Countdown to Caligula

Had a great Christmas with the family, but got pulled into work two days early because one of my guys had the flu. Took a look at the Youwriteon website and found lots of good wishes from the members for Caligula. If Crossmouse ever visits here, the scene in the Temple of Claudius will hopefully be in the third book. I completed the copy-edit version of the manuscript last night and I plan to get it back to Simon at Transworld at the end of next week. The mistake I had to correct was a lot easier than I thought, it's amazing how big a difference you can make by adding a few words or just cutting a few here and there.

THE STORY SO FAR 5

I think it was the middle of June when Stan got back to me to say the manuscript was now in a fit state to send out to a publisher. He was so confident in the quality he had decided to let seven top publishers have a look at it, including Sara at Orion. I'd always had the impression things happened slowly in the publishing world, but it can't have been much more than a week before he came back to say we'd had a couple of solid expressions of interest, and less optimistically one 'I liked it a lot, but no thanks'. The main interest was from Transworld and Orion. A few days later I got a call at work from Stan. He explained that Simon at Transworld had made a pre-empt offer - basically an offer that was meant to chase all the other interest away. Simon was offering a two book deal and Transworld wanted to purchase the world rights. He said Transworld had one of the best rights departments in publishing and I'd be in good hands. He couldn't have been more correct! A couple of months later, I found out Caligula was going to be published in Italy and then out of the blue came deals for Russia and Poland. When I started this blog I stumbled on Amazon sites in Japanese, Dutch, Swedish and Italian all offering Caligula for pre-sale. Now the kids Google their dad every day to see what's new. And it's still seven months to the launch.