Goodbye 2020 (at last!)

It’s time for our annual roundup of the last twelve months and what a year it’s been! From a publishing and writing perspective it’s been a busy and exciting year, despite the difficulties caused by the pandemic. From a personal perspective it’s been very up and down and a year we’ll be glad to get past.

January started off well with the Horror-On-Sea film festival where we were selling books. At the time, we thought it was the beginning of an events-filled year. January also saw the birth of our daughter Mathilda and we can hardly believe she’s almost a year old already.

February involved a Q&A at the Bloody Flicks Film Awards, selling lots of signed books, and the release of our first signed authors book – Dirges in the Dark by Antoinette Corvo.

Then everything went weird in March. We’d had a weekend away and the following week we were plunged into lockdown. We quickly found ourselves having to home-school the children 5 hours per day alongside work. This went on for almost six months and was honestly exhausting. In March we released Madman Across the Water by Caroline Angel and A is for Aliens.

April brought us The Ivory Tower by Antoinette Corvo and May saw the release of B is for Beasts. April also brought the exciting news that P.J. Blakey-Novis had won the Indipenned Short Story Contest 2020 with the short horror tale Passing Through.

June showed some relief from lockdown rules as businesses began reopening. This increase in people commuting resulted in a large bump in sales of audio books. In June we release the epic cosmic horror tale The Vegas Rift by David F. Gray, as well as C is for Cannibals.

July saw the release of The Place Between Worlds, the fifth collection of short stories from P.J. Blakey-Novis.

August saw us release The Curse Awakens, the long-awaited sequel to Madman Across the Water, as well as D is for Demons. In September we brought you the first children’s book from Gemma Paul, The Little Bat That Could, as well as E is for Exorcism.

October came around quickly and things were really busy on the run-up to Halloween. We released four books that month – Keep It Inside by Mark Anthony Smith, F is for Fear, The Mummy Walks At Midnight, and the superb charity anthology It Came From The Darkness in aid of the Max the Brave Fund. October also hit us with a medical emergency and week’s hospitalisation for Leanne so it was a difficult time but we’re proud of the books we’ve managed to put out.

November was mostly spent reading through the 114 submissions we received for our next anthology and listening to audio books we had in production. You can find out which audio books are available on our new Audio Page. Despite this, we still brought you three more books – the apocalyptic horror novel Less by Caroline Angel, A Very Zombie Christmas by Gemma Paul, and The Cat That Caught The Canary by Antoinette Corvo.

G is for Genies dropped on December 9th and H is for Hell is currently available to pre-order ahead of release of January 13th. December was a difficult month personally as we lost a close family member unexpectedly so we needed a little time to deal with that.

So what about 2021? What do we have in store? Well, it’s a lot. We’ll be bringing another 6 or 7 books from the A-Z of Horror Series out. We have a new novel from Caroline Angel coming. There is a trilogy from Antoinette Corvo. A sequel to The Vegas Rift is being written. Mark Anthony Smith has another collection of shorts and a novella in progress. Gemma Paul will be adding to the Kreepy Kids Collection. We have a novella from David Owain Hughes and a collection of short horrors from J.C. Michael. There will be a sixth collection of short stories as well as two novels from P.J. Blakey-Novis by the end of the year. We also have two other projects which we can’t discuss just yet but they look like they’ll be awesome.

Huge thanks to everyone who has supported us by buying the books, leaving reviews, sharing posts, and submitting to the anthologies. You’re all rather wonderful.

Have a great 2021.

Peter & Leanne