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Chris Quinton talks to F. M. Parkinson about THE WALLED GARDEN, and R.A. Padmos introduces UNSPOKEN on Fearless, Fast-paced Fiction.

We're delighted to report that, as of a few minutes ago, THE WALLED GARDEN by F.M. Parkinson and UNSPOKEN by R.A. Padmos are both available to purchase via our online shop module. We're looking forward eagerly to seeing what readers make of these two novels, which shed light on some of the problems facing gay relationships in times less enlightened than our own.

While we're here, this would also be a good moment to bring you up to date on direct sales statistics for April. We didn't have an overall top seller; Chris Quinton's FOX HUNT and Julie Bozza's THE DEFINITIVE ALBERT J. STERNE (yes, the original 'Albert' book, not the sequel!) tied for the honour, and our average response time for the month was respectable enough at five hours and 34 minutes.

Progress on our two 1 August titles is pretty spectacular; most of the work on them is done already - covers designed, much of the proof-reading dealt with - and we're now turning our attention to November instead. (Indeed, the weather here at Megaheadquarters makes this seem perfectly seasonable!) Naturally we'll keep you up to date with everything new that happens!

Reviewer Gabbi at Top2Bottom Reviews seems to have been highly impressed with Chris's FOX HUNT and has commented as follows:

I really loved the physical and emotional chemistry between Robert and Fox. I also loved the witty and intelligent banter between them, and I found myself captivated by their relationship. They were an easy couple to rally behind and hope they find a way to be together...

Tom at 'A Bear on Books' has just posted a wildly enthusiastic review of Chris's FOX HUNT which includes the following:

Chris Quinton outdid herself with this sexy, funny mystery involving artwork, family secrets and maybe a supernatural creature or two. This is a nicely imagined, fantastically executed work with huge heart and soul.

We'd say it was well-deserved (it is!) - but then we're hardly objective where Chris's writing is concerned - so we'll simply confine ourselves to repeating something else Tom included in his review:

This book is just ripe for a sequel. Please?

When we crunched our year-end numbers we realised that we had just sold our 1,000th book - a whole month ahead of the expected date. We've offered the purchaser of that book a free book from our list, and we'll be doing the same with the purchasers of the 2,000th, 3,000th etc. - as long as we manage to keep going. We just thought we'd better make it public so that the person who gets the surprise e-mail will realise that yes, it's absolutely genuine and that the unfortunate date is nothing but a coincidence!

Well, dear readers, here we are at the end of our second year of trading. Yes, we know it's only been a 48 week year but we're moving the start date so that 'our year' coincides more closely with the tax year; we hope that will make things slightly more convenient for those of our authors who pay tax on their royalties.

We have updated the website with details of our new titles, R.A. Padmos's new novel UNSPOKEN and, from an author new to Manifold Press, F.M. Parkinson, THE WALLED GARDEN. These are both historical novels which offer thoroughly absorbing portrayals of intimate relationships between men in times much less accepting than our own. They'll be available to buy from 1 May.

The past week has been mercifully quiet, with most of the sales being through our distribution partners. As far as our own website goes, the top seller was Chris's popular FOX HUNT and our average response time - since we were hovering over the keyboard - was 32 minutes.

In Year Three, we won't be burdening you with this information on a weekly basis but will save it for the end of each month instead. Such details, which were important when we were just starting to establish ourselves, are no longer of the same importance now; although we'll continue to monitor them, we won't be in quite so much of a hurry to share them in future. This means that we'll confine ourselves to posting whenever there is a review or a piece of substantive news to share with you, rather than once a week come hell or high water. The plan at the moment is to post statistical information on the first day of each month; fingers crossed that we can keep to that!

And to everyone who has been with us for the past two years/one hundred weeks - thank you for your support, and we're very glad to have your company as - to our slight astonishment - we embark on our third year of trading.

Ahead of announcing our two new titles tomorrow, we've made a few small tweaks to the website; these relate to the page counts of our books.

To explain; in the past few months we've been re-making all our e-book files, incorporating some of the lessons we've learned since we started on this strange adventure two years ago. This means that on the whole we've eliminated superfluous spaces and generally tidied up our presentation. As a result, most of the file sizes have changed (the online shop module will update itself overnight with the new figures) and so have most of the page counts, which are based on the .pdf versions of our titles.

As a rule, the page counts have come out slightly shorter - although THRACE has stayed the same, THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH has come out slightly longer, and for reasons we are completely unable to fathom GHOST STATION appears to have lost 52 pages! In fact it hasn't lost any text at all - none of them has; we can only imagine there was something slightly strange about the layout that we didn't notice in the original version, but which has now been corrected. In any case, page counts are of little use when it comes to electronic books; they're only there as a guide, so that at least you know whether to expect a light read or a substantial blockbuster!

We're sure none of this will matter to most of our readers, but as some of you are particularly eagle-eyed and would probably spot the alternations we thought we had better give you an explanation just to set your minds at rest.

Now, on with preparing to announce the two new books ...

Another quiet week, and once again we're gearing up for the end of our trading year by crunching numbers and doing stats. We also have a new DMCA cop who has started chasing illegal download sites and issuing DMCA notices on our behalf - which is of course becoming a much larger job as the number of our titles grows.

Our top seller this week has again been Chris's FOX HUNT, and our average response time of four hours and 18 minutes was certainly not to be sneezed at!

In addition, we were thrilled to learn that a new book we're hoping to publish later in the year is now finished, and a couple of others have taken major leaps forward recently. After a (northern-hemisphere) winter of hard slog for what felt like very little return, we are emerging into spring in a much more positive frame of mind and full of re-awakened energy ... which has got to be a good thing, right?

Details of our new 1 May publications will be announced this time next week.

Not a hugely busy week, it must be admitted, although we had a modest surge of sales through one of our online distributors. On a purely domestic level, however, Chris's FOX HUNT was again the highest seller through our website, with an average response time of exactly three and a half hours.

We're still gearing up for our new releases, but the jobs that remain to be done on them are now being ticked off one after another. We took a little time out today to prepare a leaflet, which we hope will be distributed by our authors at various conventions and events later in the year, and to start thinking about improvements and amendments we can make as we plunge headlong into our third year of trading; some of these we'll discuss with you here when we have a better idea of what we're doing! Suffice it to say that with the exception of the year end accounts and the actual publication of our two 1 May titles we're about as far ahead of ourselves as we could reasonably expect to be at this stage - which, we're quite convinced, probably means that some kind of apocalyptic disaster is only just around the next corner!

Thanks to the recent excellent review on Jessewave Chris Quinton's FOX HUNT was this week's runaway best-seller, although our average response time dipped somewhat and was exactly seven hours.

We're pushing forward on a couple of long-term projects, one of which is nearly completed, and gradually pulling things together for not only the publication of our next two books on 1 May but also the formal end of our second year in business; this means bringing our accounts and statistics up to date so that when we have our annual get-together/meeting of minds (essentially a lunch where our authors all meet up - or at least those who can actually get there) we have some solid information to impart. However the essential decision was made a long time ago; initially we intended to try this for two years just to see how it went, but obviously it's going well enough for us to carry on into the foreseeable future!