STORYWORLD

THE SAVAGE INSTINCT, release date May 18th 2021 It's been almost eight years since I made the startling discovery that the street just around the corner from my grandmother's house in Hetton-le-Hole, Tyne and Wear, UK was actually the birthplace of Mary Ann Cotton, one of Britain's most prolific murderers. Once I started reading about her case and the sensation it caused in the newspapers of the time (1872-73), I knew I had to write a novel inspired in some way by the events at the time. I didn't want to write it from the murderer's point of view. Many articles written since that time have argued about the extent of Cotton's guilt, and there is still wide disagreement about how many people she actually killed. Instead I was more interested in how the case influenced the men and women reading the newspapers at the time and how it caused sensation and outrage at a time when women's roles were restricted to the domestic sphere, and fulfilling one's role as ...

The publishing date for The Savage Instinct has been moved to May 18th .  I never realized how much promotional work is done in the months before a book is launched. Here's a quick rundown: Once all the line edits and copyedits are done (and they're exhausting), the book goes onto Net Galley. That's the online site where numerous reviewers from media to librarians to educators and book bloggers apply to read an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of your book and provide a review, which is usually shared to Goodreads. This is a nail-biting time for authors, waiting to discover how your book will be received by people in the biz. You find yourself checking back numerous times a day to see if someone else has left a review and what they have to say. With The Savage Instinct it's been a great experience. So far the book has garnered over 83 amazing reviews. There's such an active community of Instagram book bloggers. I'm amazed at how many of these people are dedicated to pr...