Gardens Release In 3 Days

Just as the title says, my new Alex Verus novella, Gardens, releases in 3 days, on Monday 31st October!  You can buy or pre-order it here.

Thanks to everyone who’s pre-ordered the novella so far – it makes a big difference.  I can’t really do much marketing or advertising for my novellas since they’re very much small personal projects, and there’s a definite limit as to how much time I can spend on them before it starts taking too much time and attention away from my novels, which are what actually pay the bills.  So most of the sales/marketing for these novellas come from word of mouth publicity and fans going out of their way to order copies personally.

I have to admit that I’m a little nervous about how this novella’s going to be received.  On the one hand, it’s definitely well-written – I’ve become a better writer over the years and I took the opportunity with this novella to make sure it was as well-crafted as I could make it.  It was also fun to go back to the Alex Verus setting, and I get the feeling that a lot of people are still interested in reading the odd story set in this world.  On the other hand, the subject material for this novella is pretty dark.  Now, this on its own isn’t really anything new – some of the Alex Verus novels such as Taken (#3) and Veiled (#6) had pretty creepy elements – but all the previous Alex Verus entries have been urban fantasy stories.  Gardens still just about fits as “urban fantasy”, but it’s probably more accurate at this point to call it horror, and I’m not sure how people are going to react to that.

But we’ll just have to see!  I didn’t set out attempting to write a horror story, but that was where it ended up, and it was the story I wanted to write, so I’ll just have to make do.  Besides, part of the point of these novellas is to give me the opportunity to experiment a bit and try something new.  After all, if I’d only ever stuck with writing stories in the same genre and aiming at the same sort of audience, I never would have hit upon the Alex Verus series in the first place.

And speaking of something new, I’m currently working on the edits for my first novel in my new series.  I’ve got quite a bit to do, but I’m fairly confident at this point that we’re on track to release next year.  I’ll put up a post with more information in a couple of weeks or so, once Gardens is released and things have quieted down, but the short version is that I’m likely to be busy with this for the rest of the year.