P.J. Murphy's Writer Site

It has been a nail-biting 24 hours, since I got the system message asking me to prove copyright for Dead Letters (or some unspecified thing in it that’s available on the internet). You find yourself asking ‘if I have to prove to Amazon that I actually wrote this thing over a period of years, how would I do so?’ I have a bunch of time-dated drafts spanning a 15 year period, charting the evolution of the novel, but I hardly think they’d be up for looking at a load of screenshots from Windows Explorer. And the idea of posting the manuscript to yourself so you can show the postmark date seems antiquated too. “Look, Amazon, look at this postmark. It proves everything!”

I’m not the only one to have struggled with these issues. I found this interesting exchange in a community forum https://selfpublishingadvice.org/prove-your-publishing-rights/

Fortunately, all the worry was for nothing. I replied to Amazon stating that Dead Letters is entirely my own work and a human looked at it and… all’s well with the world (or this part of it, at least!). Dead Letters is now available for pre-order.

Here’s the Amazon.co.uk link. It’s available on other Amazon sites too, if you don’t live in the UK.

Paperback copies are not available for pre-order but will be available for the launch date of 5th May. And I do recommend the paperback version, as it gave me far more options for formatting than the ebook, so it looks quite beautiful, if I do say so myself. However, if you’re like me and haven’t bought a physical book in years, the Kindle version is perfectly readable too. And I’m pleased to announce that it’s word for word identical (wow, what a revelation, I hear you cry, but believe me, I had to verify this after a rather painful formatting and copy control incident!).

I’m sure I’ll be giving you more updates in the coming weeks, but for now, I just need to go and lie down. Laterrrrzzzz!