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MASSIVE Kickstarter Thanks

Thank you so much to everyone who supported our Kickstarter. Not just to the amazing backers, but to everyone who shared a link, re-tweeted, or just told someone else about our campaign. We succeeded with 150% funding!
What does that mean?
Well, 2015 is shaping up to look amazing. We can now put titles on Netgalley, attend more conventions with stock, start an online shop, sort audio books and most importantly, offer our titles in large print for the partially sighted. From day one, we wanted Grimbold Books to offer something for everyone and this means we can move one step closer to our goal of total parity.
To those that pledged – we’ve sent out a survey that needs to be completed so we can gather up info and start sorting out your pledges. Please do bear with us. We set the initial delivery date for January 2015, but naturally we want to get the goods to you sooner.

2015 will bring us titles by…

Jude Houghton

Kate Coe

Deb E Howell

Joanne Hall

Ellen Croshain

Michelle Basson

Steven Poore

…and others.

  We’re still working through submissions from our open window period, and thank you all for your patience. We have some excellent readers helping us, and the quality has been fantastic.

 

Sorry for the shortness of this post, it’s difficult typing up here on Cloud 9…our fingers get cold and stiff!

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Kickstarter Perks: Grimbold Notebooks!

Ok, these are probably the coolest perks EVER!

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All Our Beautiful Titles! 1 Day to Go!

A quick  post of the day…you may or may not have seen our collage of book covers so far. Isn’t it pretty? Colour is important to us, and with the talent of artists such as Evelinn Enoksen, Raymond Tan, Ken Dawson and Matthew Donnici (to name just a few), we feel blessed to have put out some quality pieces of work.

We’ve set our highest perk to include all these lovely books, as well as our entire 2015 catalogue. Check it out:

‘The Top Cat’
Our ENTIRE library of SIGNED printed books so far (and their digital counterparts), a ltd edition ‘The Reluctant Prophet’, as well as the entire 2015 catalogue (shipped as each book is released), a Grimbold Books leather notebook, a hoody, a T-shirt, a tote bag, and the entire giclée collection of ‘Willow, Weep No More’ prints. Also includes a handwritten thank you, and an acknowledgement in a printed paperback from our 2015 catalogue. A SKYPE session (up to a total of 3 hours) with either Sammy Smith, Zoë Harris, Dean Lombardo, Joel Cornah or Tina Closser (Paige Daniels) for your book club, writing circle, or even just a one-to-one to discuss writing, editing, reading, and the publishing world.

 ***BONUS***

A full manuscript read and critique by Grimbold Books, complete with editorial letter.

Link to the Kickstarter campaign coming tomorrow! 

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Grimbold Hoodies! 2 Days To Go!

The Grimbold Kickstarter comes on Friday…Just 2 days to go!

Today, we thought we’d share the concept image for the kitty hoodies. We’ve got some on order (and will snap a picture of them when they arrive!), so if you want a cool, funky hoodie – watch this space and look out for ‘The Spot’ package on Kickstarter:

The Spot will get you: A Grimbold kitty hoody, 5 random giclée Willow, Weep No More prints, 4 e-books of choice and a thank you on the website – all for a bargainlicious £35.

HOWEVER, if the hoodie is too hot for you, and you want a cool, kitty tee-shirt, perhaps ‘The Ser Pounce’ will be more to your liking:

The Ser Pounce will get you: A Grimbold kitty T-shirt, a paperback copy of both ‘Felinity’ and ‘The Spire of Frozen Fire’, 2 e-books, a Grimbold bookmark, and a thank you on our websites – all for £30.

There’s lots more perks coming…including limited edition and OOAK artwork, beautiful prints, books, Skype sessions, manuscript critiques, leather notebooks and more! …

 

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Watch This Space…Our Kickstarter Arrives on Friday!

If you want to write, keep cats. ~Aldous Huxley

OK, I’m not sure why we had the cat quote, but it seemed apt. As you know, we love cats, and we publish books, so it seemed a good fit…

Over the last few months, we’ve sat down and plotted the rest of our 2014 and our upcoming 2015 catalogue across Grimbold Books, Tenebris Books and Kristell Ink. We have a plethora of amazing titles coming up from some extremely talented authors. Here’s a sneak peek of *some* work we’ve got pencilled in for release from now onwards (and in no particular order!)

~ Bequest by Rowena Wiseman
~ Green Sky and Sparks by Kate Coe
~ Non-Compliance: Equilibrium by Paige Daniels
~ Atlantis and the Game of Time by Katie Alford
~ Songs of Seraphina by Jude Houghton
~ Anna by Sammy H.K Smith
~ A Tenebris Books Annual
~ The Settlers’ Daughter by Michelle Basson

Exciting, huh?

We can’t wait to share these books with you, and we want to continue to publish amazing work. To keep up with the ever-changing publishing world, we know that we have to try new marketing ideas and push ourselves, and so we’ve set up a Kickstarter to help with the 2015 catalogue.

Full details will be coming soon, but we hope you can be a part of it!

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Willow, Weep No More Illustrations

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Felinity Interview – A.F.E Smith

 

Hi and welcome to Team Grimbold! Felinity is set to be the first publication under the Kristell Inkling imprint, and we’re thrilled to have you on board. Tell us about yourself. (Please include links to blogs/sites/Twitter/published works etc)

My name is A.F.E. Smith, and online I am often to be found in the form of a robin. Perhaps not the safest choice with Grim and Bold around, but I’m used to being a bird by now so I’ll take my chances. Very few people have seen my actual face … well, you know, except in my offline life. It’s not like I wear a mask to the supermarket or anything.

Anyway, I’m a fantasy writer and my first novel, Darkhaven, is due to be released as an ebook by Harper Voyager later this year – which means I’m currently in a permanent state of both excitement (making my début!) and fear (what if everyone hates it?). I have a website atwww.afesmith.com, where I blog and interview with varying degrees of, er, sporadicity, and I’m on Twitter as @afesmith. I’ve also recently made myself a Facebook page, www.facebook.com/AuthorAFESmith, which does have my face on it. So if you’re curious, you know where to look 🙂

What inspired your story for Felinity?

Cats are renowned for having nine lives, so I began to wonder: what if the same cat had witnessed nine key discoveries in history? More – since we all know cats are in charge of us really, what if the cat caused those discoveries to be made? And that’s how Nein was born.

How do you feel about having an illustration accompany your story?

Excited. A little bit thrilled, actually. I’ve always longed for someone to create illustrations for my books – one of my ambitions is for my writing to be successful enough to be made into a graphic novel. It’s always amazing to see my work fire enough of a spark in someone else’s imagination for them to be able to bring it to life.

What writing projects are you working on at the moment?

I’m working on the sequel to Darkhaven, and a completely different adult fantasy called Dawn Rising (the first in a rather complicated five-part series), and also a young adult fantasy called Arcana. Sometimes I write short stories or flash fiction in between. Of course, all that has to fit around my actual job and my life with the other Smiths, Mr and Baby. And Baby Smith 2 is on the way …

Congratulations on Baby Smith 2! Now, the most important question – Cats or dogs?

As pets, or as overlords? I wouldn’t choose either a dog or a cat as a pet. Dogs are too needy, and I’d always suspect the cat of plotting against me. But I’d certainly back the cats to defeat the dogs if it came to an outright species war. They’re far better tactical thinkers.

 

Inkling Interrogation

 

  1. What sort of child were you?

    I’m reliably informed that I was the World’s Worst Baby. I cried non-stop until I learned to read at the age of two. After that I always had my head in a book and barely made a sound. Except to ask for more books.

    Of course, I was lucky enough to grow up in a house where there were always drawing and writing materials to hand, and plenty of books for all age groups to explore – so I always had an outlet for my creativity. When I was old enough, my mother introduced me to J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin and Anne McCaffrey. That was it. I’d found my spiritual home, and I’ve loved fantasy ever since.

  2. If you could be a superhero, who would you be?

    I feel like I already am a superhero. After all, I have two identities and almost no-one knows them both. Shame about the lack of actual superpower, of course, but I can work on that. Does an infinite ability to procrastinate count?

    Seriously, though … I think if I could pick, I’d be Iron Man. Because he’s a superhero not by virtue of being an alien or as a result of some kind of radioactive accident, but through the application of science and human intelligence. And that’s something I can get behind.

    (I realise Batman also fits into this category, but I don’t think I could cope with all that brooding. Besides, Iron Man has a flying suit, and for me that trumps the Batmobile any day.)

  3. What’s your earliest memory?

    You know, I’m not even sure. After a while it becomes hard to know whether you remember something, or just remember remembering it.

    I definitely remember being at my first primary school, seeing a copy of Roald Dahl’s The BFG that one of the older children had left in the cloakroom, and thinking ‘Wow, that looks like a really grown-up book, I’ll be able to read that one day’. And I also remember being given a copy of The Hobbit for the first time (I think it was in a doctor’s waiting room) and spending ages just looking at the cover. You know, the classic dark blue and green and white one, slightly abstract.

    Yeah … most of my early memories are about books.

  4. If you could sing one song on the X-Factor, what would it be?

    Pink Floyd’s ‘Have a Cigar’. Since it’s about the way the music industry treats artists as commodities, I think it would be appropriate. Plus it contains one of my all-time favourite lyrics.

  5. What’s your biggest disappointment?

    I don’t know. Probably myself. No matter how I try, I can’t stop wasting time. I have no idea what I was doing before Baby Smith was born. I must have had vast quantities of free time, and yet I don’t appear to have used it wisely at all.

    That, and hot chocolate, which never tastes as good as the idea of hot chocolate.

  6. If you could enroll in a PhD program, with your tuition paid in full by a mysterious benefactor, what would you study — and why?

    Theoretical physics. Quantum mechanics. Elementary particles. That kind of thing. I can’t think of a more fascinating subject than the fundamental fabric of life itself. (In a parallel universe, I’m basically Sheldon Cooper.)

  7. Who would play you in a movie of your life?

    If they made a movie of my life it would have to be part fantasy. My life so far has been so normal that it would make an incredibly dull movie. So it would have to be one of those films where you see the protagonist’s imagination come alive. Then the story of my life would basically just become the framing narrative for my characters’ stories, and that would make a far better movie.

    I don’t really want an actor to play me. Rather, I’d like the film to be animated, because I love animation. To begin with I was thinking Disney, so lots of pretty dresses and me breaking into song all over the place, but actually I think Studio Ghibli would be a better fit for me. Something dark and strange to match the contents of my head. James Earl Jones could do my voice. (Not that I sound anything like him, of course; he just rocks.)

  8. Do you sing in the shower?

    Always. I sing whatever’s got stuck in my head, so these days it tends to be songs that Baby Smith likes. ‘Walking in the Jungle’, ‘The Wheels on the Bus’, or songs from the Frozen soundtrack – he loves those. In fact, I’m humming ‘Fixer-Upper’ right now.

 

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Felinity Interview – Christie Rampersad

 

Hi and welcome to Team Grimbold! Felinity is set to be the first publication under the Kristell Inkling imprint, and we’re thrilled to have you on board. Tell us about yourself. (Please include links to blogs/sites/Twitter/published works etc)

Christie Rampersad PictureFirst of all, I’d just like to say how immensely thrilled I am to have “Nine Lives Later” appear in “Felinity”. When I’m not writing about science fiction or cats, I study medicine at the University of Manitoba. That takes up most of my time these days, but it has taught me one very important lesson about writing. Writers do what we do because we have to. Whether it’s for a few short minutes of de-stressing, or if I just have too many ideas bouncing around in my head, there’s nothing quite like putting pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard, as the case may be.

While my genres of choice have tended to be science fiction and fantasy, I am always open to exploring new fields. All of my stories begin with the characters. Where things go from there all depends on them, and what feels right and honest to their personalities and intentions. That being said, I do tend to gravitate to YA. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m 21 years old, or because books in that genre have just left such a strong impression on me, but those are the characters whose stories I am most compelled to tell. I’m very excited to see how my writing grows and changes in the years to come.

And one of the more fun facts, in my opinion, is that I am currently represented by Sasha Raskin of The Agency Group.

Twitter: @KikiRampersad
What inspired your story for Felinity?

As most of my stories start, “Nine Lives Later” was inspired by a thought flitting across an idle mind. In this case, the somewhat morbid thought was: “We all die. But what if we didn’t, at least not the first time?”

How do you feel about having an illustration accompany your story?

I’m very excited about having an illustration accompany my story. There are so many ways to tell a story, and I think that the illustration was really able to do exactly that: not just complementing the text, but also really carrying its own weight.

What writing projects are you working on at the moment?

I’m currently working on a few stories that are very dear to my heart, and which you will hopefully be seeing someday.

The most important question – Cats or dogs?

I like cats, but I love dogs.

 

 

Inkling Interrogation

 

  1. It’s the zombie apocalypse, how do you survive?

If you can’t beat them, join them.

  1. Who would you like to say sorry to?

I’d like to apologize to my parents and brother because I become something of a hermit when I’m really drawn into a story – whether I’m reading or writing it.

  1. If you could sit down with your 15-year old self, what would you tell him or her?

When I was 15 years old, my family and I moved from Trinidad to Canada. So I supposed I’d tell my 15-year old self to get ready for things to change, and that there are some things that never will – all in the best ways possible.

  1. What is your worst character trait?

I’m a worrier. But I’m working on that, on recognizing the things beyond my control, and on letting those things go.

  1. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live?

The Shire.

  1. What do you think of garden gnomes?

They’re excellent travellers.

  1. Do you believe in magic?

Absolutely.

  1. What’s your biggest regret?

My biggest regret is that I waited so long to start writing because I didn’t think I’d be good enough. It took years before I realized that it didn’t matter. Now I write because I have something to say, and not because I need to be heard. Although, it is always nice when a reader really connects with the story.

 

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Felinity Interview – Jessica Frost

Hi and welcome to Team Grimbold! Felinity is set to be the first publication under the Kristell Inkling imprint, and we’re thrilled to have you on board. Tell us about yourself. (Please include links to blogs/sites/Twitter/published works etc) 

I’m a self-confessed perfectionist, medical student, black belt in karate, dog-lover, aspiring author, and it goes without saying that I love books probably a little bit too much! I have an interest in photography and am constantly on the lookout for new landscapes to catch on camera. I also love all things Spanish, have a slight addiction to ice-cream and cry way too easily at sad movies and books… That pretty much sums me up!

Twitter: @MissInkweaver.

What inspired your story for Felinity?

I somehow stumbled across an article on the evolutionary development of cats and dogs and was intrigued by how both animals actually stem from the same carnivorous ancestor – the miacid. I find it fascinating how the biological split of this creature millions of years ago instigated some sort of rivalry between the two species, and couldn’t stop myself wondering about why and how that came about. That’s really the initial spark that got me writing.

How do you feel about having an illustration accompany your story?

I think that’s a great idea! Illustrations can really help the writing to come alive!

What writing projects are you working on at the moment?

I’m always writing something or other! I’ve recently finished a YA fantasy romance – a story that’s ultimately about forbidden love and all its dangers and hardships – which I’m hoping to start sending out to agents/publishers soon. Scary times! I’ve also got a contemporary YA novel planned out that’s currently just a heap of notes in my drawer, screaming to be written. Just got to get my med school exams out the way first, then that will have my complete attention!

The most important question – cats or dogs?

Dogs, without a doubt. I have a 7 month old Cockapoo called Ruby and she’s just the cutest thing ever: I’m sure she’d convert anyone!

 

Inkling Interrogation

1. How would you guide an alien through making a marmite sandwich?

Well, I personally hate marmite so I’d probably try and persuade the alien not to make the sandwich in the first place!

2. What’s your greatest achievement?

I’d have to say receiving my black belt in karate is something I’m extremely proud of! I’ve spent over ten years pouring my heart and soul into the sport and to finally receive something in exchange for all the blood, sweat and tears has made the many hours spent training completely worth it.

3. Who s the living person you most despise?

I try not to hate anyone really – you can never have too many friends! I save my dislike for fictional characters instead! One of the most evil people I’ve come across in literature has to be Shakespeare’s Iago – he really makes my skin crawl!

4. Do you take the shampoo and soap from hotels?

I do… When you’ve got hair as crazy as mine, you can never have enough shampoo!

5. What would be your motto?

It’s cliché but ‘live life to the full’. So many people let amazing opportunities pass them by and I don’t want to be that person who looks back in years to come and has regrets because they didn’t embrace life. Time is too precious.

6. What did you want to be when you were little?

Growing up, I was a huge Enid Blyton fan and was adamant that I was going to create my own secret group and solve mysteries for a living! Then, I decided I was going to be a vet – but that only lasted until my first rabbit had to be put down, and I changed my mind again.

7. Who do you admire most and why?

A best friend of mine. She’s had so many horrible things thrown at her over the last few years but has stayed strong throughout it all and is undoubtedly the most positive, optimistic, incredible person I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet. I don’t think I could ever confront life’s hardships with as much courage as she’s done. She’s a real inspiration.

8. Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, and find line 4 – what is it?

“…the dog keeps me from getting too close to magnets.” (My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult).