Sinful

The days are ticking down now to the publication of Inspector McLean book 13 – For Our Sins. You lucky people will be able to find out what’s happened to Tony and his colleagues in the almost two years since All That Lives ended on a bombshell.

UK readers have been able to pre-order the Wildfire published edition for a while now, and see the cover art for that edition too, but I’ve been a bit slow off the mark getting the US and Canada eBook editions sorted.

For those of you who don’t know the situation, I have a deal for the Inspector McLean series with Wildfire that covers the UK and Commonwealth Territories (i.e. New Zealand, Australia etc.), but excluding Canada. For the early books in the series I had a deal with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the US (now part of Harper Collins US), and Harper Collins Canada in Canada. Books four and five were published in both the US and Canada by Crooked Lane Press.

Sadly, Inspector McLean hasn’t exactly wowed the North American audience though, and while I have a loyal group of readers oversees, they’re not enough to interest a mainstream publisher. Having the series already split between two publishers for the first five books doesn’t help either – no one’s going to want to pick up the later books if they can’t have the early ones.

Rights to Dead Men’s Bones and Prayer for the Dead were on a licence which will expire soon, and those books will revert to my control. Natural Causes, The Book of Souls and The Hangman’s Song are on a more traditional lifetime deal, so unless they go out of print and stop selling altogether in the US or Canada, I am unlikely to regain control of the entire series any time soon. Such is publishing, and perhaps a subject for another blog post some other time.

The upshot of all this is that I have, since book six – The Damage Done – been self-publishing the Inspector McLean series in the US and Canada as eBooks. I would offer print editions, but that’s very expensive for a tiny market. Fans of print can get the UK editions pretty easily anyway. I’ve also self-published all the Con Fairchild and Sir Benfro books that way, since likewise US publishers have shown no interest in them. It works well for me – Amazon take a lot less of the cover price than mainstream publishers do, so the effort and expenditure is worthwhile.

Most of that expenditure is on covers for the self-published editions, and for this I always turn to the excellent J T Lindroos. He did my first covers for Natural Causes and The Book of Souls back in 2011 – before Penguin came along and changed them – and now he’s done another wonderful cover for Inspector McLean’s latest, For Our Sins.

Good, no? You can pre-order on Kindle, Kobo, Nook and iBooks in the US and Canada by clicking here. UK purchase links can be found at that link too. I’ll be updating links as and when I have them, so if your region and format isn’t there yet, please bear with me.