These are tough times for the book trade, as they are for everyone, and the situation gets grimmer every day. Waterstones have now cancelled their orders from us, and Amazon is not restocking. The closure of the wholesaler Gardners has hit indie shops hard.

HOWEVER, we’re in daily contact with our distributors, who assure us that it’s still safe for their staff to work and they have no plans to close. That means we can honour our pledge to carry on with our publication schedule, unlike most publishers, whose presses have gone quiet.

It also means that we can fulfil any orders from our website, where we have created a range of attractive offers to fit every budget, from a blanket 30% discount on every title, to even more generous multi-buy bundles, plus a gift-a-book offer where we’ll send a free book of your choice to anyone self-isolating.

We’ve also slashed the prices of six of our bestselling titles on ebook, we’ve made two comic novels completely free on ebook, and we’ve launched an ebook-exclusive imprint for debut fiction, with each title costing £1 or less.

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First, more details on those offers on physical books. If you order anything from our full range of paperbacks and hardbacks, we’ll take 30% off (with free UK p&p). Just enter the discount code THANKS when you get to the end of the checkout.

Alternatively, if anyone buys a full-price book from our website (free UK p&p), we’ll send a free book of their choice, up to the value of the original purchase, to anyone who is self-isolating in the UK. Use the code GIFTABOOK.

And if you’re stocking up, we’ve put together a range of bumper packages:

Nine Eye Classics, from our original travel/adventure imprint, for £50.00 (RRP £75.91);

Eight stellar novels and graphic novels from Australia and New Zealand in our Antipodean Bundle, a massive bargain at just £50 (RRP £98.92);

Suzy K Quinn’s bestselling, four-part Bad Mother series – Why Mummy Drinks meets Bridget Jones – for just £20.00 (RRP £31.96);

Four glittering comic novels in the Lightning Comic Fiction bundle for £20.00 (RRP £35.96);

Alastair Humphreys’ bestselling kids adenture trilogy The Boy Who Biked the World for £11.98 (RRP £17.97);

Nicola May’s superselling Cockleberry Bay trilogy for £15.98 (RRP £23.97);

and finally Six of the Best: six Lightning fiction debuts for £40.00 (RRP £53.94).

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On ebook – fast, cheap and completely safe to download –  our new digital-first Lightning Bolts titles are all currently £1 or less, and we’ve also reduced a selection of six of our bestselling titles to 99p, on all ebook platforms.

In addition, we've made two of our titles completely free: Simon Edge’s prize-listed novel The Hopkins Conundrum, a highly original blend of tragedy and comedy based on the life and work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and A Tangled Summer, the first in Caroline Kington’s sparkling Summerstoke trilogy.

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Finally, a word about our spring and early summer titles:‍

Beneath the Streets, a page-turning 1970s ‘what if’thriller by Private Eye journalist Adam Macqueen, which imagines what would have happened if Jeremy Thorpe’s assassins really had killed Norman Scott;

The paperback edition of Ray Robinson’s The Mating Habits of Stags, which was shortlisted for the Portico Prize (aka ‘the Booker of the North’);

Please Do Not Ask For Mercy As A Refusal Often Offends, a dark, comic dystopian crime novel from Paul Bassett Davies, author of the Amazon bestseller Dead Writers in Rehab;

Walks on the Wild Side, John Pakenham’s account of his gruelling treks in Kenya in the 1980s, in the spirit of his mentor Wilfred Thesiger;

and The Tempus Project, the second Brigitte Sharp cyber-thriller from Antony Johnston, author of The Exphoria Code.

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We are confident that you’ll find something, in this cornucopia of offers, which will help you get through the lockdown. In turn, your custom helps us to continue doing what we do.

Many thanks and stay safe, wherever you are.