In April, Jane Dougherty came over with a new edition of The Green Woman…

Thank you, Sue, for taking time off from packing boxes and creating gardens to let me borrow your blog today and for setting up this post.

If JRR Tolkein could do it with his blockbuster trilogy, so can I with my slimmer effort. It’s done—the three books of The Green Woman are now available in a single volume. I had two reasons for going to the bother of reformatting 220,000 words.

First, tinkering around with ebooks is one of the perks. You don’t have to stop a print run, call back thousands (let’s think big) of copies because you just discovered a plot hole in chapter twelve the size of the gap in the ozone layer. All you have to do is make the change, upload a new file, wait for the Amazon machine to do its stuff and Bob’s your uncle.

If you get sick of the cover, or someone tells you they thought the girl dancing with a bouquet of flowers was someone trying to stuff a hippo into a concrete mixer, all you have to do is upload a new one. My husband tinkers with bicycles, I tinker with books.

In this particular case, the idea of selling all three volumes together was given to me by two people—they know who they are but I’m not going to name and shame—and I couldn’t stop thinking that they had a point. And I didn’t stop thinking about it until I’d done it.

But the main reason for doing it was because I really want people to read ALL the books. The Green Woman is a story that starts in a grim, brutal, desperate hell on earth and it ends on a rising note of hope. That’s the way it was written originally, and I only broke the story into three books because one volume was far too long. The plot didn’t evolve as I wrote one book then the next, it was all there from the start.

I don’t know how to sell this story. The idea either grabs you or it doesn’t. Imagine 1984 with a host of heroes liberating Room 101, or the second instalment of The Handmaid’s Tale, telling what happens after she escapes. Here’s the new cover.

And here’s the new blurb.

She is the light in the darkness, the fiery beacon, but the world’s fate seems such a little thing when the light in her heart is dead.

Among the ashes of the world, a lone city cowers in fear and ignorance. A light breaks the darkness, the spark that will kindle the greening of the world. This is the story of how Deborah carries the spark of memory from the grey oppression of Providence to a green place, where its fire will spread to cover the whole of the earth.

The darkest, oldest of evils vows to quench her light, but the Green Girl is filling the world with heroes, courage blazes in the desolation of Providence, and love is waiting in the desert.

Abaddon’s grip tightens on the earthly realm he has promised himself and his followers, but he reckons without Deborah, who marches with the banner of her fiery hair, and a burning passion for freedom, justice…and vengeance.

You can find The Green Woman for the very reasonable price of $3.99 and whatever that is in other money at
Amazon UK http://tinyurl.com/ka37xbr
Amazon US http://tinyurl.com/nqn9whc

If you’d rather test the water first, I have reduced the price of the first volume, The Dark Citadel to 99c. Available from
Amazon US http://tinyurl.com/m9xhyb6
Amazon UK http://tinyurl.com/nholyft