My Blog

Starting 2025 with an apology

Posted on January 2, 2025 in Path to publication, Phosphate Rocks, Self-publishing

Happy New Year!

I have an apology to make. I’ve been ignoring you. After redesigning my author website (with the invaluable assistance of Simon Appleby at Bookswarm), I then neglected to post or update regularly – even though the new WordPress platform is now MUCH easier to use.

I promise to do better in 2025. I’m aiming for AT LEAST a post a week. Judge me in 2026.

So top news first.

To celebrate 100 reviews and being paired** with Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, (my favourite book of 2023*), Phosphate Rocks: A Death in Ten Objects is now available for FREE on KDP Select.

I wanted to go as broad as possible when republishing Phosphate Rocks (after Sandstone Press went bust), but my full year sales for 2024 with Kobo and Barnes and Noble were a miserable one e-book each. Time to try a different tack. I promise to report back on how it’s going.

And since you asked, here’s how the year developed for print sales (mainly bookshops) and ebooks (mainly Amazon) in 2024.  I reissued Phosphate Rocks & a North American edition of The Chemical Detective and I self-published Losing Control.

Among the lessons I’ve learned is that re-issuing new editions of old books costs much more than you recoup, and the best way to increase sales is to write another book.

Fellow writers – stop reading now and get back to work (and feel free to contact me direct for actual sales numbers if it helps cheer you up).

I don’t know about you, but I’m finding all the flavours of social media hard to navigate these days. I was never a facebook person (and I still struggle). I use LinkedIN as an address book for keeping in touch with professional colleagues. My favourite social media was twitter/X where I met new book people, bought the novels they recommended and made some wonderful on-line friends. Now I have to figure out where BlueSky and Threads and Notes and Instagram and BookTock fit in and whether I have time to engage.

The only new platform I’ve really taken to is Substack – home of some great longform journalism.

I’ve been busy writing a rubbish first draft of The Chemical Tiger on Substack, chapter by chapter to impose some self-discipline and a weekly wordcount target. I strongly suggest you wait until it’s finished polished and then professionally edited. At the moment I’m just figuring out whodunnit…

I have lots of exciting plans for 2025, and I promise to update this site more regularly in future!

Fiona

*Yes, 2023 is not a typo. I got there first folks, in hardback, thanks to Mel at Drake the Bookshop. She should be on the Booker Prize judging committee.

** Andrew Wille wrote in his Readers Report for 2024, ‘I really enjoyed how both Orbital and Phosphate Rocks were doing something different with the form of the novel – in different ways each felt like hybrid forms of creative nonfiction, and though I read both of them early in the year they stuck with me. Lots of good science to digest in accessible ways, plus important political dimensions. I also enjoyed Fiona Erskine’s procedural thriller Losing Control too.’