New review of THE APOTHECARY'S GARDEN

It's been a very quiet time for reviews lately, but we're pleased to say that our books are still making new friends out there in the world - and from time to time those friends feel strongly enough to put their responses into words and publish them online.

Julie's ever-popular THE APOTHECARY'S GARDEN has just been reviewed by Runell on the the website Bachelors and Bombshells, prompting some lovely comments about Julie's qualities as a writer as well as about the book itself.

This was my first book by Julie Bozza so I can’t compare this work to any of her others, and I don’t want to compare it to any other author’s work because that’s like comparing apples and oranges (cliché, I know, but it’s true). All I know is that if her other work is anything like The Apothecary’s Garden, I’ll give it a go.

Thank you, Runell! Really, what author - and what publisher - could ever ask for more than that?

Gradually updating our covers

Here at Manifold Press we like to try to stay on the move, to keep working on the quality of our product. When we started out, for example, there was no agreed standard cover format for e-books, and so – as with so many other things – we originally went our own way. Now, however, Amazon have introduced a standard higher-definition format, which we're using as the excuse for going back to the beginning and re-making all our covers with a new font and a slightly altered logo; these will gradually be rolled out on all platforms and across all formats, starting on 1 March.

On the whole, we've been very lucky indeed and have managed to acquire better versions of almost all our original cover images. In two cases, however, that hasn't been possible because the pictures we wanted to use just weren't available in the right size; the covers for Chris Quinton's FOOL'S ERRAND and Julie Bozza's THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH have therefore been recreated – to the best of our ability - from very similar images.

There has been a knock-on effect of changing the cover dimensions, however; it meant that it was necessary to change the dimensions of the pages as well. Without wanting to get too technical, we had been using an 11 x 18 cm page which is not quite the same aspect ratio as the new covers; therefore we've taken this opportunity to move to a 14 x 21 cm page instead, and also to go to a slightly larger text font. Clearly this only affects those readers who prefer to buy the .pdf versions of our books; the .epub and .mobi versions will still have new covers, but the text itself will be unaffected by the other changes.

However you may notice that the page-counts for each book given on our website and on our partner websites will alter slightly when the new covers go up, since these are taken from the .pdf versions. Obviously the actual difference will vary from title to title, but on average the page-count will now be around 7% fewer than before. We'd like to reassure everybody that there's nothing missing from the new versions of any of our books – all the text is still there, but now it's just a bit better organised than it was previously. We don't imagine anyone will mind too much about all this, but we like to make sure we keep everybody informed whenever we make a significant change to the way we do things.

In honour of the occasion ...

Two new titles now on sale!

We're not sure quite how we managed it, but we somehow omitted to announce yesterday that our two new books are now available to buy!

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER WYE by Adam Fitzroy tells the story of Rupert who, returning after a three-year exile, finds himself caught up in mysterious events occurring at his friend Jake’s struggling organic farm – events which may extend as far as murder.

Jane Elliot's THIS MEANS WAR continues the saga of Jasper and Brian (from her immensely popular ABOVE ALL). Just because they’ve settled into their relationship doesn’t mean that their lives are any calmer – as this amusing tale of a prank war gone wrong abundantly demonstrates.

Congratulations go to both authors on the release of their new titles, which we hope will both be very successful ... and, having accomplished which, the Press will now turn its attention to the books we are planning to bring you on 1 May. No rest for the wicked, you know ...