The Butcher Bird

Feb 23, 2025 | Books

The Butcher Bird

I’m delighted to announce that The Butcher Bird will be published 6 March 2025.

The blurb – which will make more sense to those of you who have read Coyote In The Corner, to which this is a sequel – reads:

Humans are all but wiped out, struggling to recover in a changing climate. Margaret, the butcher bird, haunts her domain, craving blood. The key to the future of both species is in the oldest stories of the vampires, hiding in myth and memory.

 

But myth and memory are unreliable witnesses and the past is as hard to predict as the future.

 

The concluding stories in the seductive Gaia Cascade sequence that began in Coyote in the Corner.

Kindle pre-orders are available on Amazon now, but physical copies can’t be bought until publication day (Amazon’s rules, not mine). The UK Kindle link is: The Butcher Bird. Outside of the UK, just change the .co.uk of the link to your local Amazon site – .com, .ca for example, and it should work.

If you are a Kindle reader then it would be really helpful if you pre-order.

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If you wonder why writers are keen on pre-orders and reviews, it is because that is how the ubiquitous algorithms select books to promote more often to a broader readership. In essence, if it is selling and if people care enough to leave (positive) reviews, then it is worthy of attention. The current version of the algorithm is trying to discriminate against review farming and also notes how much of the eBook has been read – for example it does not like 5* reviews from people who have only read a few paragraphs of the eBook, assuming that it will not be a credible review.

It can’t do that for physical books, but physical books can’t be pre-ordered and tend to be more expensive. For physical books, ‘verified purchases’ are important as a proxy for reviews not generated on the back of freebies for friends and family.

If you are further wondering why I am publishing through Amazon alone, it is because that is where the market predominantly is, including for Kindle Unlimited readers (for which I get a small royalty for pages actually read). I have previously published on multiple platforms and I always use ISBNs that I have bought in my own name so I can ‘go wide’ again in future if it becomes appropriate, but I do not sell enough books to make it worthwhile as yet.