Hello world. I'm back!

Well, that was a thing, wasn't it (cf. Rob's previous posts). Sorry I've been absent for a while. I stopped blogging around about the time when my marriage finally broke down. I didn't really want to share the fact on here - I was worried that people would roll their eyes and tut at my private life. Now, of course, getting divorced has been put firmly into perspective. It's been mortifying having to reveal to the world the hellish pickle I've got myself in to, but it's been heartening to receive so many notes of support and kindness. Thanks particularly to Snowbooks authors for your patience and understanding whilst I collected myself. Good news: the backlog is getting cleared, the road ahead is getting clearer and, mostly importantly, my delicious brains are fully back in gear. I shouldn't get ahead of myself: the full healing process will take a while, but for the moment, suffice to say I'm back in the saddle.

So, where were we? Ah yes, books. Shall I tell you about some that we have lined up for the coming months? They're rather super. Yes? You'd like that? Oh, OK then, stop twisting my arm. Ow. OW. Gerroff.

The New Year starts with a super coup: the latest from Paul Magrs who has brilliantly decided to let Snowbooks publish Enter Wildthyme. Iris Wildthyme is friends with Doctor Who. I think that's all you need to know.

The latest from (and I don't say this lightly) top horror author Thomas Emson will be out in hardback this week. The vampire plague continues to spread in Krimson. It's out in paperback in Feb.

Also in February we'll be publishing Drop Dead Gorgeous, the next corker from Wayne Simmons, author of the bestselling Flu.

Then in March, look at this lovely thing: The Martian Ambassador. (Cover design by me: see end of this post!) It's set in London in 1899, six years after the discovery of intelligent life on Mars.

March brings the second in the Burton and Swinburne series by Mark Hodder - The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man. What if Time presented Charles Darwin with a different set of opportunities? What if he became a super-criminal? Florence Nightingale a rogue surgeon? Isambard Kingdom Brunel a living corpse in a massive mechanized steam-driven body?

And that's just a few of the books in the first three months of 2011 (which I hope for all our sakes will be a hell of a lot better than this poxy year [shakes fist at 2010]). See? It might have looked quiet but there's been a lot going on behind the scenes!

And for old time's sake, why don't we do a to do list? Yes, why not. Here is a heavily abridged version of what I'm up to at the moment.

- Royalties. This year we moved to a new system for calculating royalties. Never do that. Our royalties will all (finally) be successfully calculated within the week. Do not ask about the process for achieving this as it has been long, slow, painful, boring, difficult, confusing, disappointing and complicated. My sincere apologies to Snowbooks authors that they're late. Won't happen again.

- Update website. It still says 'summer' on the homepage yet I sit here with woolly socks on thinking about a snifter of brandy, purely for medicinal systemic warming purposes. That can't be right.

- Do eBooks. Some of our books are in a number of ebook formats, but not enough (either titles or formats). It's my next major piece of work. Should be fun, and hopefully lucrative.

- Catch up on paperwork. I owe signed copy contracts, emails and paperwork to a number of people - it's on the way.

- Learn bookkeeping. I have always done the bookkeeping for Snowbooks, and the summary for my approach is possibly best described as 'unsophisticated'. Entering basic transactions is one thing: entering journals to move income from LBS's ringfenced trust account to the sales ledger, then to the cash account, then to Snowbooks' current account ledger is quite another and I'd like to be able to do it without relying on an outside bookkeeper. In fact I really want to get on top of all the financial admin of the business once and for all. So today I've started an Open University Bookkeeping course. By Christmas I'll be a qualified bookkeeper. I find this hilarious.

- Get some money in. All this recent nonsense has left me well out of pocket, personally, and to fill the gap I'm going to ramp up the cover design work I do for client publishers. I've knocked together a portfolio here: www.snowangels.org. If you'd like me to do some design for you, along the lines of the covers in this post, I'd be delighted. Money *and* fun design - a lovely combination.

You know what: it's nice to be posting again. I am so proud of our books and I've got out of the habit of blogging about them. Brace yourselves for some renewed bragging. Anyhoo, so what have you been up to, then? Did I miss anything?