P.J. Murphy's Writer Site

The day has finally come to release my second novel. You can find it on Amazon.co.uk here, or in your friendly (automated) local Amazon store.

I say ‘finally’ because I’ve been waiting a long, long time for this day. Two reasons for this: firstly, this novel took a very long time to write. Fifteen years by my best estimation. I wasn’t writing it constantly, of course, but it did go through various iterations and long periods of getting stuck. I wrote another novel, Troubleshot, in the meantime. For several years, I thought Dead Letters would remain a novel 90% completed. But I got there in the end…

I’ll write a full blog about the genesis and development of Dead Letters, but since it will probably contain mild spoilers, I’ll wait a bit to give you a chance to read it!

The second reason for the wait is that I wanted to get Troubleshot out first and use it as a learning experience for self-publishing. I actually finished Dead Letters last July, but didn’t think it would be a good idea to publish two novels at once. Troubleshot had been sitting around for a couple of years by that point, so I went ahead with it first. I also saw it as a more ‘niche’ book, in terms of its theme and structure, so I didn’t have high hopes for it. What better guinea pig? Dead Letters, on the other hand, has (hopefully) a wider appeal, with its clear central plot and protagonist.

I should probably write another blog about my learning from Troubleshot and how I’ve applied it to marketing Dead Letters. Let’s wait to see if it makes any difference, first of all!

Until next time, happy reading!