News/Blog

Where on Earth is Dark Harbour?

November 5, 2019 in Blog / News tagged broadsands beach / combe martin / devon / inspirations / moonlight cove by Joseph Kiel

I often wonder which seaside town would make the best location if (when?!) a film producer ever decides to turn Dark Harbour into a movie. How about the place that inspired the books, perhaps? Well, the truth is, Dark Harbour is not based on one town, but an amalgamation of seaside towns that I’ve visited throughout my life (plus my hometown which isn’t beside the sea). It’s part Hunstanton, part Skegness, part Folkestone, part Whitby etc.

All of these seaside towns I visited in my childhood on family holidays. Most of them, as you may have noticed, are situated on the east side of England. Living in the east, it was the coastline that we naturally gravitated towards. In my early childhood, however, there were times when we ventured all the way over to the other side of the country. So I’m certain that Dark Harbour also has a little bit of South Wales in it, plus a certain other place on the west coast that we once visited.

Combe Martin Beach 1989 (me far left)

Combe Martin beach 2019… Broadsands Beach in the background

That place was a village called Combe Martin in North Devon. We went on holiday there during the October half term of 1989, back when I was only ten. It was one of my most favourite holidays, and the place left a great impression on me. There was such a different atmosphere to the east coast. The place was so brooding (certainly at that time of year), with such dramatic cliffs and rugged coastlines.

…and dead bodies stuffed in bushes

I don’t actually remember a great deal from that holiday of 30 years ago. Random details still come to mind, like a certain Belinda Carlisle song being on the radio whenever we got in the car. I liked the song so much that I later bought the album (come on, a Beatle played guitar on it so it had class). Listening to Leave a Light On still takes me back to that holiday. We stayed in a chalet, and I remember that when we first got there, the television was in the bathtub. My parents didn’t actually like the chalet as it was so grotty and vowed never to stay in one again; they got a caravan the following year because of this holiday and never looked back.

Looks like a great place to grab a bite to eat. Must be a lot of Dark Harbour fans in Combe Martin.

We were also there with our cousins (fellow writer Killian H Gore among them) and together with my brothers, the six of us would go exploring. It was during our explorations that we discovered a secluded beach down a steep cliff face. Down there we found a beautiful cove that we kept running off to throughout the week. Along with numerous caves and tunnels, at low tide there was an outcrop of land that became an island at high tide. Climbing upon it, we named it Hameton Island, an amalgamation of our surnames. In the first edition of Dark Harbour: The Tale of the Soul Searcher, one of the characters refers to an island with this name (although you may not find this anymore).

Broadsands Beach, the island in the background

It felt like we were the very first people to discover this cove (even though there were steps in place down the cliff face). There was definitely a bit of magic in the air in that place down in Devon, and recently I felt a compulsion to return there. It was the 30th anniversary of our visit, and weirdly, the only time I was able to get away was again during the October half term.

The Tale of the Broadsands Searcher

Before I went, I did some research and found out this cove we visited is actually called Broadsands Beach, and apparently it was voted Britain’s Happiest View. It was a very strange experience retracing the steps of my childhood, especially after so many years. I did take one wrong turn, leading my wife down to the adjacent cove, ignoring the closed sign in the process. Despite getting stung by a wasp ascending the cliff (yeah, that’s karma for me, sucker), we persevered to Broadsands.

Broadsands Beach… The sign was a big giveaway

So eager was I to find this place again, my legs were aching terribly for days after with all this cliff climbing. The steps leading down to Broadsands are rather steep and I maybe forgot I wasn’t a 10 year-old as I went up and down them. But I can absolutely confirm that there is definitely a lot of magic still there in that cove.

The steps to Broadsands Beach

In fact, as we were still descending the steps, a chap with his family asked me if I knew anything about seals… Just over from us, taking shelter after the recent horrible weather, was a seal pup. We went and investigated but it didn’t seem injured (I ended up taking some more video of it the next day – see below). We decided to let it be and continue exploring, taking in the sight of Hameton Island.

In Dark Harbour, one of the most significant locations is a place called Moonlight Cove. Like everything, I never directly base anything on specific people or places, and whilst there are lots of differences between Broadsands and Moonlight Cove, I think Broadsands must have been the biggest inspiration, the story of young Jeremy climbing down the cliff face as we did as young boys. Down on Broadsands you feel like you are in your own world, as though this is the place mermaids come to comb their hair when no one is around.
Joseph Kiel on Broadsands Beach
We visited the cove three times during our recent visit. Partly that was because I kept feeling the draw, but partly also because I had plans to involve the place in Dark Harbour… As it’s such a cool location I got my wife to take some Joseph Kiel profile photos, and I also took some footage to create a trailer for my books… keep your eyes open for that.

A new Joseph Kiel profile photo

I never did get to climb up on Hameton Island while we were down there. I was so tempted to run up there, but, alas, I had stuff to do. Hopefully much sooner than 2049 I will make the seven hour trip to Devon and explore it again.
Broadsands Beach

Completing The Dark Harbour Trilogy

April 17, 2019 in News by Joseph Kiel

On the 17th of July last year I started writing the first words of the final book of the Dark Harbour trilogy. I am delighted to announce that today, exactly nine months on, I have now completed the first draft.

Dark Harbour Part 3: The Tale of the Something Something

I always knew that this book was going to be a big challenge. Not only were there various loose ends and messy situations left at the end of book 2, the truth is that I needed a bit of time to step back from Dark Harbour to work out where I went next with it. Soul Searcher and Night Shiner were both stories that have been with me for a very long time. In fact, both stories started life as film scripts. I’d never written a script for part 3 though. I didn’t even have an outline. Not a thing. So I needed a bit of time to immerse myself in the world again and get back in touch with my initial inspirations.

Inspirations… The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke painting by Richard Dadd, something that had also inspired Freddie Mercury in an early Queen song

I still didn’t have a pristine vision of where I was going when I started out on July 17th, but I went with a few ideas that took a life of their own and have turned into something that I am very pleased with indeed. There’s a little more fantasy in this one, a lot more magic, and a fair amount of eccentricity thrown in too. Each book has had its own flavour within this urban fantasy world: the first one had romance, the second one horror. As tempted as I was to stick with the formula of book 2, I changed the flavour again, going for something that has a strong hit of English folklore of fairies and sorcery. I’ve had a working title that has stuck with me during the writing process, something I will perhaps be revealing soon.

I hope that it will be a satisfactory conclusion to the trilogy, and although things have come to an end in part 3, this book may well leave the door open for more…

Broken Melody: The New Vampire Book on the Block

February 1, 2018 in News by Joseph Kiel

Yes, I realise that that’s what the world needs right now, another book about vampires. But listen, this Broken Melody one is different. Trust me…

Okay, so you know what? Maybe it isn’t that different. But people will still read it, because you know why?

Because vampires! broken melody: a twisted vampire tale

Because blood! And big teeth! And stakes through the heart! This book has all of that!

So this is it, my third novel, called Broken Melody, about a girl called… you guessed it… Melody, and one morning she wakes up with a ‘fangover’, and worries that she may have run into some vampires the night before. I know I’m yet to complete the Dark Harbour trilogy but I’ve been taking a break from that (and I still have no idea when the concluding episode will come along so you’ll just have to remain hanging there).

I wanted to try something fresh. Having learnt a few things from my first two books, I thought I would try a different approach, and there’s certainly a lot about this book that’s different. It’s the first novel I’ve written in the first person for one thing, but, most importantly, it is pretty clear on its own genre. Audiences are hopefully going to understand off the bat what it’s about and what to expect.

So what can you expect? Well, there’s a lot of twistedness in this book. I suppose I didn’t quite appreciate how twisted and horrific the Dark Harbour tales got at points, so I thought I would make that clear from the start. Broken Melody is definitely for mature audiences, for people with a strong stomach who aren’t easily offended. It is balls out grade-A NSFW material! Plenty of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, various OMG and WTF moments. I also think it has an interesting story to tell and hopefully it’s a pretty pulsating page-turner that gets going from the first chapter.

I’ve described it as a cross between The Hangover and The Lost Boys, and it also has a twist of Trainspotting and The Goonies in it, and yes, I realise all of those are films… but in the case of Trainspotting I’m also including the book version of that, something I read last year as I was writing Broken Melody.

So Broken Melody is set in Edinburgh? Actually no, it’s set in a fictional English city called Meridian. And where haven’t you heard of that place before? It’s actually the setting for the feature film I made, Shadows of a Stranger. Yeah, that may explain all the movie references – there’s a distinct filmic quality to this book. In fact, some of the characters from my film make cameos in this book in some weird, cross-medium mashup. Because why not? It expands the universe of the film while creating completely new characters, a bit like Rogue One I guess. Ah there we go, I’m back on the films again!

To keep with the visual theme, I’ve decorated this book with a series of images, taking some new snapshots from the original world of Meridian that we’d created for the film, and making plenty of original ones too. So it’s somewhat graphic novel-esque. I’m a filmmaker who also happens to be a writer (or maybe that’s the other way round… I still haven’t worked it out yet) so that’s my excuse for doing that. I think visually. But I hope it’ll show readers that it’s more than just another standard vampire book.
broken melody twisted vampire tale
So please go and read it! The release date is 2nd February 2018. The reason for me choosing that particular date is that that is the day that the novel actually starts. You’ll maybe work out the reasoning for that when you read the book.

And if you’re wondering what this whole Shadows of a Stranger business is all about, then you can catch that on Amazon Video right now. And when you read the book you’ll be like ‘I know this guy!… And hey, I know this place!’

Broken Melody is available to download at Amazon, with the print version in the works too. Please let me know what you think to this strange and shadowy vampire novel!

The Findings of a First-Time Author (Part 2)

September 7, 2017 in Blog by Joseph Kiel

Continuing my findings as a first-time author… If you didn’t read Part 1 then make sure to check that out too.

So let’s continue with The top 10 things I’ve discovered through self-publishing.

This guy wanted a Pepsi free but he had to pay for it.

6. The best way to promote your book is probably through making it free.
This is where those Amazon KDP free days come in. You’re allowed five days every three months where you can put your book on promotion and give it away for free. You can get a lot of downloads this way – although don’t expect that all these downloads will equate to someone actually reading the book. But if you’re a first-time writer like I was last year, this is the most effective way I know of to introduce yourself to the eBook market and generate organic reviews for your book. There is also a way of going ‘perma-free’ which is maybe a good idea if you have a series of books, or at least have a large enough catalogue that you don’t mind giving one away for free – something to think of further down the line. It’s like drug dealers will give you a sample to get you hooked and then you just can’t stop going back for more… (not that I know anything about that, of course!).

For the record, I’ve found the best results through Freebooksy and Kindle Nation Daily (in terms of ads that I paid for). As for the free sites, there are plenty of them and you may as well spend time hitting them all. Here’s a list to get you started. There are also (paid) tools that will submit your details to multiple sites so you only have to submit the information once.

In terms of the websites that charge when it comes to advertising your free (or discounted) book, although there are plenty of them, don’t expect that they will necessarily accept your book. If you do get rejected just keep trying though. The big player in book advertising is, hands down, Book Bub. They are pretty pricey, but they get you great returns. Not that I know that from experience, just from what I’ve heard all other authors say. I’ve never been accepted by them, but it hasn’t stopped me from trying!

Remember when pirates used to be cool?

7. There’s a depressing downside to giving your book away for free.
When you make your book free, it’ll get downloaded and made available on rogue websites, and this can be majorly disheartening for the independent writer, especially as a lot of us self-publishers are essentially one man bands and not making tons of money through this. I don’t know what to do about this other than suck it up and carry on. If you decide to avoid giving it away for free then it’ll be difficult to gain momentum with it. So this is one area where it feels like you can’t win. Piracy is a major pain in the backside and will make you question why you are doing this.

8. Nothing’s free.
As I said, there are numerous websites that will advertise your book on its free days, and yes, a lot of them you will pay, even though you’re giving away something for free and you’ve still got to pay someone to promote it. But there is a ‘kickback’ you get from free days – it’ll lift your book in the Amazon charts and people will continue to download it after the free days, or it will be read through Amazon Prime readers, and in those cases you are paid per page view. So giving it away for free doesn’t mean that you get zero return. Finding effective advertisers can be difficult, and I imagine even the more successful ones have periods where the market is just down and results are therefore down, or maybe they’re just better at different genres than others. I find the Paid Author website a great starting point as they make YouTube videos to show you their results from advertising with particular websites. I’ve used a fair few of them myself. There are some that I’ve had great results with. There are others that I would NEVER use again as I’ve felt ripped off and doubted that they’d even done anything – stick to the ones where you can actually see that some marketing is actually going on is all I’d say. There are free websites out there too, and sometimes I’ve used my free days and gone through these websites only, and sometimes I’ve had brilliant returns. So it can all be pretty unpredictable. You’ll just have to see what works for you. Another thing I’ve wondered through this whole experience, with this ‘industry’ of promoting vain self-published writers is whether somewhere on the other side of the world someone has a ton of Amazon accounts that they use solely to download free eBooks and make authors feel great that they’re getting great results on their promos, but that might just be my cynical imagination kicking in. Sometimes I’ve had a ton of downloads and hardly any reviews, and sometimes it’s the other way round. You just can’t predict it.

So keep those ideas coming… from anywhere!

9. The more books you have, the more success you’ll probably find.
I’ve only got two books out there myself so far, so hopefully I’ll start to be taken more seriously and snowball more success. Not that I’ve made extensive checks, but I guess there are a lot of one book strikers who’ve had an ambition to write a book someday and once that’s ticked off their bucket list they’ll be on to something else. But if you manage to get a fan of your work, then there’s a good chance they’ll want to read more from you, so you need to be mindful of keeping your audience – remember to promote your other books in your other books, and have a newsletter. The successful writers will tell you that’s a really key thing. Don’t expect that hyper success will come overnight.

I’m sure my genre is in there somewhere.

10. Know your genre!
Especially if you use advertisers to promote your work. They’ll want to know what genre your book fits in as they’ll target it to specific audiences who are into it. For me, it’s been a bit challenging as I haven’t quite been comfortable about putting my first book, The Tale of the Soul Searcher, inside a box. Yes, it has some crime, it has some mystery, it has some of the supernatural, it has a bit of horror, it has some romance, but it’s not really any of these, not on their own. Maybe it’s its own genre, but I didn’t really think about this before I started writing it. So maybe you should know what genre and what audience you’re targeting before you start the whole process.

Anyway, I hope this top ten list provides some use for someone somewhere! There are plenty of other finer findings, but these are really the main ones. Are there any glaring areas I haven’t touched on? What things did you find as a first time writer? Please do let me know. I’m always willing to hear other authors’ insights!

The Findings of a First-Time Author (Part 1)

September 1, 2017 in Blog by Joseph Kiel

It’s been almost 18 months since I self-published my first novel on Amazon and so I thought I would write a blog on the experience of dipping my toes into the great publishing ocean, and hopefully give some help and pointers for other authors, especially unpublished writers who are thinking of releasing their first works. Not that this is advice from a bestselling author or anything – whilst I’m no longer a first-time author, I still consider myself a newbie in this realm and so I’m still very much learning about it all, still trying to find that magical formula myself… if indeed there is one. There are various eBooks out there that appear to have the winning formula to turn you into a bestseller; you’ll read them and they’ll get you inspired but you probably still won’t get anywhere. Read them anyway. They’ll give you pointers if nothing else. Anyway, take anything I write here for what it is and feel free to disagree and add to the discussion!

I should point out that all of the following is from what I’ve found through publishing with Amazon only. I know there are other eBook vendors out there but I have no experience with them. I have heard from other authors that most of their sales come through Amazon. The reason I am with Amazon solely is because my books are signed up to KDP Select which asks for exclusivity.

So what I thought I would do was present my findings in a list:

The top 10 things I’ve discovered through self-publishing.

1. Don’t proofread your work yourself.

“Ah crap, I found ANOTHER typo!”

Well, I mean, let that be the starting point – you need to at least start the work of tidying up those inevitable typos and grammatical errors and those clunky sentences or things that are otherwise just plain wrong, but you need other eyes to look at your work. Preferably you need someone with a keen eye for detail who will scrutinise each sentence meticulously – having proofread other authors’ works myself I have a pretty good sense of what’s involved in the job. No matter how many times you proofread your own manuscripts, something will get through. Saying all that, I proofread both of my Dark Harbour novels myself – and in fact no one else on the planet had even read the whole of the first one before I published it. The good thing is that with eBooks you can correct any mistakes and re-upload them pretty quickly, which is what I did.

A year later I reviewed the manuscript of The Tale of the Soul Searcher with fresh eyes, and I found that despite having read through it countless times in the past, I still found typos that I’d missed. But despite all I’ve said here, I’ll most probably continue to ignore my own advice and carry on publishing without another proofreader going over my work. But you shouldn’t do this. Get a proofreader. Better still, get an editor.

2. Most of your readers will come from America.

You’ll know you’ve made it if Rory Gilmore buys your book

It’s a no-brainer really: the population of the USA is 5 times bigger than the UK so it’s a bigger market. Now, as you’ll no doubt have gathered by now, I write in English, and so my markets are mainly the English-speaking world, and if you haven’t gathered from my spellings or my domain name, I’m based in the UK. I don’t know, but I have a suspicion that the number of kindle/eBook readers is proportionally higher in the US than the UK – perhaps there’s data out there to confirm that. But anyway, you’re going to get a lot of US readers. Yes, I’ve had a bit of response from the Australian and Canadian marketplaces, and even a small trickle from non-English-speaking marketplaces, but most of your readers will be American, and to further give you an idea on demographics, I’m pretty sure most of my readers are female.

3. My native UK market seems to ‘get me’.
This is based on the reviews I’ve got through the US and UK Amazons: the US has given me a complete mixed bag, whereas the UK was unanimously giving me 5 stars until someone thought The Tale of the Soul Searcher was the sickest thing they’d ever read and bucked the trend with a 1 star (would have been a 0 if Amazon allowed, apparently). So I don’t know whether other writers find this, that their books are best received in their native countries, but that’s been the case with me.

4. You’ll most probably sell way more eBooks than hard copies, but you should still have both versions available.

And we need fewer trees, right?

I say this even though publishing paperbacks is a more complex process – you need a back cover and spine in addition to the front cover for one thing, and this is all proportional to the size of your manuscript of course, so there’s a lot of precision involved and Amazon will reject your document if it doesn’t fit the template. I did find that Amazon takes you through the process well though, and they’ve made it much more straightforward since they ditched Createspace and you can publish your paperback version through the same control panel as your eBooks. But your main market will most probably be the eReaders. It’s nice to have hard copies – it helps for marketing, you can give them away, and I guess they somehow make you feel like a ‘proper’ author, having something physical that you can put on your bookshelf.

Now this guy?… He’s kind of a big deal.

5. Marketing yourself and promoting your work can be a full time job.
When you have more than one other life like I do, this can make it challenging to find some degree of success in this field as you need to spend so much time at it. I mean, look at my blog here. It’s not exactly brimming. You can learn a lot from other authors, so see what they’re doing, talk to them. There’s a useful forum you should join called KBoards, full of authors discussing self-publishing and their experiences of promoting themselves, so get signed up there.

I pestered a lot of other authors for their insights, and still do! Learn from their mistakes as well. See what you don’t like about them. There’s a ton of writers on twitter and a lot of them seem to market using the same cookie-cutter way where everything is a brand. Hey, maybe it works and I’m just getting it all wrong, but I’m conscious of presenting myself as a ‘real person’ and not overselling. That’s probably my biggest turn off with other authors. I don’t like automated DMs on twitter when I follow people and I rarely read them, so I don’t use them myself. Recently, as another example, I was enticed to sign up for an author’s newsletter and to download one of his books for free, but this then sent me on a series of hoops to jump through and I was very soon exhausted and unsubscribed from his mailing list. I would imagine the guy is doing way better than me, but still, it didn’t work for me.

Anyway, that’s the end of part 1. Stay tuned next week for the concluding episode!

The Night Shiner Beast is Released…

June 1, 2017 in Blog by Joseph Kiel

I am really excited to announce that my new book, Dark Harbour: The Tale of the Night Shiner, has now been released. You can check it out now on Amazon where it is available as an eBook or as a paperback. The cover, as I mentioned before, was designed by the awesome studio Asylum Seventy7.

This is a follow up to my first book, what was indeed the first of the Dark Harbour trilogy, The Tale of the Soul Searcher, and was released last year. I actually wrote half of this new book before the first one was released, so writing it concurrently I was able to sow a little detail into the continuity. Saying that, I’m also aiming for these books to be standalone narratives.

The first Dark Harbour tale very much had a romance theme to it, despite all the death and blood in it. This new tale though sits firmly within a horror / supernatural genre. A bloodthirsty creature, the Night Shiner, has returned to the town. He’s a figure loosely based on the legend of Spring-Heeled Jack as he pounces on people from out of nowhere and then flies away again. The story also takes inspiration from one of my favourite films, Jaws, where a terrified community attempts to deal with the deadly problem at hand. The Night Shiner preys on people in the dark hours, killing off the losers and the wasters, and many individuals are forced to look in the mirror and ask that dreaded question: am I next?

There is a definite psychological subtext to this book, with overtones of the fear and terror that we increasingly find ourselves in in this modern day. Even as I was publishing this book, one of the deadliest terror attacks to hit my country was taking place. Psychopathic groups around the world make it their agenda to instill fear in us, rogue nations demonstrate what destructive powers they are concocting, and in the vicious circle, the media know that fear sells, and that, as Michael Moore talked about in one of his films I watched recently, nations can be so fueled and steeped in fear. In fact, I may talk more about this on a personal level in another blog…

The Night Shiner character was touched on a few times in the first book (I was sowing the seeds, as I say!) as I knew that the sequel would be all about this horrific beast. There were various other details I set up in the first book without you realising too. Most of the characters from the first book make reappearances in the new book, and they all have their part to play in it.

All in all, I am very pleased with how this new book has come together. I know when people are plugging their newest creation, they’ll always tell you that it’s the best thing they’ve ever done, but really, I do think that this is the best thing I’ve ever written. I think it’s more engaging, more page-turnery, more terse, and more tense than the first book.

If you haven’t read the first book, and want to dive straight in with this new one, then I don’t mind…

Or if you want to start at the beginning, then The Tale of the Soul Searcher is also sitting there waiting for you (the eBook version of it will also be going on a free promo from the 5th till the 9th June 2017).

I’d love to hear your feedback on the new book. Is it better than the first? Any thoughts on where things may go in the concluding book of the trilogy? I look forward to hearing your thoughts…

News on the New Dark Harbour Book!

January 20, 2017 in News by Joseph Kiel

So it seems it’s generally agreed with people that 2016 was, quite rightly, a disaster. While all the great celebrities were dying and people were getting all crazy by voting for jokers, I decided to shut myself off from the world and focus on completing my next Dark Harbour book. If you’ve read the first one, then you’ll know what the title is. If you haven’t read the first one then get on to it! And for you johnny-come-latelies, the new one will be called The Tale of the Night Shiner.

I think this one is going to be pretty epic, even better than the first one, a harrowing rollercoaster ride that’s even darker than the first one (heck, maybe 2017 will be the same!). Your favourite characters will be back, and there’ll be plenty of new faces too, including a terrifying monster the likes of which no one has experienced before.
Designing the cover to the new Dark Harbour book.
The great news is that I’m on course to release the book in a few months’ time. Currently I have an awesome designer who is working on a killer book cover (check out his website here), something that’s going to give a punch right from the start, as that’s exactly what the book does.

There will be some surprises. Some people will have their worlds turned upside down, and there’ll be plenty of twists and turns along the way. I’m really looking forward to getting this book out there, but until then I’d better get on and finish it…

I’m a Book Hippo Featured Author!

October 17, 2016 in News by Joseph Kiel

During my October promo campaign, I again hit a number of different websites to try and get the word out about my book. Unsurprisingly, a lot of these websites are American – there is evidently a massive market of Kindle readers over in the States, but with my book being specifically English, I’ve also been keen to search out the British book-related websites.

One such British website that did catch my eye is one called Book Hippo, so I was keen to sign up here. I understood that they’re one of the bigger players in terms of eBook promotion (come on, they’re a hippo! Hippos are really big!) and so must be a great resource for UK writers and book readers.

I was thrilled to find that this time round I was accepted as a Book Hippo Featured Author, especially as they hand pick their authors (I can believe it – I wasn’t accepted last time round!) so massive thanks to the crew there!

You can check out my profile on their website by clicking on the image of the hippo, and make sure to have a look at the rest of the site which is updated daily with Kindle deals.

Finding an Audience

September 27, 2016 in Blog by Joseph Kiel

As a book that wasn’t designed for a specific audience, it’s been intriguing to see what sort of audience would find Dark Harbour. Another aspect to the book that I never specifically had in mind is its genre. With book websites needing to know the genre category though, the one I’ve tended to put it in is Mystery, but there are various others I think you could put it in: Crime, Paranormal, even Romance.

So it’s quite possible that without a specific genre or audience in mind that I’ve gone about it the wrong way, but… whatevs.
September stats
What I hadn’t really anticipated was that most of Dark Harbour’s readers would be female, and a lot of readers would be American. That’s based on the readers that have reviewed it so far and who have added it on Goodreads. Well… and my Amazon dashboard stats as well, of course.

As I was writing the book, I realised that nearly all the characters in the book are male. There is one major female character, but she’s somewhat of a mystery. So I realise I’m not going to win any awards as far as creating strong female characters goes.

I also wondered if the title of the book with a word spelt the ‘wrong’ way, would put off potential American readers. With a book that is specifically meant to be English though, perhaps I thought that a deliberate British spelling in the title would help find Anglophiles. I know there is a hunger for quintessentially British things over the pond: Harry Potter, the royal family, BBC America…

In the second book though, I have attempted to create more balance. There are some more major female characters, AND there is even a major American character in it!

Anyone else have trouble defining the genre of their book? Anyone have any thoughts on what genre to put mine in?

August 2016 News

August 31, 2016 in News by Joseph Kiel

Joseph Kiel in the Sleaford Standard

March 2016 marked the release of the first of the Dark Harbour books as it was made available on Kindle, the paperback version following a few months later. During its promotional run, Joseph Kiel featured in his first newspaper articles in the Sleaford press, including the Sleaford Standard.

Dark Harbour: The Tale of the Soul Searcher has soared the Amazon charts during 2016 and has been downloaded thousands of times as it now starts to receive reviews which, so far, have all been 5*. It is still early days, but so far the book has readers hooked and has been described as “awesome” and “perfection”.

Stay tuned for more news on Dark Harbour: The Tale of the Soul Searcher as it continues to find its place in our dimension!