Turning words into stories.

Publishing. Writing. Blurbs. Covers. Fiction.

From Colin's blog . . .
Exploring Exo – the headland of Dungeness
Exploring Exo – the headland of Dungeness

Discover Dungeness, the real-life inspiration for my novel Exo.

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Extra! Extra! Announcing Exo – a novel of murder and the end of the world
Extra! Extra! Announcing Exo – a novel of murder and the end of the world

After writing the words on the outsides of several thousand books, I’ve decided to take a shot at the insides of one.

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8. The Irresistible End
8. The Irresistible End

‘But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.’ – The House At Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne

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7. The Many Shaped Blurb
7. The Many Shaped Blurb

‘Poetry is precise a thing as geometry’ – Gustave Flaubert

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6. Middling – opposites make a blurb
6. Middling – opposites make a blurb

‘There is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites.’ Carl Jung

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5. Beginnings, or How to Get People’s Attention
5. Beginnings, or How to Get People’s Attention

‘It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

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4. Pitching your story’s emotional hook
4. Pitching your story’s emotional hook

‘I never take on a client unless I can pitch their book in twelve words.’ UK literary agent

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3. Who are we talking to?
3. Who are we talking to?

‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half’ John Wanamaker, US Postmaster General and marketing pioneer

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Discover my novel EXO
a story of murder,
multi-dimensions
and the end of the world

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Blurbs in the wild: Kaliane Bradley and Sceptre’s The Ministry of Time offers the meeting of Victorian polar explorer and 21st-century civil servant. In the blurb this odd couple and their contrasting worlds provide sparks of excitement & o
Blurbs in the wild: The all-quotes blurb is Cubist in that it’s an opportunity to pitch the book from multiple viewpoints. For @vintagebooks and Adam Smyth’s The Book Makers, we have a story for bibliophiles everywhere. Love is a many-spl
Blurbs in the wild: Sometimes all you want is the inciting incident and a line or two about the story's scope. Ali Smith and @penguinhamishhamilton Gliff has two sentences: the first is small – intriguing with details; the second is expansive a
Blurbs in the wild: A novel about an imaginary novel from a classic book that's escaped a fantastical London behind the real London, @bloomsburypublishing and Alan Moore's The Great When is a series of nestings & the blurb does a great job of pit
A shout out to my LEGIONS of American followers, @barnesandnoble are currently offering a whopping 25% off ALL PRE-ORDERED TITLES until end of Friday, April 25th. You read that right! Murder, hyperdimensions and the end of the world are currently bei
Blurbs in the office: For the 40th anniversary edition of @michaeljbooks and @dndwizards original Dragonlance trilogy by Weis and Hickman, the trick was to convey both the fun story and the beloved game. A character list (names, races, professions),
Books by the sea: Announcing my first novel – Exo – published in November by Diversion Books in the USA. A tale of murder, higher dimensions and the end of the world . . . The inspiration came from Dungeness – sea, shore, dilapidate
Blurbs in the wild: sometimes a blurb perfectly captures a book. For @jennie.godfrey and @hutchheinemann The List of Suspicious Things the blurb reads like the book in microcosm: dark subject lightly but seriously addressed, small problems in a big,
Blurbs in the wild: Cosy crime loves a niche setting. How to emphasise that niche and the cosiness's inherent humour? Dish up a lot of puns. @orlandomurrinauthor and @transworldbooks Knife Skills for Beginners throws half a dozen cooking/murder-relat
Shout lines in the wild: One of my all-time favourite cover lines for @robertharrishome and @hutchheinemann Conclave. Uses two brilliant word pairings – God/men, power/ambition – to not just help explain a title that for many will be opaq
Blurbs in the wild: time was when a complicated SF concept was genre or bust. Nowadays, literary fiction embraces high concepts. But how to combine? In @scottalexanderhoward and @atlanticbooks The Other Valley character, concept and emotion are intim
Blurbs in the wild: Love the interleaving of quotes and copy in @johnmurrays and Daniel Mason's North Woods. Simple use of CAPS for copy makes reading it clear and the divisions make what could be a tricky proposition – multiple narrators over