It is hard to believe that in 43 days, my sixth novel will be released. As promised, here’s a small video promoting the release. To see it, press play below, and turn up the volume.
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I know I was also talking about including a cut chapter from the book, but before I talk about that, I want to share a bit about the journey to this final book in the Declan Hunt Mysteries series. I wanted to look back at how the last six years have changed my life.
It all started in 2020 during the pandemic. At the time I was still working at the Royal Ontario Museum, and employees were asked to work from home. I was also bumped back to four days per week, so suddenly I had long weekends every weekend. Scott and I coped differently with the isolation requirements of the pandemic. He did a photo-journal with daily stories of the life of two stuffed meerkats who lived with us (Larry & Curly), and I started writing on a book. A friend had suggested that gay novels were gaining traction in the publishing world, and thought I should try my hand … after all, I had written plays and was a creative fellow.
By the spring of 2021, I had a manuscript that involved action, suspense and romance, and I was ready to send queries off to publishers. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I initially sent to six publishing companies, and received 5 rejections, but late in the fall of 2021, Pride Publishing in England sent me a note saying they were indeed interested in releasing my first novel. It would have to go through lots of steps in terms of editing, but by the end of the process I would be a published author. I had planned to retire on my birthday in September of 2021, so I finished my work with the ROM, and in the spring of 2022, after lots of editing work with the publisher, The Woodcarver’s Model came out.
Different publishers have different royalty structures. While my first published novel didn’t have an advance, the cover art, editing and distribution were all financed by the publisher, as well as some limited publicity. I didn’t have to put any money into the process, and I was offered a free set of marketing videos to help me figure out how to shout out my book. Scott got to work on creating the base elements of any author’s trade including social media accounts, a website, and joining Facebook groups. None of this had a hard cost, but it was a lot of hours to put in. Scott told me he would focus his energies on my marketing, so I could focus on writing.
Royalties from the big retailers such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Kobo come in to the publisher 6 months after the sale. Monthly sales statements are sent to the author along with a monthly royalty cheque. We had no idea how much the book would earn or how many copies would be sold. We were in Iceland when the first statement came through in June with a trickle of sales through the publisher’s own website. That first royalty cheque was around $20 Canadian. But the thing about books is that as you keep writing, the royalties slowly grow, along with the readership. It was all very exciting. This was never intended as an income, but rather as a retirement project anyway.
It was at this point that my writing path took a strange turn. An acquisitions editor named Allister Thompson with Lorimer Publishing in Canada somehow crossed paths with my first novel and emailed me. He was commissioning youth novels that involved normalizing gay teen relationships (in a fairly innocent way) and wondered if I would be interested in writing something for them. This book would have a small advance, but again, the company would do all of the editing and distribution, and the target for this book was libraries in schools and other institutions. So I sat down and wrote my first youth novel – Not Not Normal. The first draft only took six months to create. It was a novella, and the story was fairly simple, but the process for THIS book was much longer, going through youth editors for accuracy, and vetting by various levels of the company. Ultimately, the book didn’t come out until 2024, but it was a step to credibility within the Canadian publishing industry.
After the manuscript for Not Not Normal was sent off to the publisher, I wondered what I would do next. At this point, I was beginning to have a small following on Amazon, Instagram and Facebook thanks to Scott’s social media work. The Woodcarver’s Model was nominated in four different categories of the Male/Male Romance Readers’ Choice Awards on Goodreads, and though my royalties were still pretty small, my sales were showing a slow but steady growth.
At around this time Pride Publishing reached out, encouraging me to write more books for them. They asked what I was interested in, and I replied without thinking that I loved British murder mysteries. They suggested that I might try my hand at a mystery, but there were a few conditions. The story still had to have gay central characters … and they were focusing their energies on books that were series, instead of stand-alone books like The Woodcarver’s Model.
And so I began work on Mann Hunt. I was fully retired by now and had more writing time.
Writing on a mystery is a strange and wonderful process and I was very proud of the draft I completed between the spring and fall of 2022. Scott does my initial content editing prior to handing over a draft to the publisher. We have worked together for years on plays, and I trust his instincts on structure and pacing. I had been out of the house, leaving Scott in peace to read, and when I came home, he looked me in the eye and said, “I think you should sit down for a minute.”
He said that he had good news and then … something to contemplate. The good news was that he thought I had written an interesting mystery and woven together great characters, good dialogue and the beginnings of a love interest between the two leads. The thing to contemplate … he thought I had the wrong killer at the end.
Initially I was defensive, but Scott laid out his reasoning and simply asked me to think about it. Much of his case had to do with the fact that if the book was going to be a series, then certain elements of the present draft would limit upcoming books. And when I really thought about it … in my heart of hearts, the person he was suggesting, was someone I had considered as the villian. And so … I rewrote the second half of the book. And by January of 2023, I had a manuscript to submit to the publisher, and in August of that same year … Mann Hunt came out. And to my great relief, the readers found the mystery interesting, and said they wanted more.
And that leads me to the next phase of my writing career, for at this point, I had two novels out with a novella coming out the following year and a second book in the series to write … now it was time to get out and meet the readers. It was time to attend my first conference as a writer and actually meet the people who were buying my books. And what I discovered was quite surprising.
But I will leave that segment of the journey until the next blog.
Until then, thanks for reading.
Warmest Regards,
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