work for a huge publisher because they’ve got inherent anxieties about every book having to earn not only its coin but also make a big contribution to the company. Whereas our books have got to make some money we can wait a year or two years for our books to become ‘bestsellers’ or just sell well. It’s the first three months that are so important for the bigger publishers these days to get on the charts or to sell big numbers. |
JR: What are your thoughts on the quality of books from those big publishers? You’re looking at the frontlines and booksellers focus on so many titles and those heavy hitters, those celebrity bestsellers, those seasonal quiz books and things, that are right at the top of the charts these days. In terms of quality of writing and production, do you feel like they’re cutting corners and skimping slightly?
KD: Yeah, you know, they’re trying to keep their RRP price down so you look at the quality of the paper or the quality of the print. You look at the thickness of covers these days, on some of the bigger publishers, they’re quite thin so they sort of bend and they stay bent. All our books are published in the UK by Short Run Press our typesetting is done in Lancaster by Carnegie Publishing, and we pay a bit more for that but I think if you’re asking someone to pay £9.99 or over £10 for a book - and a book is for life and not just for Christmas - we will never compromise on quality and that’s the quality of the writing, the quality of the print, the quality of the production. We always say before we send the book out it’s got to pass the Bluemoose ‘strokeability test’. It’s got to be the best in show.
And as we say, we are the coral reefs, we’re adding a bit of colour. But you know, I have in the past had a bit of a pop at the bigger publishers but they do bring some fantastic writers onto the bookshelves but there is a lot of blancmange out there. And even though the bigger books are getting even bigger, that does create an opportunity for smaller publishers because we’re told, and you’ll have heard as a bookseller, and I’m constantly getting emails from people saying that they’ve gone into the bigger high street bookshops and they’re not finding the new exciting books available. So they’re going to the smaller independent bookstores who have to curate differently to compete. So they’re curation of backlist and frontlist is different because they can’t compete on price with the big blockbusters. And so they’re the literary aficionados, perhaps, are finding their reading opium in the smaller bookshops. |
JR: Absolutely. You talk about rising prices and things, and I think as a punter, as a reader, you’re no longer seeing hardbacks at £16.99, £18.99. You’re looking at a new fiction at £25.00 these days.
KD: And that’s a false price, you know. What they’re doing there is they’re printing a false RRP at £25 knowing that they’re going to give at least sixty to seventy per cent off to Amazon to make it under a tenner, or for the supermarkets. But then the high street booksellers can’t do that. So they’re creating that false price not for the industry, well in effect it’s the industry, but they’re supplying it for three main retails: Amazon, the supermarkets and Waterstones. But no one is talking about that.
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JR: Yeah, and the ripple effect of that is then the paperbacks creeping up a bit and your average paperback is starting to edge over a tenner.
Are you starting to feel the pressure as a small press to raise your prices to match the landscape?
Are you starting to feel the pressure as a small press to raise your prices to match the landscape?
KD: We’ve just seen our printing costs go up by about twenty-five to twenty-six per cent which means we’ve held our prices at £9.99 for the past three years but there might come a point perhaps in 2025 - especially with smaller print runs, you know if we were printing 100,000 copies we could keep the prices low but we’re not doing those sums - so we might have to [break] above the £10 mark. But I think because we’ve got such a loyal readership they know they’re going to get quality and they’re going to get great stories and books that will stay with them for life. I think that the readers who know what we do - without becoming a victim and the struggles we’re all going through - won’t mind an extra quid or an extra couple of quid.
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JR: I’ve seen so many customers, especially in the last two or three years, more than ever coming in in search of particular publishers, not just authors. Their awareness of the industry is better than it’s ever been, I think.
KD: And we have to thank the pandemic for that. I know you’re not allowed to say things like that, you know, the three hundred and odd thousand people died, but the consequences of Amazon for the first two weeks shutting off their buttons to buy because books weren’t deemed essential services then, they quickly changed it around, but for two weeks people were then looking around for other publishers. You know, we don’t talk about it but unfortunately, the default for someone buying a book online is to go straight to Amazon, isn’t it?
When they couldn’t do that people started looking for other publishers and ways to find books. And we, together with Little Toller who are a publisher of nature books in Dorset, we asked Ben to write a short story for us and we did a bit of a, you know, we’re waving not drawing, and it managed to get some attention in The Bookseller and The Guardian. So I think people started to look elsewhere and you’re right, they’re looking for books from publishers rather than just authors. |
JR: You mention The Guardian. There was the indie publishing mavericks article last year that talked about how indie have a willingness to take on potentially less commercial titles but are pushing boundaries. I mean, you’ve been doing this for quite a while now, you’ve kind of grown up with a lot of these other small presses. Who do you see doing great work right now?
KD: I look at Eloise and Sam at Galley Beggar, I look at Sara Hunt at Saraband, at Jeremy at Peepal Tree, I look at Ra and his team at Comma Press, who have done probably more than any other publisher in the UK or internationally for the short story and short stories in translation. Their books on cities, books on Prague, London, they're producing a book on Gaza and Palestine, they’ve been doing tremendous stuff over the last twenty years. So it's those kinds of publishers, and Valerie at Jacaranda who’s done remarkable things with writers from the Caribbean and West Africa and they’re a go-to publisher now. Those are the kinds of publishers I look to.
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JR: You’ve spoken before about the importance of off-balancing that London-centric publishing world. Do you still feel, even in the face of Hebden Bridge having such an amazing writing community now, that North-South divide as a barrier for small presses?
KD: Yeah, I still think it is. I know some of the bigger publishers, I think it’s Hachette have, haven’t they, and I think HarperCollins have offices in Newcastle and Manchester and Sheffield, I think. But they’re still publishing books which they’d probably published via London anyway, I don’t know, I don’t see anything remarkably different. That might be disingenuous of me, and I don’t mean to, because they’re making an effort and they’re doing something.
But the people making the big decision are all still based in London. And we’ll see. It’s if these satellite offices aren’t making money then the most important people in publishing are not the editors, it’s the sales and marketing people. It’s all about the bottom line and shareholders, isn’t it? For me, I might be speaking out of turn, but for me, literature is about finding great new talent and developing that and promoting that and I don’t see that with the bigger publishers, even with their satellites. If they’re giving out bigger advances, if those advances are not earned and those books don’t make big money then that author isn’t going to get a second book published by them. We are publishing the third fourth and fifth novels by authors who we published their debuts in 2007/8. And I think that is the difference with independent publishers. We’re there for the writer's career. Obviously, when Bloomsbury came with Harry Potter gold for Ben there was nothing we could do. And that is a commercial decision and we knew that was going to happen because he’s a brilliant writer. But we make some money off the sales of The Gallows Pole, especially after the TV series. But I think you really do have to look to the smaller presses for the really interesting books that are coming out. And then the bigger publishers with their imprints are trying to be cool and iconoclastic and after you develop a writer you’ll see them wave a big cheque at various authors and then we have to say goodbye. |
JR: In terms of your global scale, I saw in the press recently that you’ve had your biggest deal ever with Rónán’s latest two in Germany. Obviously, that’s going to have a huge impact on the publisher and on you being able to put other things out now. But for an author, that is also huge, isn’t it?
KD: Yeah, It’s massive. I mean, for the first time ever Bluemoose in translation in mainland Europe the turnover has been over a million Euros. Which is phenomenal. We yeah, we sold Ghost Mountain and Panenka to Blessing Verlag which is an imprint of Penguin Random House. And we sold Leonard and Hungry Paul for a big five-figure sum too. And we have an agent, Deborah, who runs an agency in Paris and she looks after all our books in translation. So she goes to all the kinds of continental book fairs, Frankfurt, etc. And she’s in contact with publishers around the world for our translation but we’ve got an agent in America as well who looks after all our books for North America and Canada, which is obviously the biggest market in the world. So we’ve got books in translation and books for North America, our authors are well catered for for rights there.
We’ve also got a film and TV agent in London who works for the biggest TV and film agency in the world. They’re just called The Agency. They’re based in London and Hollywood and look after all the Bluemoose books, so they’re talking about our books to Netflix and all the streamers. And we’ve been working with them for about ten years now. |
JR: I guess it’s maybe hard to tell right now, or if you’re looking ahead at the next few years, but does that kind of international success feed back into the type of books you may publish in the future? Would you consider doing more international translations into English, for instance?
KD: Yeah, we’re getting more and more books sent to us from agents and although we’ve never done books in translation before it’s definitely something we’d look to do. But it doesn’t shift our mindset of what we want to publish. In our DNA is just finding great books, great stories written well. And I know that sounds a bit of a platitude but it’s true. And it’s worked and it will also work. Because I think if you try and replicate something you’ve done in the past to accrue more money then it’s not going to work. You’ve got to just go with your gut with what you feel is a good story and is well-written and put everything you can behind it. And find the readers for it. And then, like with Ben, like with Rónán, like with Sharon’s writing, you get more and more books sold, you get more and more people coming to you.
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JR: Because you’re so hands-on and because you’ve got such great relationships with your authors, are there one or two books you could pick out from the last few years that you’ve particularly enjoyed working on?
KD: Yeah, there’s a wonderful story we published last year, last January, called Chopin in Kentucky by a writer from Boston, Massachusetts, called Elizabeth Heichelbech. It’s a story about a young girl called Marie Higginbottam and she comes from a kind of dysfunctional Southern family, obviously based in Kentucky, and she wants to be a ballet dancer. But she’s the ‘wrong shape’, or everybody tells her she’s the wrong shape and she can’t dance. And her imaginary friend is Chopin the musician, but her real-life friend is called Maisie and she’s the state’s under-thirteen female Elvis impersonator champion. And they just go around doing stuff.
And you know, sales were just trickling through, not doing anything, but then someone contacted me and said that they’d read Chopin in Kentucky and said it was the best thing they’ve ever read but then he said he was the principal dancer as The Royal Ballet in London and he wanted to turn it into a ballet. So he’s turning it into a ballet. Those are the stories, no one would’ve published, no one wanted to publish until we took it, but it’s such an unusual and unique story. It’s brilliantly written, it’s very funny, and it’s tragic in parts but it’s about - without getting too X-Factor about it - a young girl following her dream and dancing her way out of rural poverty. And she does it despite all the trials and tribulations thrown at her. But when the principal dancer at The Royal Ballet rings you up, gets the number of the author, rings the author in Boston and has a chat for an hour about how much they loved the book, that’s why we publish. |
JR: Definitely. It’s special stories like where you must get a fuzzy feeling. I heard a similar story about someone in Hollywood calling you about Leonard and Hungry Paul in a similar way, is that true?
KD: Yeah, so I was having a meal with the family in a pub in Hebden and Julia Roberts' agent messaged me. So I deleted it straight away. I just thought it was a troll or something. And then she messaged me again and said if you Google my name you’ll find out who I am. So I did and she was. So it turns out Julia Roberts had just read the American edition of Leonard and Hungry Paul and she wanted to get in touch with Rónán and thank him for writing such a beautiful book about kindness. And again, that’s the power of what we do. And yeah, it does give you a fuzzy feeling, especially as I’d just spat out a roast potato across the room when I found out it was Julia Roberts!
So it’s those things, and you know we’re not publishing celebrity books, but books where things happen when people read them. I still get emails every day from people who’ve read Leonard and Hungry Paul - about it being a book about kindness and about two individuals who you’d probably walk past, and they’re probably on the Autism scale, where they’ve read it to their Autistic child. And it’s just those things things. I’ve still got to put food on the table but it does give you an extra push that you know what you’re doing is working. You know, publishing is really easy, it’s finding great stories, getting them published and finding readers for them. But we don’t have the pressures of having to have bestsellers straight away. And I know I’m repeating myself. But that’s the beauty of building a writer and their careers, you know, we can do it. |
JR: Yeah, you know, it’s such a special feeling as a bookseller when you find a book that just seems to click with readers. And I can only imagine that that would be exponentially better for those who find the manuscript or have worked with the author to create that. Leonard and Hungry Paul is just one of those titles, and you know our experience of selling that book at Forum Books for example, but we can have these hand-picks that have always done well but it’s the kind of book you can almost put into anyone’s hands.
KD: And then Panenka was completely different. It was a different kind of readership. But Ghost Mountain comes out in May and we’re all panicking like mad thinking, ‘Oh my god, is it a second album syndrome?’ But I think and I hope - it’s a completely different book to Panenka and it’s completely different to [LAHP] but it is a fable for our times. And I just think it’s the best thing he’s written. Already the feedback we’re getting is just absolutely phenomenal. It’s resonating with people and touching them and just blowing them out of the water. And it’s unique and different to anything else being published. And that’s the beauty of being an independent publisher, in that you can take these massive risks - I don’t think it’s a risk because it’s Rónán and he’s now got a following. But there’s no way that Penguin or Harper would publish Ghost Mountain. They’d be like, ‘Oh my god, what’s the market?’, ‘Where do we place it in the bookshop?’
Instead of just allowing booksellers and readers, giving them enough intelligence to say, ‘Here’s a book. I think you’ll really like it.’ That’s all you have to do, isn’t it? |
JR: Absolutely. With the good ones, it really is as easy as that.
To finish us off here then Kevin, could you tell us about Christ On A Bike?
To finish us off here then Kevin, could you tell us about Christ On A Bike?
KD: Yes, that’s by Orla Owen. And again, the feedback we’ve had, we released it early, It’s not published officially until the 25th of January. So yeah, there’s a woman and she gets left some money, there’s a will, she gets left some money but she’s got to stick to three rules. And those rules lead her down a path she doesn’t really want to go to. It’s like Tales of the Unexpected meets Black Mirror with shades of Shirley Jackson.Again, it’s kind of different, it’s kind of a thriller, a psychological crime, but it’s beautifully written. This might sound a little crass, but one of the big reasons why I publish it is when I find a manuscript and it just grabs you by the scruff of the neck and drags you through the story and it just demands to be published. And I think that with Orla. This is her third novel and I think this will get her even more readers. We’ve got a brilliant jacket by one of our designers. A great read.
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JR: And is there anything else you can give us a hint at coming out in the near future?
KD: We’ve got a book by Jo McMillan coming out in the Autumn. We’ve also got a book coming out in 2025 which I’m very excited about by Susanna Crossman called The Orange Notebook. She lives in northern France but was brought up in a cult in London with her two sisters, which is what her non-fiction book coming out with Penguin this August will be about. But [The Orange Notebook] is her first fiction title which we’re all very excited about and is a remarkable piece of writing.
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"We are publishing the third fourth and fifth novels by authors who we published their debuts in 2007/8. And I think that is the difference with independent publishers. We’re there for the writer's career."Head to Bluemoose Books to see what exciting new titles they have in store for 2024.
If you liked the sound of any of the books mentioned above then head to orders to request your copy. |