Castle Priory Press

Castle Priory Press have accepted me as one of their authors!

After a successful meeting with Jane Langan, we agreed that Castle Priory Press would start work on publishing Are We Still Friends?

They've got my completed manuscript and will start editing in October so, hopefully, there will be an annotated version for me to work through during November. If there aren't too many edits to do and we work well together, we might even publish by Christmas!

Now I really need to start thinking about covers - not just for the book but for uploading to, for example, Libraro and other pre-publication review platforms. I'm not sure how prescriptive and/or complicated I can be with CPP but here are a couple I mocked up. One is based on the image used here that is supposed to represent a photo I can't find of myself and my friend watching the waves at Wembury in Devon after riding horses along the beach:

The other is copied from a book cover I admired and is more representative of the friends as adults which is, after all, where the narrative sits. It definitely needs quite a bit of work but I'll see what Jane thinks before I invest more time. Or maybe I'll try to identify a better artist than myself who would work on it.

Just as an FYI, this post could just as easily have been about how not a single agent responded to my submissions sent out in July. One did send a personal acknowledgement of receipt and, I think, assumed that I would understand that he wasn't interested in taking it further; that was the one who was paid to talk to me in London and encouraged me to send out again while expressing surprise that I got no response from agents. As someone who provides software to engineers which can send out an email within seconds of arriving on site, I find it incomprehensible that agencies don't have the courtesy to invest in a similar app to indicate why they've rejected a submission. Message me if you'd like to find out more.