Here’s the short version of what it’s about:

Emily and James, a young British couple, spend a winter converting a van, then get on a ferry and work their way through France to the north coast of Spain. The plan is to live in their home on wheels and film the whole thing. Build a following, monetise the videos and, ideally, let the trip pay for itself.

What Emily doesn’t tell James – not straight away – is that the journey has a second purpose. Fifteen years earlier, her five-year-old brother, Ben, was snatched from a campsite in France. The case was enormous at the time. A man confessed to his murder but refused to say where he’d hidden the body.

Now Emily wants to use the trip to finally find some kind of closure after fifteen years of pain and guilt. And if the attention surrounding Ben’s case helps Emily and James find an audience for their videos, perhaps something good can come from it too.

Their videos go up. The follower count climbs. But then they start noticing another van arriving at the same beaches they do, just as darkness falls.

Night after night.

That’s the premise, and I’ll stop there, because no one likes a spoiler.

Where it came from

We’ve spent a lot of time travelling around Europe in a series of battered, converted vans, and there’s a wonderful freedom to it – throwing a few things in the back, setting off without much of a plan and waking up beside a beach somewhere. Your home travels with you. And, almost by chance, you discover incredible places far off the beaten track.

But a van leaves you strangely exposed too. Everything you own is inside one small metal box, in an isolated place, surrounded by people you don’t know, and whatever secrets they might hold. And if you choose to post your trip online — a strip of coast gives away more about you than you’d think – the wave, the light on the water, the car park, a few personal items scattered about in the corner of the frame.

What struck me was how cheerfully we all hand that information over now, just as I’ve done here. How easy it would be for someone behind a keyboard to track every move we make.

There’s something very special about van life – watching the sunset over the ocean with a beer in your hand. But when darkness sets in, and you’re not quite sure whether you’re parked somewhere safe for the night, it has a darker edge too.

Having lived that so many times, I thought that was worth a book.

If you’d like to help

The first fortnight matters enormously for a new book, so if you fancy helping out:

• Buy it – ebook, paperback or audio, whichever suits.

• Review it – a couple of honest lines make a big difference to folk on the fence.

• Tell one person – that friend of yours who loves thrillers and finishes them in two days. Or the celebrity mega-influencer - whichever’s easier…

And if you’ve read an early copy already and said nice things about it – thank you. You’re clearly a lovely person and deserve a lifetime of chocolate, fluffy kittens, and endless joy.

If you do read it, please consider leaving a review. They make an enormous difference – and I promise not to follow you across Europe if you forget.

Probably.

Gregg

But since I am here, I’ve written my take below. Before that, a news update – because there’s quite a lot of that too.

Perfect Stranger

I have a new book coming out. No – make that two. Perfect Stranger is a standalone psychological thriller about a young couple travelling by camper van along the north coast of Spain (where regular readers will know we moved a few years ago). They think they’re on the trip of a lifetime. What they don’t know is that someone’s watching them. I actually wrote this book a year ago – in previous updates I called it The Follower – but then, excuse the pun, I parked it and wrote a couple of other books in the meantime (I tend to do that). It’s finally ready, and it comes out next week, on the 19th of August. You can grab it on pre-order below.

Amazon: https://geni.us/565-al-aut-am

The Lies

The Lies is the fourth and final book in the Erica Sands series. There’s a little wait left for this one, but I think it’s a fitting end to the series – it’s been out in Spanish for a while now, to very good reviews, and was actually a lot of fun to write. I’m also delighted to say we’ve finalised a cover revamp for the whole series. I really didn’t like (OK, hated) the original covers for books 1 and 2 (The Cove and The Trap), and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those books haven’t sold well in English – even though in Spanish they’ve all been in the Amazon top 100, with The Cove spending nearly six weeks at #1. I don’t expect new covers alone to work miracles in the insanely competitive English psychological thriller market. But I do finally feel these ones look like the books they belong to. If you haven’t read the series and you like the new look, please do give them a go.

The Lies (Book 4) – out 30 September 2026
Pre-Order on Amazon: https://geni.us/1236-al-aut-am

In other news

I’ve got a new website. My old one was starting to look a bit MySpace-circa-2004, so I spent a couple of days updating it, and it now looks much better. Tell me what you think: www.greggdunnett.co.uk

I’ve got a new book idea. You might remember I had one of those earlier this year, which I announced to much (some) fanfare but I got stuck (twice) at 20,000 words and have temporarily given up. I will come back to it – but in the meantime I’m going to write something else (see? I told you I do that). This one is much closer to The Things You Find in Rockpools than anything I’ve written in a while, so if you liked that one, stay tuned. I have a theme I like - about someone unimportant who dies, and the powerful folk in the town give a collective shrug because it doesn’t impact them - and a title this suits: These Things Happen. As ever at this stage of the creative process I’m convinced this one will be the one.

We finally made it around the Isle of Wight (sort of). If you want the full story, I wrote a short, free book about it, which you can grab here. [LINK]. And the updated story is here: https://www.windsurf.co.uk/the-not-so-famous-five-round-the-isle-of-wight/

The WriteOff show campaign has hit 1000 readers. So we’re only 99,000 short of our target. If you’ve not signed yet, have a look! www.thewriteoffshow.co.uk

So – what of Clacton?

I do try to keep this newsletter relatively politics-free, especially after last time. So let me be clear: what follows is not politics. It’s a guided tour of a seaside town, written by a former local, which merely happens to coincide with the most-watched by-election in Britain. Any resemblance to current events is entirely the fault of current events.

I only half grew up here, in fact. I’m actually from London – but my mum was from Clacton, and every weekend we’d drive down to visit my grandparents, until eventually, when I was about sixteen, we gave up driving back and forth and simply moved here. I also haven’t lived here for a long time. I went to university, and never really came back. But if I have roots anywhere, I guess it’s here.

Anyway, for anyone not up to speed on why the world’s cameras are pointed at the seafront, I’ll summarise: Two years ago, the man who may well become the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Nigel Farage, was elected as Clacton’s MP. He didn’t pick Clacton because he’s from here (he’s not even half-local). He picked it because it was calculated to be the constituency in the whole country most likely to elect him – and as it happens, this little tour will explain exactly why, though I remind you that is not the reason I’m writing it.

What happened next is a bit complicated. Nigel – who by then was facing some rather awkward questions about a £5 million gift he’d received but not declared, and a parliamentary investigation into whether that broke the rules – resigned his seat and announced a “people versus the establishment” by-election, in which he will re-contest his own seat against, well, the establishment. But then every major party refused to stand a candidate, declaring the whole thing as a stunt and an attempt to evade the investigation - which means his highest-profile opponent is the comedy-candidate, and maybe that should be ‘comedy’-candidate: Count Binface.

Are you with me so far?

In a weird twist, more and more political wannabes have since come out of the woodwork, so that this by-election – despite not including any of the mainstream parties – nonetheless has the greatest number of candidates in British political history. Thirty-four of them, requiring the largest ballot paper ever printed in the UK: three feet long, at four times the usual printing cost. In addition to the man with the bin on his head, voters are offered: Nick the Incredible Flying Brick, Howling Laud Hope, Baron Von Thunderclap, Woke Trump Carrzee, Joseph 77 & Marcus White, of the Everyone is God Party. Mr Fishfinger announced his candidacy but didn’t make the final ballot.

It gets stranger. If trute that Farage called the by-election to halt the investigation into the gifts he received from his unusually wealthy and generous friends – as his critics suspect – it probably won’t be the end of the matter. If he wins his seat back, the investigation will restart. If that ultimately leads to a suspension long enough to trigger a recall petition, and ten per cent of Clacton’s voters sign it, there will be another by-election. Farage could then, and the focus on making Clacton funny will return for another round.

So. Clacton. What’s it actually like? It’s a seaside town whose heyday came with the Victorian railways, when Londoners would ride the trains for a day beside the sea. Closest to London’s working-class East End, it focused then on cheap and cheerful attractions and accommodation, and never much changed. It’s like it turned its nose up as other places got trendy, opening fancy coffee shops and winebars, but didn’t notice that trendy became the new normal everywhere else. Even after those winebars elsewhere fell, in turn, out of fashion, Clacton just got more and more left behind.

The Clacton constituency isn’t really one town at all, but five, strung along a little peninsula called the Tendring Peninsula. They’re worth a quick tour.

Start at the southern end and you find Jaywick. Jaywick is the poorest part of Clacton – and I can be unusually precise about this, because I studied it. (I did politics at university, then a master’s in planning and regeneration, and I chose Jaywick and coastal deprivation as my dissertation topic, for which I scraped a pass.) England, I learned, is divided into roughly 32,800 areas known as LSOAs – Lower-layer Super Output Areas. Think of them as an un-catchy way of describing a place with about 1500 people, while vaguely and for no good reason invoking a superhero franchise.

When I studied it, Jaywick ranked sixth most deprived of all of them. “Deprived” here meaning access to healthcare and education, incomes, benefits. Prospects, basically. If you visit it really is quite shocking both how run-down it is, and how visible that deprivation is – the houses look like something you’d expect on the hillside of a Brazilian favella, and the unpaved streets are lined with abandoned cars, beds and fridges. And yet, weirdly, it’s also rather nice. It has a genuinely sandy beach – a rarity on a peninsula that mostly offers stones and gravel. It’s just that the bit behind the beach is somewhere most people would be frightened to walk through in daylight, let alone after dark.

Fun fact: do you know which areas of the UK ranked worst of all back then? It turned out to be the streets immediately surrounding the Premier League football grounds of Manchester United, Liverpool and Leeds. It seems that having thousands of drunk fans pissing in your front garden once a week doesn’t help with property prices.

Fun fact 2: while writing this piece I looked up how Jaywick has done in the years since I studied it. And it has moved, but not in a good direction. The Jaywick LSOA was ranked the single most deprived neighbourhood in the whole of England in the 2010, 2015, 2019 and 2025 Indices of Deprivation. Make of that what you will.

Move north-east and you reach Clacton itself – hold that thought – then the place I actually grew up: Holland-on-Sea, a sort of village on the coast. Think of it as a retirement spot. The road I lived on had its own claim to fame, if that’s the right term. At its peak it had three shops selling mobility scooters. There’s only two left, the other one is now a funeral director.

Beyond Holland-on-Sea lies Frinton, and a different world – at least for this area. It’s here that Nigel Farage uses what he originally described as a house he’d bought. It later turned out to be owned by his girlfriend, who paid for it in cash and has declined to explain publicly exactly how she funded it. But it’s not for me to speculate, this being a newsletter about the seaside.

Last stop: Walton-on-the-Naze, which is another oddity. It has a seafront much like the rest of the peninsula, but behind it lie the Walton Backwaters – where Arthur Ransome set his book Secret Water – and they are backwaters by name and very much by nature: muddy creeks and great expanses of water that exist at high tide and vanish at low tide, leaving nothing but a sea of mud. We used to windsurf there in my teens, and it was always a race against the clock not to end up stranded in the middle of it all with the tide draining away around our ankles. It’s also the setting of a story that somewhat inspired my second novel. On a camping trip there, aged seventeen or eighteen – officially to drink cider and burn cheap sausages on a disposable barbecue – we were woken in the middle of the night by a boat coming in. We crept out of our tents and watched, hearts pounding, as men unloaded bales of what we were absolutely certain was cannabis, or possibly cocaine. In hindsight it may have been something considerably less exciting, such as the local Tesco run. But we believed it then, and that night seeped into my second novel, The Desert Run (which happens to be available on Amazon, in Kindle Unlimited and on Audible. I have to fund these missives somehow.)

And so, back to Clacton itself – or rather, the version of it you won’t get from the news crews currently camped along the seafront, reporting on the thing this newsletter is not about. Allow me to present:

Six things about Clacton they won’t show you on the BBC

1. McDonald’s, Clacton. Aged about thirteen, I can still remember the town-wide excitement when this arrived. Since then I have had three separate bicycles stolen while popping in for a Big Mac, showcasing the two major industries the town still boasts outside tourism: fast food and petty theft.

2. The seafront cycle path. Clacton has been fighting a decades-long civil war over whether cycling on the seafront should be permitted or banned – a conflict that has historically generated more passion than any by-election. The council’s great compromise, which now appears to have finally settled the issue, was to designate a cycle path – which promptly achieved national fame as the worst in Britain, on the grounds that it directed cyclists down a flight of eighty steep steps, while the paved gentle slope only a few metres further on is firmly pedestrian only.

3. Clacton Common Shopping Village. Quite possibly the saddest out-of-town shopping centre ever dreamt up. Despite being surrounded by empty fields on almost every side, the shopping part and the car park part were put on opposite sides of the access road, linked by a dark, urine-filled underpass where even graffiti-tagging teens fear to tread.

4. The seafront on a sunny summer’s day. On these days you’d often get a strong north-easterly blowing perfectly cross-shore – ideal for windsurfing in my youth, or these days wing foiling – which we nicknamed “Roger,” after a friend’s dad called Roger, who lived directly upwind. We campaigned hard to get the term adopted, and I’m proud to report that to some extent it stuck, and is in use to this day. Hmm, looks sunny. Reckon a Roger’s coming in later. This may be my most lasting contribution to the town. It’s certainly my proudest.

5. The Pathfields Road roundabout. Officially the first roundabout in Britain to be issued its own postcode, following a clerical error in 1994 which the council concluded was cheaper to keep than to correct.

6. The Gunfleet Sands wind farm. The view out to sea from Clacton has, in recent years, gone rather woke, with the arrival of a massive offshore wind farm. But here’s the bit you probably don’t know: even though it’s seven miles out, on the very lowest tides the shallow North Sea sometimes actually exposes the sands it’s built on. There used to be an annual cricket match out there. Now banned – because of health and safety rules, or rising sea levels due to climate change, whatever you want to call it.

Now – a small confession. All but one of those are true. I won’t say which. I just want to see if it turns up on the BBC.

And that’s it, really. Clacton: a faded Victorian resort with one of the oldest populations in the country, which finds itself unexpectedly, and a little unhappily, on the political frontline — championed and derided by many who have never been here and have no intention of ever coming. Tomorrow it will likely re-elect the controversial Nigel Farage, and to some people that will be a reason to cheer, to others a reason to rant. But I doubt either really has the best interests of the people who live here truly front and centre in their minds. Either way, the cameras will leave, the novelty candidates will pack away their costumes, and Clacton will be left much as it was. Much as it always has been. Perhaps a little bruised for its moment in the spotlight.

Which is a little sad. But then again, in yet another national heatwave, with its uncrowded beach, it’s actually rather a nice place to be.

Thanks for reading,

Gregg

The idea is this: Eight bestselling authors, a villa on the Spanish coast, seven days. They’re put into pairs, in most cases with someone they’ve never met, and each pair has to come up with and write a 20,000-word novella before the week is out. We film all of it — the plotting, the arguments, the panic on day six. Once the stories are written they’re published together, readers read them and vote for their favourite. Best story wins. Baking has a show, sewing has a show, pottery has a show. Books don’t, which is clearly an oversight that someone needed to fix.

The back story: Some years ago Maria t

ook the kids to Spain for half term and left me at home dogsitting. I randomly decided to see whether I could write a whole book before they got back. That became Killing Kind, which quite a few of you will have read, because I’ve been giving it away free ever since. To my mild annoyance, people often tell me they like it more than the novels that took me two years.

Somehow the show idea came from that — the realisation that it’s perfectly possible to write something worth reading in just one week.

Anyway, the original plan was to make it ourselves, funded by a kickstarter, but we learned that TV is crazy expensive, so the plan/hope is to get a television company to make it instead — Amazon being the main target. But we’re told TV wants to know an audience exists before they’ll properly consider a new idea.

That’s what the website is for. It’s a summary of what The WriteOff is, and a chance to add your name to say you’d watch a show like this. It doesn’t cost anything, and takes about 10 seconds of your precious time to sign. But I’m actually asking for a little bit more than 10 seconds.

I figure I don’t often ask you for anything. This time I am, properly.

If you’ve enjoyed something I’ve written — one of the books, Killing Kind, or even just these emails — then please, please send the link on to one or two people in your life. Book-minded people ideally, but also anyone who enjoys a good reality show (Bake Off, Traitors, Love Island even.) So sign it, and then share it — the easiest way is to use the sharing links on the site itself:

www.thewriteoffshow.co.uk

If you can share it I’ll be forever in your debt and hereby promise to do my best to write better books, or to start writing good ones if you haven’t enjoyed any of my efforts to date. Although if that’s the case I do wonder what you’re doing on this mailing list.

Anyway. That’s the ask. The target on the site is 100,000 names, which I’m aware is the sort of number people put on things. So let’s start with 1,000, which feels close enough to touch.

Thank you
Gregg

P.S. A few weeks ago I sent an earlier version of the site and asked you to try and break it. Many of you did, and actually managed to break it! Thank you! It’s all fixed now, and much the better for its experience.

P.P.S. There’s also a Book Club on the site, which is the side project to the side project. Three people with completely different tastes, all slightly related to me, recommend one book each per month. Read it if you can (and want). We see which is most popular and award someone an amazing WriteOff mug. It could be you…

Anyway, a while back I took the dog down to our nearest beach — lonely and empty most of the year — and there was a young couple in the carpark with a battered converted style van. He was sat at a camp table repairing a coffee pot with a Germanic air of competence. She was on a skateboard, long blond hair, practicing her carves down the empty tarmac. And something about watching them — or more honestly, something about noticing the way I was watching them, half-thinking about having been young once myself — snagged. I wondered what they thought I was doing: whether I was looking at the surf, or studying them, and if so why. And I remembered the vague sense of vulnerability and threat you feel when you’re staying in a van, in a place you don’t know. Far from home, alone. And then I thought: I kind of know the answer to that, I’ve had a lifetime of it. And it’s a great setting for a story.

It ended up being one of the most fun I’ve ever written. But for various reasons I finished it well over a year ago, and had almost forgotten it was coming. But here it is: my new thriller, Perfect Stranger, published on 19th August. The carpark scene is actually in the novel, more or less exactly as it happened — though you’ll have to read it to find out why it matters.

Here’s the cover. The forest isn’t there just because it looks creepy. The book is the story of a van trip, and important parts of it take place in the endless pine forests of south-west France — the same forests as the photo above, which I’ve gone back to summer after summer for decades — and, rather less cosily, the mountain forests of Kosovo. If you want to know how they connect, can I gently direct you to the pre-order links?

It nearly wasn’t called Perfect Stranger, incidentally. As it was being written I thought of it as The Follower — but I got outvoted, on the grounds that it sounded like a book about social media (which it touches on, but nobody needs more social media in their lives), so it took a new name that sits closer in tone to Little Ghosts.

You can preorder it now, if you’re the organised sort:

[Preorder Perfect Stranger →]

And if you’re the reviewing sort — Amazon, Goodreads, a blog, a strongly worded book club — it went up on NetGalley today, which means you can request a copy and read it a month before everyone else. Early reviews matter more than authors like to admit, so if that’s you: thank you, genuinely.

[Request it on NetGalley →]

That’s all for today, but I will update soon on the progress of our (attempt at making) a TV show: The Writeoff, and news of the final book in the Erica Sands series too (now finally titled The Lies.). But surely one unexpected much overdue book is plenty for one day. Particularly as we’re all going to busy enjoying watching England winning the world cup at last. Right?

Gregg

We’re on our way back from London, where we attended the Self Publishing Show Live – a huge author conference that happens every year. Which means I’m also going to be super busy, because I’ve now seen all the business things I should be doing but definitely aren’t. Hence me becoming super efficient and writing this while enjoying the finest in-flight comforts that 29 euros (return) can buy.

But this update isn’t really about publishing. It’s about the rapid expansion and hopeless optimism of our latest crazy side project: The WriteOff.

I mentioned it last time, though I kept things fairly low-key, because we weren’t sure how realistic the idea was. So for many of you, I expect this is the first you’ll have heard of it.

What is The WriteOff, then?

The 30,000-foot description – geddit? – is that it’s a TV show for books and readers that we’ve decided to make. Think Bake Off, but for books.

The plan is to lock eight bestselling authors into a luxury villa and have them compete, in pairs, to write the best novella they can in just one week. We film the whole thing, then cut it into episodes for TV. At the end, the surviving teams’ stories are published together in a book, viewers read them, and vote for their favourite.

Best Story Wins.

Why?

The short answer is because we think it could be fun.

The slightly longer answer is that I once did something similar myself, and I’ve thought about it ever since. A few years ago, María and the kids left me alone at home while they went to Spain to visit family. It was half-term, I was dogsitting (not in the doghouse) and for reasons I cannot remember, I decided to see whether I could write a complete book before they got back.

The week became a very intense, slightly weird creative experience, not dissimilar to my time in the jungle living off bugs and ayahuasca (joking). The result was Killing Kind, the 20,000-word novella I offer as a free taster of my writing. To my eternal surprise, people have often written to tell me how much they like it – sometimes more than my full-length novels.

The WriteOff is essentially that, but bigger, with much more famous – and probably better – writers, and lots and lots of cameras.

Also, baking, sewing, pottery and flower arranging all have their own TV shows, and books – the thing that actually fills our shelves and a good portion of our lives – somehow don’t. We think this is a strange oversight that someone should fix, and nobody more qualified has stepped forward.

When I last wrote, the plan was to make the show ourselves, inviting authors we’d met at conferences and who we thought would be interesting on TV to take part, dusting off the old handycam I’ve got somewhere in the loft - and putting it all up on YouTube. But now that we’ve spoken to a lot of people in television, we’ve realised that plan would have to change.

The format, as we want to run it, is far too expensive to make ourselves. For context, our first budget came to €40,000, which we thought was an awful lot of money. That then grew to €80k, then €120k, then €200k, and currently sits at around half a million pounds for one season – as well as being technically quite difficult to pull off.

Now, you might think – if you’re a sensible person – that a sensible person would give up at this point, go back to writing books, or perhaps do something that might bring in some income instead of costing a small fortune?

You might be right. You’re definitely right. But we’re not sensible people (maybe it’s the Spanish sun?)

Instead, we’ve gone very much the other way, and decided we’re going to get the show made anyway. Just not by us.

We’ve decided that if we’ve accidentally designed a proper TV show, we need to get it commissioned by a proper TV company – Amazon, the BBC, Netflix, whoever makes the most sense.

How are we going to make Netflix make us a TV show? We have a plan for that too.

The eight bestselling authors we plan to put in the show – all more bestselling than me, by the way – each have an audience of readers who like them, possibly even love them, and who would quite probably watch a TV show with their favourite author in it.

We’re going to ask those readers to add their names to a campaign saying they’d like to see the show made. Shortly, I’m going to ask you to do the same.

The hope is that if we can reach the not-at-all-plucked-out-of-the-air figure of 100,000 names, we can take that to Netflix, the BBC and the rest, and they can see that an audience does exist for a show like this.

It’s not just proving the audience though. Alongside working out how much the show would cost and how to get it made, most of our time has gone into working out what the show really is, and how to make it something people will genuinely want to watch. This has also been the really fun bit.

Partly because it’s the closest to what I do anyway – visualising worlds and ideas in my head – but also because it’s where we’ve got to feel like fancy TV executives. We’ve had meetings with actual TV producers and discussed everything from edit suites and camera rigs to the strange job titles at the end of TV shows. I now know what a best boy and a gaffer are, although I do confess I’ve forgotten again.

But it’s these people – the TV producers, not the best boys – who have told us that the show we’ve developed is the sort of thing a BBC or Netflix could actually commission.

If we get their attention.

It’s important to add that this is a long shot. Not quite a moonshot, perhaps, because TV does get made, and everyone knows the moon landings were filmed in a basement in Arizona. But the point stands, this isn’t a given - but you really can help, and we’d love you to do so.

We’ve built a website that explains the idea rather better than I can while wedging my elbows into the man in seat 11B, who is pretending not to read this but quietly intrigued. It lets readers add their name in support. It’s free, I hope it’s fun, and you can be among the first to join the side project to the side project: The WriteOff Book Club.

You’ll understand when you see it.

thewriteoffshow.co.uk

You’ll notice not many people have signed yet. That’s deliberate – you, dear reader, are the soft launch.

It’s all built, it all works. The plan now is for actual people to look it over, click the buttons, possibly break the buttons, and – if so – drop me an email to say what worked and what didn’t.

The big push, where I ask everyone I know to share it far and wide, comes a little later, once we’re confident everything holds together. But do sign up, please do share the links (if it goes viral that’s not a bad thing). And do join the Book Club (you might even win a mug).

Anyway. It’s approaching that time when I need to return my seat to the upright position, stow my tray table, and start praying for a safe landing and an immigration officer in a good mood. Here’s a pretty picture of a cloud while there’s still time.

So here’s the website again:

thewriteoffshow.co.uk

Please look it over. Please click some buttons. Please share it with friends if you want to. And please let me know what you think.

Gregg

ps the London show was a week and a half ago, the final website checks took rather longer than I thought.

We’re on our way back from London, where we attended the Self Publishing Show Live – a huge author conference that happens every year. Which means I’m also going to be super busy, because I’ve now seen all the business things I should be doing but definitely aren’t. Hence me becoming super efficient and writing this while enjoying the finest in-flight comforts that 29 euros (return) can buy.

But this update isn’t really about publishing. It’s about the rapid expansion and hopeless optimism of our latest crazy side project: The WriteOff.

I mentioned it last time, though I kept things fairly low-key, because we weren’t sure how realistic the idea was. So for many of you, I expect this is the first you’ll have heard of it.

What is The WriteOff, then?

The 30,000-foot description – geddit? – is that it’s a TV show for books and readers that we’ve decided to make. Think Bake Off, but for books.

The plan is to lock eight bestselling authors into a luxury villa and have them compete, in pairs, to write the best novella they can in just one week. We film the whole thing, then cut it into episodes for TV. At the end, the surviving teams’ stories are published together in a book, viewers read them, and vote for their favourite.

Best Story Wins.

Why?

The short answer is because we think it could be fun.

The slightly longer answer is that I once did something similar myself, and I’ve thought about it ever since. A few years ago, María and the kids left me alone at home while they went to Spain to visit family. It was half-term, I was dogsitting (not in the doghouse) and for reasons I cannot remember, I decided to see whether I could write a complete book before they got back.

The week became a very intense, slightly weird creative experience, not dissimilar to my time in the jungle living off bugs and ayahuasca (joking). The result was Killing Kind, the 20,000-word novella I offer as a free taster of my writing. To my eternal surprise, people have often written to tell me how much they like it – sometimes more than my full-length novels.

The WriteOff is essentially that, but bigger, with much more famous – and probably better – writers, and lots and lots of cameras.

Also, baking, sewing, pottery and flower arranging all have their own TV shows, and books – the thing that actually fills our shelves and a good portion of our lives – somehow don’t. We think this is a strange oversight that someone should fix, and nobody more qualified has stepped forward.

When I last wrote, the plan was to make the show ourselves, inviting authors we’d met at conferences and who we thought would be interesting on TV to take part, dusting off the old handycam I’ve got somewhere in the loft - and putting it all up on YouTube. But now that we’ve spoken to a lot of people in television, we’ve realised that plan would have to change.

The format, as we want to run it, is far too expensive to make ourselves. For context, our first budget came to €40,000, which we thought was an awful lot of money. That then grew to €80k, then €120k, then €200k, and currently sits at around half a million pounds for one season – as well as being technically quite difficult to pull off.

Now, you might think – if you’re a sensible person – that a sensible person would give up at this point, go back to writing books, or perhaps do something that might bring in some income instead of costing a small fortune?

You might be right. You’re definitely right. But we’re not sensible people (maybe it’s the Spanish sun?)

Instead, we’ve gone very much the other way, and decided we’re going to get the show made anyway. Just not by us.

We’ve decided that if we’ve accidentally designed a proper TV show, we need to get it commissioned by a proper TV company – Amazon, the BBC, Netflix, whoever makes the most sense.

How are we going to make Netflix make us a TV show? We have a plan for that too.

The eight bestselling authors we plan to put in the show – all more bestselling than me, by the way – each have an audience of readers who like them, possibly even love them, and who would quite probably watch a TV show with their favourite author in it.

We’re going to ask those readers to add their names to a campaign saying they’d like to see the show made. Shortly, I’m going to ask you to do the same.

The hope is that if we can reach the not-at-all-plucked-out-of-the-air figure of 100,000 names, we can take that to Netflix, the BBC and the rest, and they can see that an audience does exist for a show like this.

It’s not just proving the audience though. Alongside working out how much the show would cost and how to get it made, most of our time has gone into working out what the show really is, and how to make it something people will genuinely want to watch. This has also been the really fun bit.

Partly because it’s the closest to what I do anyway – visualising worlds and ideas in my head – but also because it’s where we’ve got to feel like fancy TV executives. We’ve had meetings with actual TV producers and discussed everything from edit suites and camera rigs to the strange job titles at the end of TV shows. I now know what a best boy and a gaffer are, although I do confess I’ve forgotten again.

But it’s these people – the TV producers, not the best boys – who have told us that the show we’ve developed is the sort of thing a BBC or Netflix could actually commission.

If we get their attention.

It’s important to add that this is a long shot. Not quite a moonshot, perhaps, because TV does get made, and everyone knows the moon landings were filmed in a basement in Arizona. But the point stands, this isn’t a given - but you really can help, and we’d love you to do so.

We’ve built a website that explains the idea rather better than I can while wedging my elbows into the man in seat 11B, who is pretending not to read this but quietly intrigued. It lets readers add their name in support. It’s free, I hope it’s fun, and you can be among the first to join the side project to the side project: The WriteOff Book Club.

You’ll understand when you see it.

thewriteoffshow.co.uk

You’ll notice not many people have signed yet. That’s deliberate – you, dear reader, are the soft launch.

It’s all built, it all works. The plan now is for actual people to look it over, click the buttons, possibly break the buttons, and – if so – drop me an email to say what worked and what didn’t.

The big push, where I ask everyone I know to share it far and wide, comes a little later, once we’re confident everything holds together. But do sign up, please do share the links (if it goes viral that’s not a bad thing). And do join the Book Club (you might even win a mug).

Anyway. It’s approaching that time when I need to return my seat to the upright position, stow my tray table, and start praying for a safe landing and an immigration officer in a good mood. Here’s a pretty picture of a cloud while there’s still time.

So here’s the website again:

thewriteoffshow.co.uk

Please look it over. Please click some buttons. Please share it with friends if you want to. And please let me know what you think.

Gregg

ps the London show was a week and a half ago, the final website checks took rather longer than I thought.

Long-term readers will know I do sometimes have daft ideas, such as the idea to write a children’s book with my children, when they were of an age to read such things. It was fun, but cost me a fortune and literally turned my hair grey trying to liaise with printers in China and warehouses in the States. Then there was the influencer box project of last year, which saw me frantically sanding pieces of driftwood to fashion into room key fobs for the fictional hotel in my last book. (And which we’re redoing now in Spanish, or rather Maria is – see below).

And if I have had another of my big stupid ideas, this one is definitely the biggest and stupidest to date.

But what is Celebrity Traitors, for those who don’t watch TV, and possibly also live in a windswept cave somewhere in the mountains with no WiFi? Celebrity Traitors is the celebrity version of the TV gameshow where contestants are put in a castle in the Scottish Highlands and divided up into either Faithfuls or Traitors. The Traitors have to lie about their status, pretending to be Faithfuls at all times, except at night when they get to ‘murder’ a real Faithful and kick them out the show. The Faithfuls have to work out who the Traitors are and kick them out the show at the round-table banishments. My mum told me to watch it, and while I sometimes nod along at her entertainment suggestions – because I’m a cool guy who’s more down-with-the-youf than hangin’-with-the-grannies – I did sit down to watch this one. And it had me hooked right away.

So much so that we started to play our own version, on family holidays (in our version we draw roles from a hat so that no one knows anyone’s status. The traitor has 24 hours to murder a faithful, by placing a special sticker on a person, or on something they eat or drink. The special sticker is kept in a prominent, public place, and taking it without being seen is a challenge in itself). The actual TV show has higher production values. It has an interesting history too. The British (and now US too) version of the show is based on a Dutch reality TV show of the same name – De Verraders (you didn’t think you’d be learning Dutch today did you?) but that in turn is based on a game called Mafia, invented by a Russian psychology researcher at Moscow State University in 1987. He’s recently complained that, though the show is clearly based on the mechanics of the game he designed, the BBC never credited his work. I also failed to credit him in our family holiday version, but I think I’ve rather got away with it.

Fascinating as this is, you may be wondering what it has to do with you, or at least books and writing, and other stuff I usually talk about. We are, I promise, within spitting distance of the point. Just one more diversion to go.

A few years ago I wrote a book, in just one week. You may know it. I was left at home while Maria took the kids away to visit family. We didn’t have a dogsitter, so I got the job. I was a bit bored and lonely, if I’m honest, and my way to pass the week was to see if I could write a whole book in one week. I didn’t have a plan for what to write, I just dived in. It was quite a weird experience, creatively. And after five or six days (I can’t remember which) I had 20,000 words of a story with a beginning, middle and end. I sent it out to everyone on my newsletter for free, but also bunged it up on Amazon – and pretty much forgot about it.

But, over the subsequent years, I’ve often received emails from readers who tell me how much they like it. Sometimes they come in the form of ‘why don’t you turn this into a full novel?’ And sometimes it’s just a simple, I really enjoyed this book. These are very nice emails to get, but also slightly annoying, because my normal books take months or sometimes years to write, and there’s definitely some that are less popular than my book-in-a-week. What else? When I sent a questionnaire recently, I asked which of my books you’ve enjoyed the most. And to my surprise, the book-in-a-week did rather well. And then the final straw, a few weeks back our screen agent decided to acquire the rights to this book (again, leaving several full-length novels on the shelf).

I don’t really know how these two very different strands of thought have collided in my head. But that’s what seems to have happened. So here’s the big idea:

We’re going to take six bestselling authors and lock them in a luxury villa on the Cantabrian coast for one week. We’ll divide them into teams of two, and each team will have just seven days to think up, plot and write a 20,000-word novella. They won’t know in advance what they’re writing, nor who they’re writing with. They won’t even know what genre they’ll be writing in. And we’ll film everything. The teams working out how to work together. The creative arguments. The plot twists we casually drop on them at breakfast. The panic as each day’s deadline approaches.

I’ve talked a lot about The Traitors, but really it’s more like ‘Bake Off’, but for books – skilled storytellers forced to work under pressure in a way that lets you see the process. But unlike that show, where you just get to watch the judges scoffing the cakes at the end, in this one you get to be the judge.

At the end of the week the three novellas will get bundled together as a single volume. Readers/viewers then buy the book, read all three stories, and vote for the winner. The show asks a question — which team wrote the best story? — and the only way to answer it is to read the book. The whole thing is a real competition, with one simple rule: Best story wins.

We’re calling it: The WriteOff. Maria and I came up with the idea when driving down to Sevilla for a self-publishing conference. It was an eight-hour drive, so we had enough of the details worked out to ask a few fellow authors if they liked the idea. We thought they wouldn’t, and the idea would die right there. But actually they were intrigued. I think, like me, they found the idea of just writing, just seeing what comes out was interesting creatively. And the thought of being forced to write with someone they didn’t know – but who was also an experienced novelist – was interesting to them. And then the thought of being on an actual TV show – but on it doing something you were good at – that was appealing too.

So when we drove back from Sevilla (another eight hours) we had a potential cast lined up already. Quite serious authors. Between them they’ve sold well over five million books. So we started looking into the other aspects of the idea. Where would we host them? Who would film it? How much would all this cost?

And I must admit, at every step I confidently expected something to come up that rendered this a fun idea in theory, but not in practice. Yet at every stage that’s not what’s happened. We’ve actually been able to develop the idea into something that feels like a serious project, that just might work. So much so that I’m telling you about it – the very first time the idea has gone properly out into the world.

I’m not going to go into too much detail here about how the show could work. I will later, if it passes the final test. Because we’ve discovered that launching an actual TV show is quite expensive (who knew?) And we don’t have any idea what real people – you, at least – actually think of it. So we’re going to test that by running a Kickstarter campaign.

The idea is both to raise at least some of the funds to pay for the show, but equally important, to get a sense of whether people actually like the sound of it, and might want to watch it. When you back a Kickstarter you get rewards. In our case it will be the book that the show produces – the three stories written by each team. So if a lot of people back it, we’ll get a sense they’d like to watch. If they don’t, we’ll know that too. Basically our thinking is: If enough people back it, we make the show. If not, the whole thing quietly disappears and I go back to writing books in the normal way, like a sensible person.

I’ll have a lot more to say about all of this in the coming weeks – the cast, the villa, the production company we’ve teamed up with, why I think this might genuinely work. For now I just wanted to tell you it’s happening, because you lot were here when I wrote the original book in a week, and it feels right that you should be the first to know.

I’d genuinely love to know what you think. I’ve been too close to this idea for a few weeks now, which is always dangerous. Do you get it? Would you watch it? Would you back a Kickstarter if the reward was the book produced by the show? Or does the whole thing sound like watching six people typing (similar to my last big TV idea: Celebrity Watching Paint Dry?)

I should add that I don’t expect, nor plan, for this to replace my writing. I’m pretty sure my fondness for these odd side-quests feeds back into the books I write, giving me experiences I wouldn’t otherwise have had, as well as adding to the grey-hair count. Plus I’ve still got two books in the pipeline coming out this year (more news on that soon), and I’m writing another at the moment. But I’m very keen to know if you ‘get’ the idea, or if this has just left you baffled. If this is ever to get out of the idea stage and actually become a real TV show, it’s going to need a bit of help from folk like you.

So let’s hear it! Good idea, bad idea? Totally crazy or just might work? Reply to this email or comment below. And I’ll be back in touch soon.

Gregg

P.S. You might be wondering what my book-in-a-week was - it’s on Amazon as Killing Kind. I subsequently did a second book-in-a-week (more dogsitting) which is also available as Falling From Grace. As it happens, the screen agent took both.

P.P.S. You might also – if you're better read than I am – know these two books aren't the first, nor most famous, to be written very quickly. In 1816, eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley was stuck indoors at a villa on Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and a man called Polidori, after a volcano in Indonesia had ruined the European summer. To pass the time, Byron proposed they each write a ghost story. Mary Shelley's became Frankenstein. Polidori's became The Vampyre, the first vampire story in English. (Byron and Percy both gave up - quitters). So the format – bored writers, stuck in a villa, daring each other to produce something under pressure – isn't exactly new. We're just turning the cameras on.

So did it?

In a sense. I was a little surprised to learn that there are significantly more of you in the UK than the US – I thought it was the other way around, which opens the door to more Eastenders references. I was quite flattered to read that most of you have read more than ten of my books (which is more than I’ve read). And it’s nice to hear that so many of you enjoy my so-called sense of humour (though I’m aware this is a somewhat self-selecting group). There were a few comments from Australian readers reminding me that they exist too - but only a few so I can safely ignore. (You can’t complain, you got a mention…)

In terms of the books, your favourite is The Things you find in Rockpools, but it’s surprisingly closely followed by Little Ghosts. In third place (big surprise) The Glass Tower, which I’ve liked, but Maria has spent four years trying to hide behind the radiator because she doesn’t like it. Good to have it officially confirmed that I shouldn’t listen to her. You’re quite split, almost 50:50 on whether you prefer standalones or series, so… I guess I should continue to be confused about which to write.

I didn’t actually ask this question, but almost none of you spend your free time potholing, which to be honest I could have predicted. On the emails though, there was a clear call for more stories and pictures of life in Spain, which I shall try to provide, starting right now (hence the haircut, honestly I was undistinguishable from a hedge this morning).

There’s a lot more, which is – all jokes aside – actually very helpful to me, though I’m not entirely sure how to act directly on it. At the same time I do think it influences me in subtle ways that I don’t understand, which is coincidentally also how Maria gets me to do the hoovering.

If you did miss the survey the first time around, there’s still time to fill it in. If you did fill it in already, thank you. And there were lots of lovely comments which I had a very fun time reading through. You’re all lovely, thank you so much!

Survey Link: (don’t forget this time…)

Right. Thoughts on the new haircut not welcome, but please do comment on my attempts to teach the dog to fly…

Gregg

*these would be the fourth book in the Erica Sands series, either called The Calm (if I have my way) or The Kill (if my editor gets her way). Let’s just call it The Kill. And then the book I was going to call The Follower, except my editor didn’t like that name either, so call that TBC.

And sometimes, they actually work. I say this because, after only seven years sitting on my desk, I have finally completed item four on a to-do list I wrote in April 2019 (really). It said: Make a reader survey.

I can’t remember why this seemed important all those years ago, but that’s not the point. What’s important is: I did it. And to celebrate my success, I need just a few minutes of your time to fill it in, and show I haven’t wasted mine. A few minutes, unless you’re a chronic overthinker, in which case please allocate a few hours.

Seriously though, it is short, and if you’ve been reading my emails or my books, I’d love you to fill it in. It’ll help me work out what to write next, and whether these emails are any good or you’ve all just been too polite to say so.

SURVEY LINK

Thank you!.

Gregg

ps. now for item 5 — I wondered what the smell was.

It is – as The Bangles once memorably proclaimed – just Another Manic Monday, so this long-overdue update is going to be a little more photo-heavy and word-light than usual.

Firstly, I’m twenty thousand words – or about a quarter of the way – through writing ‘the new book’. As you may know, I suffer terribly from SNTS – Shiny New Thing Syndrome, hence I truly believe that ‘the new book’ is going to be the best book I’ve ever written, and probably the best book I’ll ever write, not to mention the best book ever written, with the possible exception of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and maybe The Bible, at least in terms of copies sold.

Anyway, I rather rashly announced on Instagram that I would make my next protagonist from Minnesota. Stupid comments/threats aside – thanks for those – this has required me to spend some time researching Minnesota, a place I knew absolutely nothing about beforehand. And it’s cool – I mean it’s cold. And hot. I had no idea. I spent some time Google-mapping my way around the state, to learn it has tons of lakes which are warm enough to swim in during summer, and they also freeze every winter so you can go ice-skating on them. That this happened to coincide with the Winter Olympics so I could simultaneously get really into ice skating is just one little piece of proof that everything in the universe is connected.

And if you require more proof of this, at the exact same time my children suggested we binge-watch the Netflix series Fargo – which just happens to be set in Minnesota.

But – ‘the new book’ isn’t going to be set there, for reasons I’m not going to tell you yet for fear of ruining the plot – it’s going to be set high(ish) up in the Swiss Alps (actually right on the Italian/Swiss border) – and in addition to watching Netflix, I also felt I needed to get a better feel for the mountains.

If you’ve read any of my books you’ll know they’re usually based by the coast (The Lake House Children is set by a lake, but even then, I had the characters go on vacation to the coast, because I was feeling a bit landlocked while writing it). I think the reason I’ve set most by the sea is simply because I’ve always lived by the sea. Although I was born in London, we spent most of our time in Clacton, a run-down seaside resort on the UK’s east coast (and since then I’ve moved around a lot, but always somewhere coastal.) As such I feel I have an almost innate understanding of such places – the way they revolve around the moods and tides of the sea, the tension between the locals and the tourists, who either come (bad) or stay away (worse).

I’ve always felt there’s a similar deep connection for towns in the mountains to their location. But I don’t really know what it is. And I’m not going to pretend that a few days is going to do the same job as spending a lifetime in such places, but it’s better than nothing. So the half term just gone we decided to spend a few nights in the town of Potes in Los Picos de Europa, just to get a feel for the mountains in some of their moods.

I don’t really know about doing research this way. I’ve never really done it before, with the exception of spending a few nights in Amsterdam the Christmas before last, where I was then planning to base the fourth book in the Erica Sands (The Cove) series. And I was surprised just how useful it was. To be honest I feel a bit stupid doing research in this way too, because I don’t know in advance what I’m supposed to be looking at, and I tend to wander around staring into back alleys or at drainpipes as if they’re going to somehow gift me magical elements of plot. But we’ll see - and Potes is a lovely place. I’ve intercut this so far with some photos to show what we got up to, and here’s a few more:

Next: Covers. I’ve paused ‘the new book’ at this point because the edges of my desk have been closing in with jobs I have to do but don’t want to do because I’m excited to write my new book. There comes a point where this becomes simply threatening, so I’ve bashed through some of them.

The Cove has a new cover. Why? Because the old one was very ugly, and derivative and boring, and I begged my publisher to update it. And also because the Spanish edition of The Cove (La Cala) has somehow become a huge hit in Spain. It was at number one in the entire Spanish Amazon Kindle rankings for over a month – whereas in the UK and US it’s been languishing in the nowhere pile for just about forever. Which feels a real shame (particularly as the fourth book in the series is now written and slated to come out this year, and is super good - did I say it’s based in Amsterdam?) I absolutely love this new cover. I think it’s the most beautiful of all my books now. And if you haven’t read this book, now is an excellent time, because all this week it’s reduced to just 0.99. (Again, there’s that universe being all connected thingy). Seriously, go buy it, I think it’s meant to be…

The Things you Find in Rockpools also has a new cover – because the old one was ugly, and the one before that, and the one before that. The one before that was great – but Amazon banned it because they said it showed a child being tortured. Which it didn’t, but you can’t argue with Amazon when it gets an idea in its head. In a way this was the book that sort of started it all for me, it sold over a hundred thousand copies when it first came out, so it’s nice to finally have it looking like a proper book again.

And Deep Blue Lies has a new cover too. This one’s a bit different – the old cover wasn’t working. Or maybe the book isn’t working. Or maybe the Instagram marketing program I spent sooo much time on last year really didn’t work (the box project) – we’re not really sure. But for whatever reasons Deep Blue Lies has been my least successful launch pretty much ever. Not in terms of reader reviews – which are very good – but just in terms of numbers of people actually reading the book. The new one – I quite like it – and maybe I’ll grow to really like it (I certainly will if it makes it start to sell!). But again, if you’re among the apparent majority who missed it the first time around, here’s the link – you know what to do:

Deep Blue Lies

And to finish on a high note – Little Ghosts has been one of my most successful books to date, and it was recently translated into Italian. So what, I thought when I heard this news, since I’ve had my books translated in a half dozen languages now, and after signing the contracts I rarely hear about them ever again. But in Italy something else has happened. I started to see these strange images of Piccoli Fantasmi actually in bookshops, and then featured heavily in bookshops, and then in bookshop windows – and then dominating bookshop windows the length and breadth of the wonderful boot-shaped country. I’m not allowed to say how many copies it’s sold, but in its first month it might just be more physical copies than I’ve sold of all of my other books, put together, in nearly ten years. Or it could all be an AI generated fever dream, what do you think?

So please don’t forget that The Cove is on special offer this week at only 0.99. And with that, the margins of my desk are somewhat cleared and I’m back to work!

Gregg

I am happily kidding about the last part, but not the rest. Although I should say, I’m neither a frequent nor a very good skier, and I’m somewhat conflicted about the ethics of the whole thing. In a world we’re told is warming dangerously because of our antics – such as converting wild snowy mountains into enormous playgrounds – it seems… I dunno, a little hard to justify? But it is breathtakingly beautiful, and I did my best to drink in the snowy vistas in case I don’t get to see them again.

And also to use them as best I can. My other plan for the week was to think hard about what to write next, and I’m happy to say that was equally successful. Since I’m on my sixteenth novel (or thereabouts), I’m very familiar now with what I need to begin writing a story. I start with a seed of an idea and then play around adding characters and places and scenarios. And it’s almost like a puzzle, moving the bits around, testing new ideas (perhaps character A would work better if she had a twin? Or maybe a twin that died? Or maybe – a twin who’s an alien!). But often it’s like a puzzle bought from a charity shop, with crucial pieces missing, or at least which I can’t find no matter how hard I look. Then I’m eventually forced to drop the idea and move onto another. And that’s what I seem to have been doing recently – coming up with ideas, but repeatedly failing to build them into full story outlines that I can sit down and write.

But while driving out to the mountains I dusted off a seed of an idea that’s been bouncing around in my mind for a while and gave it another look. And whether it was the mountain scenery, or the diesel fumes, somehow this time the pieces fell into place. I won’t give away the whole plot for obvious reasons, but it’s going to be set in a remote valley in the Swiss Alps, at an obscure research facility. And it’s a little bit similar in tone to my book The Lake House Children, or if you’ve read or seen Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty – it has shades of that as well. I even have a name: The Angel Project.

But also, as I’ve been working on this, and enjoying the snow, I’ve been following the news from America. And I feel conflicted about this too – a lot of my readers are in the States, and I’m not. And I genuinely wouldn’t think it my business to tell anyone how to vote, even if I was. Plus it’s hard enough to make a living as a writer without giving people a reason not to read my books – because of the perception I’m on the wrong side of a political divide. All that said, it feels like a point has been reached where staying quiet is no longer the right thing to do. Even though I’m well aware my words will have absolutely no effect.

To me it feels like the moment in The Emperor’s New Clothes when the little boy shouts that the beautiful robes we’re all pretending to admire don’t actually exist. Privately I’ve thought as much for a long time, but not had the courage to say so online. Or perhaps I thought it wise not to say so. Or not my business. But now the situation feels flipped. Many of the lies told up to now were vague. It was possible that maybe they were sort of true, or spoke to a core of truth that had been ignored for too long. But when we clearly see a man holding a phone and are told it’s a gun. When we’re told an officer is in hospital after being rammed by a car, yet watch him walk away unharmed after shooting the driver in the head – these lies are no longer vague. If we won’t call out the most blatant untruths imaginable, then what will we call out? I think we all see now that the emperor is naked. As such, we have to say so.

And for that reason, I’ve decided to make the hero in my new book – a fourteen-year-old girl named Megan – from Minneapolis. I don’t know much about the city, so I’ll have to do some research, and as already said, the action is going to take place in Switzerland, so there’s little consequence to this decision from a narrative perspective. It’s simply an opportunity to demonstrate my support in a very, very small way for the people there who are showing such bravery and humanity in standing up for the truth.

I will add that it’s not going to be in any way a political book – in some ways quite the opposite. And this doesn’t mark a shift in these posts towards including more politics. I’ll soon be back to my usual bad jokes, and writing about life as a writer. But on this occasion, at this point, it feels the right thing to do.

Hope you’re well, and thanks for reading.

There are a few obvious posts for an author page – cover reveals, updates on what books are coming next, alerts for when current books are on special offer. But that’s slightly thin gruel, it doesn’t quite live up to the vision. We did think about adding book reviews, funny dog videos, and pictures of my breakfast – but it still felt like something was missing.

So partly the reason for writing this is to simply ask you, what would you like to see coming up in your feed? Are there any other authors – or other accounts – who do social media really well? I’m not suggesting I’ll simply copy them. Or at least, I’ll only copy the best bits.

One thing we did do last year was the box campaign for my book Deep Blue Lies. And I’ve realised that after a lot of talk about this, I never said anything about how it went. And it’s kind of relevant here, so I’ll give a brief overview. Was it a smash viral sensation, or a sad soggy flop?

Seen from the perspective of how much the book got talked about within the bookish communities on Facebook and Instagram, the project did really well. Or at least, it did much better than any other social media campaign we’ve ever done before. We grew the Instagram page by a thousand followers, with many of those being thriller book influencers who had previously never heard of me or my books (as hard as that is to believe). Some of the posts, in particular the giveaways, maybe did go viral, at least a little bit, with some getting tens of thousands of views.

It also, and this feels relevant to the above dilemma, gave me something to post about. Possibly that resulted in my feeling I was posting too much about the boxes, and maybe some of you got bored of them too, but the internet is quite a big place, and I’m probably wrong to worry that I filled it all up.

However, from the perspective of how many copies of Deep Blue Lies we actually sold, things were less rosy. Deep Blue Lies has actually had a pretty poor first six-months in terms of sales, compared to my other books. There are, looking back, some possible reasons for this. It was very much a summer book, and we launched in late September, just in time for Christmas. Maybe the green cover didn’t match too well with the title Deep Blue Lies? And it was a slightly different style to my other books, and maybe didn’t connect as well for this reason (though it has 4.4 average rating on Amazon, about the same as my other books).

It’s hard to say. But it is clear that a splash of this size on social media doesn’t automatically translate to enormous commercial success. Which is a shame, but also kind of brings me to the main point of this newsletter. Maria and I are somewhat split on whether to declare the exercise a dismal failure, and never speak of it again, or consider it a promising idea that perhaps didn’t quite work this time, but is worth trying again and building on. And I’m interested to hear what you think.

My sense is that, doing some sort of ‘launch project’ for new books as they come out (roughly every six months), can provide a core reason-to-exist for the social media channels (Facebook and Instagram, I’m giving up on TikTok). And then obviously alongside that come the cover releases, the titbits of author news, and the occasional shots of my breakfast, just to spice things up.

For example: The Follower is a psychological thriller about a young couple on a van-life journey across Europe – and a stranger who is watching them. He knows their past. He knows their secrets. And he has no intention of letting them reach the end of the road alive... (The elevator pitch is a work in progress).

While I don’t know yet what a launch campaign could look like for The Follower (out 9^th July), there’s some obvious candidates – giveaway boxes containing the sorts of physical items you’d take on a van trip (Follower-branded key rings, little model camper vans, branded maps, beer holder), perhaps even a prize draw to win a week away in a camper for yourself. (A quick check shows you could run one in the UK/Europe and another one in the US, using companies that have outlets all over. It’s doable, but sorry Aussie readers, maybe next time…)

Maria’s view, in contrast, is that all this is very expensive, very time-consuming, and doesn’t seem to work. And this might be true.

I guess I’m writing this partly to get things clear in my head, but also I’m hoping to spark a bit of conversation, and get some feedback from you, my lovely readers, many of whom are quite a lot better at social media than we are…

Although - that said, did you catch my recent, and frankly spectacular, video I posted just the other day on my Instagram account? I’ve posted it here for those that might have missed it. Not least because it contains news on the aforementioned The Follower, and also Erica Sands book four.

So do please reply, or send over an email if you have any thoughts on this. In the meantime, I’m also in pondering-what-to-write next mode at the moment, and just for a treat, I’m going to do my pondering in the French Pyrenees, with a snowboard strapped to my feet. If I feel brave, I might even put a picture on social media…

Thank you in advance. Don’t forget to like, share and tag your friends. Oh, and I hope you have a very happy 2026.

Gregg

ps. If you’re not following me on Instagram or Facebook, the question has to be asked – why not? Get with the program.

Facebook/greggwriter

Instagram/greggdunnettauthor

PS. If you’d like to boost the very sad sales so far for Deep Blue Lies, you can find it here.

Either way, I haven’t been in a very Christmassy mood so far, partly because it’s been unseasonably warm here, although we have also seen some very impressive storms. This was the local harbour when I was there the other day for my daily 5am 10k swim-run.**

But the other reason I’ve not been feeling seasonal is because I made a small error when I proudly announced – a few months back - that the final book (4) in the Erica Sands series was finished. The error being, of course, that it wasn’t. I had got to the end, but when I read it back, it just felt a bit flat and – not quite right. So I’ve spent the last eight weeks or so trying to fix it, with several trips back to the drawing board along the way. Long story short, I ended up adding thirty-thousand words, the last of which I finished yesterday.

But this time around I can say with confidence that it really is finished. The reason for this is that it’s being published in Spanish first, with a launch date of January 2^nd. And this rather tight deadline means that Maria has been live-translating the book over my shoulder as I’m writing – and is now finally content that the story is all there and working properly. She’s less content that she’ll now be spending her Christmas editing and proof reading the Spanish edition. But at least I can relax, hey?

For those who have been following Erica’s story, this is the last book in the series – there was an opportunity to make it very definitely the last book right at the end – which I didn’t take (you’ll know it when you get there). But it wraps things up for all the characters, and the main arc of Erica and her serial killer father completes in a very satisfactory way. I’ve certainly learned my lesson about cliff-hanger endings. As I might have said, I didn’t much enjoy writing these books when they were restricted to a UK police-procedural (which was the original plan for the series) but I really got into it when I gave that up and let it evolve into what it wanted to be. Which is a kind of international thriller with the ultra-real, European-capitals vibe of the early Jason Bourne films (the good ones) and the deeply-disturbing, charming-genius characterisation of The Silence of the Lambs. For this final book, a lot of the action takes place in Amsterdam, which also gave a nice excuse to go and visit the city and get a bit of a feel for it. I’m going to do this more in the future for upcoming books. It really helps with making a place feel real to me while I’m writing. Plus I like holidays.

The series hasn’t actually done that well in English, but the reason we’re publishing in Spanish first is because La Cala (The Spanish name for book one, The Cove) is now my best-selling book in Spain, by a very long way. It was even number one in the entire Spanish Amazon store for almost a month this summer, and it’s still in the top fifty now. Consequently there’s been quite a lot of pressure to get this final book in the series out in the Spanish market, before the attention moves onto something new.

And perhaps one reason why it’s not really caught on in the UK was the English cover wasn’t very appealing. Hence another piece of news is that there’s now a new cover, which I think is really lovely. Long term readers will know that I originally self-published this book, with a cover I made myself, and which was really bad. So it’s taken an awfully long time to get this book looking good – and it’s kind of fitting that I’ve finally managed it now, when the series is all wrapped up.

(If you want to see it live on Amazon, it’s here.)

There’s no UK release date yet for book 4 (working title: The Calm), but it’ll be Spring sometime, once we’ve all got Xmas out of the way and settled into 2026. But I’m looking forward to it. And if you’ve not read any of these books yet (The Cove, The Trap, The Hunt are all out now on Amazon) - then why not get started now? At least you don’t have the excuse that the series isn’t finished any more!

There’s a lot more I could tell you, and now I’ve finally got this book done, I will write a bit more often. But I’m sure you’re busy in the run up to Christmas, and since I’ve doomed Maria to a holiday of translating and editing, I will be too. So for now, I hope you have a very happy Christmas and I’ll be in touch soon. Until then, I’m going to relax a bit and ponder on what I might write next. That’s a pretty nice Christmas present…

Merry Christmas!

Gregg

* Just in case you don’t know what a mince pie is, it’s a festive pastry eaten in the UK at Christmas, often served with Brandy Butter or thick cream - mmmm - and filled with mincemeat, which isn’t meat at all, but a mix of currants, raisins, and lots of sugar. Apparently it used to contain meat in ye olden days, but by the Victorian age people worked out the sweet versions were better. We really do stand on the shoulders of giants.

** There is no daily 5am 10km swim-run. It’s biweekly.

And so I found myself responding to not one but two lovely offers from book clubs to feature Deep Blue Lies. One of them asked me to answer some questions about the book, so I spent the morning doing just that, thinking hard about my answers, and feeling rather happy that the book had caught the interest of not one but two little communities of readers. But then I got a few more emails, somewhat similar, all offering amazing promotional opportunities for my book. Some of these came from people who had obviously read the story in great detail, but another from someone who’d misremembered a character who doesn’t exist. In fact several of them.

And then the penny dropped. I was talking to ChatGPT.

With the kind offers from the bookclubs, I politely enquired if they were simply asking me to donate my time to assist a readerly discussion – or more of a paid-opportunity-kind-of-deal, and yes – you’ve guessed it – they were both! Not only an amazing chance to get my book in front of thousands of real readers, but also $249.99 plus taxes.

So I’m feeling a bit sore, and not just in the finger department. It’s not that I’m against paying to promote a book, but if you’re charging for a service, I feel you should at least be upfront about it. But then I thought something good could come of it. I think the questions that ChatGPT wrote for me were actually rather good – they prompted me to understand a bit better what the book is actually about, at a deeper level. So I’m going to give them to you (with the answers, I mean). But please be warned: I was told the bookclub readers had all been busy reading the book this month (they hadn’t, obviously, because they weren’t real) but thinking this, I did include spoilers. So if you haven’t yet read Deep Blue Lies – but want to. Stop now!!! Actually stop after the next paragraph.

Because if you haven’t read it, now’s a pretty good time. My publisher has dropped the price for this week only. So I think it’s available in the UK at 0.99p and the US at 0.99c. But only if you’re quick.

Amazon buy link: Get Deep Blue Lies for just 0.99

OK. So without further ado, and painful use of words with the aforementioned letters, here is the Q&A with Gregg Dunnett, the well-known Welsh writer of Deep Blue Skies, a Boy called Roger and over twenty six other novels entirely hallucinated by AI.

Thanks for reading (and being real),

Gregg.

[continues]

A Q&A with the author of Deep Blue Lies, Gregg Dunnett

WARNING: BELOW HERE CONTAINS SPOILERS! DON’T READ THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK. GO AND BUY IT INSTEAD, AND READ THAT!!!





YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!





SERIOUSLY, YOU’VE READ IT HAVE YOU?

AND REMEMBERED IT? YOU DON’T WANT TO READ IT AGAIN, TO MAKE SURE?

Firstly huge thanks to the XXXX book club, I really am touched that you took the time to contact me… [Note from Gregg, I’m gonna cut the intro and skip to the questions]

Q1: Where did the idea for Deep Blue Lies come from?
I’m not sure exactly, but the book took shape after I read The Silent Patient (and then studied it in great detail). I wanted to write something with a twist as good as that one. Real twists are actually quite rare in thrillers—you can re-use or adapt ideas, but the first story to use a twist is usually remembered for it.
For example, in The Others, we think Nicole Kidman is trapped in a house haunted by ghosts—but the twist is she is the ghost.

So I was walking on the beach one day, trying to think of an idea that hadn’t been done before but could completely change a story’s meaning. The idea of a cryptic pregnancy came to me. Even the phrase itself sounded perfect for a thriller (I almost called the book The Cryptic Isle). If someone genuinely doesn’t know they’re pregnant, it’s automatically hidden from everyone—including themselves—until the truth inevitably comes out. And it’s a moment of intense shock, and stress. That’s an ideal twist.

In the end, it works differently from The Silent Patient—cryptic pregnancies aren’t well known, so it had to be explained rather than delivered in a single shock—but it still rests on something I’ve never seen in a book or film before, which I was really pleased about. Once I had that, everything spiralled from there.

Q2: The island of Alythos feels very real. Is it based on a real place?
It’s fictional, but strongly inspired by the time I spent in my twenties working in Greece as a windsurfing instructor. The Aegean Dream Resort’s manager, Jason, was modelled on the real manager I worked for—tough but basically fair. He often threatened to put people on the next plane home, and a few times he actually did. The only difference is, he didn’t end up murdered.
I was only there for one summer, but it made a deep impression. I especially remember our days off—borrowing a battered hire car and exploring the mountains, empty beaches, little towns. It was a Greece that still felt undiscovered back then.

Q3: Ava Whitaker’s journey is both emotional and mysterious. How did you approach writing her?
Ava begins broken—expelled from university, unsure who she is—and the story becomes an emotional excavation. Every secret she uncovers about the past changes her understanding of herself. She’s resourceful but vulnerable, and that duality drives the book.

It was tricky because there are some basic facts about her life she doesn’t know at the start, and I didn’t want that to feel unrealistic. Of course she’d have asked who her father was before, and why she was born in Greece. So I had to create strong reasons why those questions never got real answers until now. But sometimes what looks like a plot problem can become an opportunity to deepen character and atmosphere—and hopefully that’s what happened here. Ava knows deep down there’s something wrong with the story of her past, but all her life she’s been too scared to face it. The book is what happens when she finds the courage to do so.

Q4: The book alternates between present day and past diary entries. Why use that structure?
I like to write in the present—it feels fresher. But my own time in Greece was nearly thirty years ago, and I wanted a way to revisit that period authentically while keeping the story current. The diary sections let me do that.

I also discovered I love writing diaries! They let you reveal secrets, because the writer doesn’t expect anyone to read them—but people also lie to themselves, probably more than to other people, which makes them incredibly revealing of character. And practically speaking, diaries last, no one’s going to throw them away. So they can plausibly carry hidden truths from the past into the present. An eye-witness to details that wouldn’t otherwise be remembered.

I also liked the contrast in how Karen is the same age as Ava when she writes the diary – so it’s a really powerful way to show how different they are, which obviously makes sense when you understand that Ava isn’t Karen’s daughter in the end. But Ava is a bit like Imogen…

Q5: The mother–daughter dynamic between Karen and Ava is tense and fascinating. Was that always central?
Yes. I obviously knew from the beginning that Karen was the killer, so she had to be present enough early on that her reveal felt satisfying. And I came to realise that made her genuinely complex. She doesn’t kill because she wants to, she was trapped by circumstances. And even then, she tries to atone by adopting Ava and raising her. Yet she’s ultimately a person who can kill to avoid facing responsibility, so there’s a true rottenness at her core that she can’t escape, and that ultimately reveals itself.

I especially loved writing the final confrontation between her and Ava—a battle of wits where Karen thinks she still has control – because she’s always had control over this child – but finally Ava has grown strong enough to defeat her. I was genuinely a bit afraid of Karen while writing that scene. She’s my favourite villain of all my books!

Q6: There’s a very cinematic feel to Deep Blue Lies. Do you imagine it on screen?
Definitely. I tend to “see” scenes as film shots when I write (probably from watching too much TV). With this book I was especially conscious of that, since I’d just sold The Things You Find in Rockpools for a screen adaptation. I actually structured Deep Blue Lies as a seven-episode limited series in my head (why seven? It just happened that way). So if anyone from Netflix happens to be reading, my DMs are open.

Q7: There’s a writer in the book called Gregory Duncan. How much of you is in him?
Usually writing takes all my energy just to get the story down, but with this one I had room to play a bit, and I definitely planted the idea that Duncan could be me. But he ends up being a pretty pathetic and weak character, so I hope I’m not really like that in real life. I could have simply changed his name at that point, to take him further from me (Gregg Dunnett – Gregory Duncan), but I chose not to. I thought it would add depth to the mystery if readers wondered, on some level, if he might be a self-portrait.

Q8: Which character was the most enjoyable (or difficult) to write?
Karen was both. She’s manipulative and ruthless, but she’s also recognisably human—she does terrible things for reasons we can almost understand. And maybe even identify with. Writing her was uncomfortable at times, but that’s what made it rewarding. Sophia, on the other hand, was pure joy: warm, funny, and exactly the person you’d want Ava to find.

Q9: What do you hope readers take away from Deep Blue Lies?
At its heart, it’s about choosing honesty even when it hurts. Ava has always sensed something strange about her past. She would have covered-up for Karen dozens of times, when people have asked about her childhood, and how she came to be born in Greece. But she needs the courage to actually go and face it—and she can’t do that until she’s strong enough to accept the truth.

If readers come away thinking about how we only really grow stronger through honesty, that would be pretty cool. But on a simpler level, I just hope they’re swept along by the story, genuinely surprised by the twists, and they’re able to look back at it and feel it all fits together. That it isn’t true, but there’s nothing preventing it from being true.

Q10: Can you share a behind-the-scenes detail readers might not know?
Maybe even a big one. To promote Deep Blue Lies, I created collector boxes filled with real-life items from the fictional “Aegean Dream Resort,” all handmade by me (and my long-suffering family). There were numbered driftwood keyfobs, artisan soaps “from” the hotel spa, and even a resort brochure. They’ve all gone now, but I also made a digital version that you can have!

👉 https://greggdunnett.co.uk/digital_collector_box/

The idea was to make the world of the book feel tangible, without giving away any spoilers. I actually enjoying making all this almost as much as writing the book. And it certainly made The Aegean Dream Resort and Alythos Island feel real.


That’s it - hope this was interesting!

Gregg

Paradise with a body count...
That’s the quickest way I can describe my new thriller, Deep Blue Lies, which is OUT NOW in paperback, ebook, audiobook and Kindle Unlimited…

If you’ve been at all curious about the crazy boxes I’ve been banging on about for so long, you can finally go and see if the book was worth all the drama!

If you can’t wait a moment longer (which is fine by me), here’s the links:

👉 [E-book & Kindle Unlimited]
👉 [Paperback]
👉 [Audible]

But I have a couple of other things to say too... 🙂

Congratulations to the winners!
I did more promotion for this book than any I’ve written before, a lot more. I think that was mainly because I had a good feeling about this story once I’d finished it - which I don’t normally get. But I was also curious to try something new. My big idea was the collector boxes — exclusive packages featuring physical items “from” the Aegean Dream Resort. Room keys on driftwood tags scavenged from the beach, artisan soap from the hotel spa. The idea started as something for influencers on Instagram and TikTok, but evolved into a giveaway for readers themselves. A much better idea, as it turns out.

Well, the winners have been chosen and the 60 boxes are on their way. Congratulations if you got one! But if you didn’t (I never win anything either), don’t worry — we also made Virtual Collector Boxes for everybody. They show off a few of the goodies in the physical boxes, and will hopefully make you feel a little bit like a winner too — or at least that someone, somewhere thought of you. They’re free, fun, and you can check in right here, right now:

👉 [Virtual Collector Box]

Deep Blue Lies – out now on audio
I’m usually terrible about remembering people who read on audio. But if you like to listen, you should be pleased to hear that Katie Villa is the voice behind Deep Blue Lies. She also narrated Little Ghosts, my most successful audiobook to date, which hit number one on Audible in the UK and US, at least partly because of the following she has. And when you listen you can see why people like her so much, she really is brilliant at understanding the rhythm of a story. There’s a short clip below where you can hear for yourself - it makes me want to hear more right away. If you’ve ever been tempted to give audio a go, this is a great place to start.

👉 [Get Deep Blue Lies on Audible]

And finally, a big thank you…
I honestly don’t know whether any of this summer’s effort will make any difference to sales of Deep Blue Lies. But what I do know is how kind and generous many of you have been with your time and enthusiasm, trusting in the story before even reading it. So thank you so much for every comment, tag, message, review and email - or even just reading this. It really is appreciated.

What readers are saying
That’s all I have to say, so what are the 135 (to date) totally impartial NetGalley reviewers saying? You know, the ones who have already given Deep Blue Lies an average of 4 out of 5 stars:

“This slow burn mystery works its way to a boiling frenzy that will leave you slack-jawed.”
“The perfect blend of sun-soaked beauty and chilling suspense. Fans of Freida McFadden and Shari Lapena will devour…”
“Masterfully crafted psychological thriller! Highly recommend to fans of mysteries and unexpected twists.”
“Perfect psychological thriller! Twists and turns on every page and gripping from the very beginning.”

Sounds good! So if you’re looking for your next read — or even if you weren’t until you stumbled on this email — why not give it a try?

👉 [Grab Deep Blue Lies today]

Thanks!

instagram.com/greggdunnettauthor

Tiktok.com/@greggdunnettbooks

I also made a video where I try to tell the story of the book (and the boxes), in just over two minutes. I think it’s good, but also that I’ll need to go to acting classes if I’m serious for this to be a career change. The dog, however, is a natural. You can watch it here:

Ahead of the launch, the book has also been available on the pre-review site NetGalley for several weeks, and there’s now over a hundred reviews, with an average rating of somewhere between 4 and 5 stars - which all bodes well. Thank you to all the reviewers (if that’s you) and here’s a few extracts:

Finally, I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who has entered the competition for the boxes, and gotten into the spirit of promoting this book launch. This has been the first time I’ve tried any sort of promotion on social media, and I’ve actually enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. I had the idea that Instagram was just a place for celebrities and influencers to show off their perfect lives, and while there is a bit of that, the Booktok corner of the site is actually a lot more thoughtful and much more fun. And I’ve been made to feel so welcome. So thank you.

That’s it. I promised this would be short. I’m sure you already have the date Friday 26^th September tattooed somewhere prominent and deeply personal, but just in case, it’s this Friday and it’s when Deep Blue Lies comes out on paperback, ebook, on Kindle Unlimited and in Audio. I hope you like it!


Gregg

PS. For audiobook fans, here’s an extract from Deep Blue Lies in audio, as read by Katie Villa, who is a fantastic narrator, and took Little Ghosts to number one in the Audible store:

We’ve arrived back in Spain refreshed and ready to work, only for the harsh(ish) reality of life to hit back. (The washing machine exploded, I managed to bite something metal that fell into my rice salad, requiring a terrifying trip to the dentist (reader, I was very brave) and finally the local school announced an apparently-endless strike, so the kids are upstairs gorging Netflix instead of locked up in prison class.) But we’re working stoically through it all.

And although we’ve been away for six weeks, visiting friends and family in the UK, we haven’t exactly been on holiday the whole time. I’ll remember this forever as the summer of the (bloody) boxes. We’ve been finalising the contents, and working on the somewhat-neglected aspect of what to do once they were done. All while bouncing around the UK from one relative or friend’s house to another. So this post is about showing how they finally came out, but most importantly, it’s to give you - my most loyal and longstanding readers - everything you need to know to stand the best chance of winning one…

For anyone new to this blog, a super quick recap on what I’m on about: My next psychological thriller DEEP BLUE LIES is set in a hotel on a Greek island. I thought it was really good, so decided to try something I’ve never done before and actually promote it. I hit upon creating ‘influencer packs’ - boxes filled with physical items from the story. I thought I could send them to important people on Instagram and TikTok and they would show them to their fans, and that way the existence of the book would filter down to ordinary readers like you and me. It would be a way to make more people aware of the book in a very crowded market for psychological thrillers even though I’m far from from a celebrity or a big name author. More on how that went later.

The idea evolved so that opening the boxes would be like ‘checking-in’ to the hotel in the story – the Aegean Dream Resort. So I made numbered room keys, on keyfobs made from driftwood supposedly ‘found’ on the island (but actually collected from my local beach, which also happens to be rather picturesque:

I also made/tried-to-make artisan soaps – ‘from’ the hotel spa. I made a fake brochure, filled with characters from the story, as well as lots of jokes that had me sniggering away for weeks. I gathered sand and tiny shells, and filled little glass bottles. And once I got started, I got completely carried away. I haven’t publicly said this until now, but I became determined to make this book-launch-box-thing the best ever book-launch-box-thing, something that people into book-launch-box-things will talk about for years, or maybe for ever. So how did it all go? Let’s find out.

I always thought the room keys would be the star of the boxes, and I think they are. Here’s a couple:

I think they’re beautiful, and you really have to hold them, because they’re very tactile, but boy was there a lot of work involved in getting them looking like this. I had the idea for them on the beach one day, when I found a piece of driftwood perfectly shaped by the sea. But then finding another sixty similar pieces, took just about forever. I ended up capping the number of boxes at sixty just because it was so hard to find enough suitable pieces of wood. And then each one had to be sanded perfectly smooth, drilled, and then laser-engraved with the hotel logo, all of which is harder than it sounds.

The soaps, in the end, were easier. After a few aborted attempts to make them myself, I gave up, and used a local Spanish firm who specialise in artisan hand-made soaps (Gracias Ja Bonita Fabrica). They’re lovely, though you’ll have to take my word for the scent:

The brochure also took a long while. It turns out that laying out a proper mini-magazine was harder than I assumed - who could have guessed? And I wouldn’t have been able to do it at all (at least not the way I wanted) without AI to create photos of a hotel and island that don’t actually exist.

Once I’d got the hang of this I decided it would be a fun joke to put images of the hotel guests all reading DEEP BLUE LIES, in lots of different, and mostly inappropriate situations (to my mind the first actually useful feature of ChatGPT’s image generation feature). It was a bit random what came out, but my favourite by a very long margin was when it churned out Jason Stratham reading the book in the sauna:

Keep reading this post to find out how you can read the entire brochure, but before I get to that, I’m trying to make you want to win one of these boxes here, so take a look at a few more images of the finished package:

I don’t know if I’ve quite lived up the ambition of creating the best ever book-launch-box-thing, but I don’t think I’m far away. So, what now?

As said, the initial plan was to send these to the top influencers in the bookish sections of TikTok and Instagram, in the hope that these people would ‘unbox’ them for their followers, and thus they’d be seen by millions of ordinary readers. Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately - that didn’t work. It turns out such people are so busy being top influencers that they either didn’t see, or didn’t care about my attempts to reach them. So for a short while I was left with sixty lovingly-created boxes and no idea what to do with them. But then I struck upon the idea of just giving them away, and that seemed to work. So that’s what I’ve been doing, via various small giveaway competitions on social media. But more importantly, it’s what I’m going to do in the run up to the launch of DEEP BLUE LIES, with the final and biggest batch of the boxes.

DEEP BLUE LIES comes out on September 26, you can preorder it here, and in the week or so before the launch I’m going to run one big (beautiful) giveaway competition across Instagram, Facebook and Tiktok. I’m going to give away all of the remaining boxes (about 20) and if you’d like to win one, this is your last, and by far your best chance. In a couple of days I’ll be making the giveaway live on all my social media channels. All you have to do to enter is to comment on the posts, tag a friend or share the post to help spread the word about the book. Remember, ultimately this project is about promoting DEEP BLUE LIES, making it stand out in a very crowded market of psychological thrillers, so I’ve structured the giveaway that every share, every friend tagged, every ‘like’ each counts as an entry. The more actions you take, helping to spread the word, the more times you enter, and the greater chance you have of winning a box.

If that sounds a bit unfair because you don’t have a big social media platform, then I actually sympathise with that, and I have set aside a few boxes for people who would like to help but can’t, and I’ll assign these at random. You definitely do stand a chance if you just enter once, and that might be commenting on just one platform, or even just leaving a message below this post. But generally the rule is this: the more times you comment under these posts, the more times you share them to a friend, or post it to your timeline (or whatever) the more chances you have of winning.

You can enter on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, because the more interaction on any of these platforms, the greater the reach of the competition and the more people will see that DEEP BLUE LIES exists. So feel free to enter on all of the platforms, but it’s just the one single competition. There are only 20 of the boxes left, I’ll never make any again, and there will never be any more, they’re true collector’s pieces (and should this actually work and the book become a big success, who knows, they could actually go on to be worth something!)

If you’re not already following me on the platforms below, here are the links to do so. You’ll shortly see the competition posts going live on these sites and all you have to do to enter is comment, tag friends and share. The more you do, the more chances you have of winning.

facebook.com/greggwriter

instagram.com/greggdunnettauthor

Tiktok.com/@greggdunnettbooks

But what about DEEP BLUE LIES itself - is the book actually any good? Unusually for me, when I finished writing the story I thought it was the best I’d ever written. But over time that confidence has waned, and by now I’m mostly back to my usual sense of thinking it’s terrible - so this question has niggled at my mind over the summer. But I’m relieved to see it getting some amazing reviews on NetGalley (where people can register to be ARC readers). It’s had 77 reviews at the time of writing, with almost all being 4 or 5 stars. And even the bad ones are 3 stars. So I’m happy. Again, I do have a favourite:

Way to go Doug!

Anyway. I am quite looking forward to putting this chapter of my writing career behind me, seeing DEEP BLUE LIES launched, and getting back to actually writing something. Long-standing & possibly long-suffering readers may also remember I left the third instalment of my Erica Sands series on something of a cliffhanger (and I’m half way through writing book 4). And I promise I’ll get back to it very soon. And also that I’ll soon stop talking about boxes! But having come this far, there’s no point not going all in. So there is a bit more to say:

Remember the brochure, and Jason Statham in the sauna? Well, while I can’t send everyone a physical copy of the fake brochure, it turns out I can send everyone an online version. As said previously, the whole thing is a sort of joke, in that it’s exactly what you’d expect from a hotel brochure, except everything’s a bit ‘off’. I actually had a ton of fun writing this, but a couple of words of warning. One - it’s hard to read on a phone. This is because it comes from an A5 brochure, which is just the wrong shape for a phone screen, and which I could lay it out again - but I’m not going to. However, on an iPad or laptop screen, you can see it all and I think it’s quite entertaining. The second point is that my sense of humour may be a bit odd. But you probably already know that. Here’s the link:

www.greggdunnett.co.uk/brochure

And if you liked that, you might enjoy these too:

www.greggdunnett.co.uk/FeedbackForm

www.greggdunnett.co.uk/SpaLiabilityForm

Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

But if there’s one takeaway to this post, it’s that your best and final chance to win one of my incredibly exclusive, hand-made, totally obsessive, clearly over-the-top DEEP BLUE LIES collector box is to make sure you’re following me on these social media channels so you can enter the competitions which will appear there in the next few days.

facebook.com/greggwriter

instagram.com/greggdunnettauthor

Tiktok.com/@greggdunnettbooks

See you there, and GOOD LUCK!

Thank you for reading, and normal bookish-posts will resume shortly.

Gregg

Crystal-clear waters. Cold-blooded murder. Deep blue lies.
When Ava Whitaker is kicked out of medical school – and dumped by her boyfriend – her life falls apart. But the real problem isn't her future. It's in her past. She was born on the Greek island of Alythos, where her mother once mixed cocktails at the luxurious Aegean Dream Resort. Yet her mother has never spoken about that time, never explained why she left so suddenly, and never answered the one question that's haunted Ava her entire life: Who was her father?

Desperate for answers, Ava travels to Alythos to discover the truth. But what begins as a search for her identity quickly turns into something far more sinister. The island's aquamarine waters hide tragic secrets. The locals' smiles don't reach their eyes. And the abandoned resort, with its cracked pool and vine-strangled terraces, feels like a tomb.

Because something happened here twenty years ago. Something the locals have spent decades trying to forget. And something somebody will do anything to keep buried...

Out September 26th on Kindle, KU, paperback and audio.

See on Amazon and pre-order now!

A quick recap if you’ve been living under a rock – or perhaps just living your life and not mine. I decided to support the launch of my next novel DEEP BLUE LIES, by sending out special influencer boxes filled with unique items from the hotel that features in the story. There’s a handmade room key, with the keyfob carved from a real piece of driftwood, washed up in the winter storms of the Aegean sea. There’s a bar of artisan soap, fresh from the hotel spa. There’s shampoo, conditioner – infused with wild Greek rose and mountain pine. And because I went a bit over-the-top, there’s quite a lot more, but it’s all very beautiful and everything connects to the book.

And I thought I had the second part of the project – a list of who to send them to – fairly well covered. I decided early on that I’m hopeless on social media (I didn’t even have an Instagram account at the time), so I’d get help from people who knew this strange new world better than I did. I contacted an agency that shall remain nameless, struck a deal where I paid an enormous sum of money in return for a list of influential people in the mysterious world of Bookstagram. All I’d have to do then was send them the world’s greatest influencer boxes, along with the one of the finest psychological thriller’s ever written. And stand aside JK Rowling, global world domination shall be mine. All mine.

Alas, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. I did get a list of Instagram creators, but they didn’t look particularly influential. And yesterday morning I found myself arguing with the aforementioned but still nameless agency over whether a creator whose bio read:

“Follow the journey of training my young horse while studying equine nutrition 🐴 ”

was a good fit for my psychological thriller set on a mysterious Greek island with absolutely no horses in it.

On the plus side, they did do the decent thing and refund the enormous sum of money. And on the actually-I-think-I’m-going-to-quite-enjoy-this side, I’m now going to have to figure out myself where to send all the boxes.

So that’s today’s job (along with finally fixing Alba’s surfboard that I ran over in the van – I have a plan for that at last). But in the meantime, I did say I’d give more of the boxes away to real people – not just influencers - and continuing that, we set up a competition on Instagram giving away three more boxes. It’s gone really well so far, and if you’re on Instagram I’d love you to enter (and we may well increase the number of boxes we’re giving away here too.) You can see it, and enter here – we made an actual video and everything. All together now – Oooooooo.

In the meantime, we’re having a really enjoyable summer back in England. Highlights have included watching the very-serious model-boat racing on the Suffolk coast, and in particular the standup row between one of the competitors and a spectator who was filming with his drone – and in doing so either stealing biometric facial information (summarising one side of the issue), or just having a nice day out and flying his drone (if you take the other). I’ve pixelated any facial fingerprints in the below image to avoid taking sides myself, and also chosen an image where most of the competitor’s silly hats are doing most of the online-safety work for me.

We’ve also enjoyed a 60km bike ride including a ride on a bike-ferry – come on – and a trip to Tiptree’s famous jam factory – awesome. And possibly best of all, a paddleboard expedition up a river to a quaint little village that appeared to be stuck somewhere in the wonderful nostalgia of thirty years ago, and which culminated in an impromptu diving competition – which I won. And if anyone from my family thinks to comment below saying otherwise, don’t bother, I’ll only delete it.

Finally, DEEP BLUE LIES is still available to those of you who like to read and review on NetGalley, and the first reviews are in! There are ten at the moment, and thankfully everyone seems to like it so far. After all this effort, phew!

:-)

I hope you’re having a fun and interesting summer wherever you are. And if not, that you start today.

You can:

Pre-order DEEP BLUE LIES here

Follow me on Instagram here

Join my Facebook group here

Sign up for a social media detox here (just kidding, this is just another link to instagram where you can enter the competition to win a box. If you can’t beat em, join em.)

If you’re a Netgalley reviewer, I hope you like it!

The book comes out on September 26th, and if you’d prefer to wait you can pre-order it here:
https://geni.us/1233-al-aut-am

In other news. The Lake House Children is on a Kindle Daily Deal on Saturday 9th August in the US and Canada - just 99c. Grab it here: https://readerlinks.com/l/4198359

And Little Ghosts is on a monthly deal for the whole of August in the US and Canada. Just USD2.49: https://readerlinks.com/l/3402196

Many people are saying DEEP BLUE LIES is the thriller of the summer. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER

:-)

Jono, Japan, Just in time…

My brother Jono has spent the last year and a bit sailing solo around Japan by windsurf board. I haven’t spoken too much about it on this blog, and I began to realise this as he closed, rather excitingly, on the finish line – pursued by his visa deadline and (in my mind at least) a comedy group of Japanese immigration officers keen to kick him out the country. On the way he’s picked up a fairly serious girlfriend, whom he met in a laundrette a few months into the journey. He’s also encountered bears, hammerhead sharks, hundred-mile long fishing nets and just generally had an amazing adventure that I can’t really comprehend. It could and probably should have been something to live vicariously via this blog.

But now that he has finished I think I understand better why I’ve not talked about it – or even thought about it too much. Whether it really is or really isn’t, it just feels bloody dangerous to me, and my way of dealing with it has been to not to think too much about him alone on the ocean every day, or sleeping rough under his sail, or getting around a treacherous headland as the light fades and the fog closes in, or wondering if bear-spray really does work, especially when the instructions are written in Japanese.

This doesn’t make me feel particularly courageous, but maybe when I woke up the other day to the news of a huge earthquake and expectations of a massive tsunami to hit Japan’s pacific coast, at least my understanding of it fell a bit more into place. It came two days after he reached the finish line so he wasn’t on the water, and I’m not even sure if the tsunami really hit with any force. But a slight rearrangement of the forces of time and nature and the outcome would have been very different. As it is each day for all of us.

Anyway, you haven’t been able to follow it much here, but I’m sure there’ll be a book, so you’ll just have buy that. And in the meantime (if you haven’t read them) there’s links below to his two previous books, about his two previous epic windsurfing journeys: around the UK in 2016, and following the coastline of Europe from 2017-2019. We don’t count the paddling round Ireland on a rubber duck.

Long Standing Ambition: https://readerlinks.com/l/1090206

In the Balance: https://readerlinks.com/l/3206003

Our own movements have been a little bit tamer. I did mention a storm on the crossing from Spain to the UK, but now it feels a bit pathetic to go on about it. Still it was quite exciting to be on a ship battering through the swells in the Bay of Biscay, though I don’t think the dog liked it much. It’s a while since I’ve been in England in the summer, and it is undeniably lovely. We spent a while in Bournemouth, where we used to live, and spent a night camping near Kimmeridge in the beautiful Isle of Purbeck. This is where I set my Erica Sands series of books, because it’s just about my favourite place in the whole world. I’d worried that it might have changed, got too busy, but it seemed just the same as ever. And then of course we all got colds, and spent a few days sneezing in the faces of dear friends we haven’t seen for a while.

Speaking of Erica Sands, something rather strange has happened with that series. In the English market the books (The Cove, The Trap, The Hunt) haven’t done terribly well. But Maria translated them into Spanish anyway, and launched them on the Spanish market. And a couple of months ago the first in the series – La Cala – actually hit the number one spot in the Spanish Amazon kindle store. This is obviously good, but I have had it happen before. But what came next is new, for us at least. The day after La Cala hit number one it slipped to number two, and we assumed it would continue to slide back down to where my books usually reside, just below the Spanish edition of A Good Scout’s Guide To Woggle Maintenance. But it didn’t. A few days later it was still in the top five, and then it climbed back up again, kicking Freida McFadden out the way to reclaim the top spot. We honestly thought it was a mistake, and Amazon would soon fix it, but a week after that it was still there, and another week after that, and another week after that. It is finally slipping a bit now, but as I write this, all three of the books are in the top 100 in Amazon.es which is completely amazing. As a result we’re probably going to be able to get a deal to put the books in bookshops too.

All of which is to say that, due to their somewhat tepid performance in English, I’ve never really liked these books. But now that they’re doing so well in Spanish I’ve completely changed my opinion and think they’re absolutely brilliant. If you’ve not read them in English, you should definitely do so, because all these discerning Spanish people can’t be wrong. By coincidence we’ve been looking at putting new covers on the English versions too, so stay tuned for that. And I am halfway through writing book 4, which I’ll get back to in September.

Deep Blue Lies
Finally we have been putting the boxes together for the launch campaign for Deep Blue Lies. This was an idea that grew and grew, and it’s finally coming together. We now have everything that’s going in the boxes, and it’s just a case a packing it all up, making it look pretty, and working out where and when to send them. It’s also clear just how far we’ve overshot the line of what would be a sensible level of effort to put into the project. I think it’s very unlikely to work, in the sense that the exposure we get is unlikely to exceed the effort we’ve put in. But it’s been surprisingly fun and you never know, all it takes is one post to go truly viral and it could make the difference and launch Deep Blue Lies up to levels I’ve not seen before.

Speaking of never quite knowing. In my last post I promised that one person who shared about the book on facebook would win their own box, and the same for someone who shared it on Instagram. And I can now reveal the winners! Congratulations to Katie Greenop, picked at random on Instagram, and Deborah Bray-Haddock on Facebook, picked because she had a picture of Paddington Bear on her facebook that I rather liked. If you could send me an address to post to I’ll make sure a box wings its way to each of you, and if you don’t I’ll do my best to track you down.

And stay tuned, I’m sure another opportunity to win a box will appear at some point. Especially to those who are following me on fb and Instagram.

Quick update on deals for this month:

The Lake House Children – Kindle Daily Deal US and Canada – 9^th August
Little Ghosts – Kindle Monthly Deal, US and Canada – August 01 -31

That’s all from me. Enjoy the lovely summery weather! (Please note, if you don’t have summery weather, consider this sarcasm, if you do have it, don’t.)

Gregg