The official site of author Stuart Farquhar
Full details of The Light Beneath the Waves launch week
The Light Beneath the Waves will be released on Monday 5th January. It’ll be available from Amazon in paperback and for Kindle. Anyone buying the paperback will also receive a free Kindle download. I’d love it if you’d post some reviews on Amazon and GoodReads. The Kindle edition of The Ultimate Dreamer will be free 5th-7th January. Last time thousands of copies were downloaded around the world and it performed very strongly in international Amazon charts. The Kindle edition of Death Us Do Part will be free 8th-9th January. The title of the cats novel will be announced on 9th January. There may be other things happening during launch week, including a new History Globe de-tailing the creation of the mermaid and the book cover. Please contact me all through launch week on Facebook, Twitter, GoodReads or my website to ask me questions or leave your comments. And please share all of this information with everyone you can. Thanks. Advent calendar competition winner
Thanks to everyone who entered the Advent calendar
competition. I challenged you to guess what the picture was of as it was
revealed bit by bit over the twenty-four days. Wrong answers included a scary
face, a puppet and, interestingly, a selkie (perhaps inspired by my promoting
my friend Judith Fullerton’s new novel, The Selkie Pact). A few of you guessed
it was a mermaid, some quite early on, and in other circumstances this would
have been enough. However, it’s clearly not a normal mermaid, and some of you
gave more detailed answers such as ‘mummified mermaid’, ‘a mermaid’s corpse’
and ‘skeleton mermaid’, any of which would have been good enough to beat just ‘mermaid’.
In other circumstances. But one person gave the very specific answer ‘Feejee mermaid’, even posting this Wikipedia link for those who didn’t know what a Feejee mermaid is. And, in all honestly, there’s no reason why most people should know. But if you read the link, you’ll see that’s exactly what it is. It’s a fake mermaid, and one deliberately made to look both grotesque and quite unlike the traditional western idea of mermaids. It’s even called a Feejee mermaid in the book (as you’ll see when you read it). Such specific knowledge was impressive, especially with the wiki link, and we all agreed (Phil Scary, Leigh Grieve and myself) that this trumped all other answers and deserved to be the winner. So congratulations to markfiend, who wins himself a signed copy of The Light Beneath the Waves. Thanks again to everyone who took part. I enjoyed reading your answers, your comments and your general discomfort at whatever was lurking behind the doors. I hope you enjoy the book when it comes out on January 5th. |
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Man of SnowMy brand new short story, Man of Snow, is now available to download free from the Downloads page. It's a spooky story for Christmas.
Latest NewsThe Light Beneath the Waves will be published on January 5th.
Misprinted copies of The Ultimate Dreamer & Death Us Do Part
If you’ve bought paperback or Kindle copies of The Ultimate Dreamer or Death Us Do Part, you may have noticed some oddities in the interior text, such as badly spaced lines or hyph-ens ap-pearing in odd places (like that). I had been made aware of some odd hyphenation in the original prints of The Ultimate Dreamer, but I’d assumed they were due to my own incompetence and had them corrected. However, I’ve recently discovered the fault lay with CreateSpace, the company that prints the books, and not only is it likely there are still problems with the print editions but these may have been carried over to the Kindle editions too, as I was allowing CreateSpace to send their printing files to Kindle for me. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but now I know what’s going on, I can prevent it from happening in future. I can only apologise to those of you who have faulty copies. (Which may well be all of you – I don’t know for sure and probably never will.) This is an embarrassment to me as it makes my books look shoddy and unprofessional. In due course I’ll be releasing corrected versions of both books in paperback and for Kindle. They won’t have different covers or anything, just corrected interiors. They may become un-available for a few days while the new versions are being processed. Unfortunately this won’t help those of you with faulty copies and I’m not personally in a position to arrange for replacements for everyone. However, next time there’s a free giveaway, please take advantage and get yourself a corrected Kindle copy. (Please note, there will be giveaways during launch week of The Light Beneath the Waves, but it’s unlikely I’ll have corrected copies ready by then as it’s a time-consuming process. There’ll be an announcement when the corrected copies are ready and possibly a special giveaway just for that.) I caught the problem early enough that it won’t affect The Light Beneath the Waves: all copies of the new novel and any future publications should be fine. Nor does it affect the free short stories on my website, as I prepared those myself. Once again I apologise if this has spoiled anyone’s enjoyment of the books, and thank you all for your continued support. |