Lilian’s Spell Book – August 1st

A while ago, I wrote a novel – a ghost story…

 

 

Lilian’s Spell Book was written compulsively, under the power of the story, which was – at the same time – very complicated and very simple.

I was hoping to publish it under a pseudonym – Alex Warden.

And it went out to editors, under that pseudonym, and everyone was confused and no-one wanted to publish it.

And so I put it up on Wattpad – where it did pretty well. Over 750,000 ‘reads’, which translates as ‘hits to a chapter’. At points it was the most read Paranormal book on the site – and there are lots of Paranormal books there.

 

The Uppers, The Downers and The Hanging Arounders

 

The original idea, for those who had been paying close attention, was that I would continue my alphabetically titled books (Adventures in Capitalism to Life-Like, so far, with Notes for a Young Gentleman to come), but that one day M would come and L would be mysteriously missing. (Because I’d published it as Alex Warden.) And those who had been paying close attention would say, ‘Huh, where’s L?’ and then go off and look through all the novels that had been published in the previous year with a title beginning with L, and eventually they’d find it. I thought this would be fun. (My kind of fun clearly isn’t everybody’s kind of fun.)

I also thought it would be interesting to try and write a book that couldn’t be tracked to me – that no-one would believe I’d written. I did try this before once. King Death was also written to come out under a pseudonym. I will probably try to do it again.

Anyway, I’ve written a longer article about the whole experience for Kate Pullinger’s The Writing Platform. That appeared on August 1st. That’s the launch date for the book, too.

And so, as of then, Lilian’s Spell Book is available on Kindle, and as a print on demand paperback.

The original title was A Summer Haunting. Now’s definitely the time of year it’s meant to be read.