My queer, middle-aged second-chance romantic mystery novel is now out! You can grab copies from me directly – any one of my 3 shops – and from other eBook platforms.
I’m particularly excited to release this one as it ticks off “complete a longform WIP” and “Publish something” from my 2026 goals. Let’s tap into the January energy!
This one is a bit of absolute nonsense I wanted to write about midlife crises and the friends who have stuck around for years. It was supposed to be an actual romance and then someone got their head bashed in, and I thought… I clearly can’t do this. And maybe the murder makes it better. So this is what we’ve ended up with.
Print copies will also be available shortly, within the next three days. I will also be recording the audio readalong for it, although I don’t know if it will a podcast series. The landing page will be updated to include all stores and options. Find it via “My Fiction” in my site menu, where you can click the covers of all my books and find their links, blurbs, and content notes.
Blurb
A modern queer romantic mystery with middle-aged polyamorous bisexual second chance romance. Midsomer Murders meets The Forty Year Kiss (but with protagonists in their late 40s).
When her long-estranged soulmate and ’90s music star, Bas, reaches out to Sarah on the 6th anniversary of her partner’s death, Sarah and their close-knit group of childhood friends track him down to the picturesque village of Oxstone and find a very different man to the one they knew.
Their old friend is now an alcoholic recluse, broken by the pressures of celebrity, hiding behind a false identity, and being blackmailed by his much-younger “wife”, Isobel. Bas and Sarah are immediately drawn back to each other, despite Sarah’s better judgement, and they embark on an affair.
But Bas isn’t the only one with secrets. When his thirteen-year-old guitar pupil discovers human remains in Oxstone Woods, and then Izzy is brutally murdered, the friends find themselves embroiled in a very dangerous game. And when they collectively decide to hide Izzy’s body to protect Bas and Sarah, all manner of skeletons come tumbling out of the closets.
Can Sarah and Bas navigate their rekindled passion and his journey towards sobriety while solving the mysteries of Isobel’s murder and her possible connection to the bones in the woods, or is it too late for second chances?
A queer, polyamorous whychoose romantic mystery.
Queer rep and the novel’s various non-heteronormative, non-monogamous relationship structures are discussed in this post.
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Ko-Fi members get audiobooks free as well as eBooks, so they won’t need to pay for their audio copies. They also get ad-free podcast episodes posted in advance; this is a new addition to the membership tiers, starting with S04-05. They can already download The Crows, Yelen & Yelena, and The Sussex Fretsaw Massacre for free.
A Note on Print Book Options & Pricing – click to expand if this is of interest to you!
The print book is being published with both Draft2Digital and KDP, as I still haven’t been able to buy my own ISBNs, and Ingramspark don’t offer free ISBNs outside of North America.
Due to the very high overheads with D2D, I’ve chosen to also provide a cheaper print alternative via KDP for people who want the print option but can’t afford to pay $15.99.
With D2D, to make $2 royalties on this book I would need to charge $19.99 USD; $15.99 is the lowest I can go to still make $1 per book. I think this book is worth more than $1 per unit, however, I don’t believe in charging someone ~$20 for a product like this.
Note that this is only the cost per unit, not including shipping costs that the buyer will need to pay on top.
The best option I’ve seen seems to be Ingramspark, but this is based on their public costs calculator, which takes off the printing fee (more than Amazon), but allows authors to retain far more of the royalties.
This is why I really want to buy a bundle of ISBNs (£375 for 100 is probably my best bet, as I already have over 10 titles published.) Without my own ISBNs, I can’t use Ingramspark. They do not provide free ISBNs to the UK market.
For comparison: I can sell a book at US$8.99 and receive $3.52 in royalties, a much better figure, and for the UK market that’s £4.30 per book priced at £8.99. Without my own ISBNs, this is what I’m missing.
However; I would need to sell around 88 copies at a £8.99 list price to earn back the money I spent on the ISBNs which allows me to publish here in the first place. I wouldn’t start seeing a profit again until after my 88th print sale.
To give you an idea of how long this may take, I have sold 187 print units on Amazon between 2019-2026.
On D2D, across the wide distribution channels, I sold a total of 13 print copies in 2025, the year I started printing with them. So it could be 2-3 years before I make back the ISBN cost, going purely on print sales, if I have no success with bulk orders.
Additionally, if I do offer wholesale via Ingram, and the vendors return the copies that have not sold, I cover the cost of all those returns. This means it will take even longer for me to recoup the ISBN loss.
I currently sell wide as “Firm Sale” (no returns) already, and this means that I cannot be added to Bookshop.org or other such platforms. If I want to be on these sites, I have to offer returns, and I have to be prepared to pay for them.
My plan is to save up and put the money aside for ISBNs, especially my Canelo royalties which I will receive in March, which I hope will either cover the cost or cover a large chunk of the cost. I will then try to set aside another Canelo royalty payment to cover the losses I may incur from returns.
This is a hobby – I want it to pay for itself, even though I do think it is worth investing my own money in. There has to be a limit, as with any hobby, and there has to be a balance, otherwise it becomes too expensive to continue.
Once I’ve bought my ISBN bundle, I will start to move my print books off KDP and D2D, and use Ingramspark’s wide distribution options instead. I’ll do this slowly, and I will probably go for Yelen & Yelena first as my test subject, and see if I can start to plug into the wider distribution networks for this novel.
Will it be worth it? Watch this space.
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