A year ago I released Till The Heavens Burst, my first novel. I remain extremely proud of it, I think it’s great, you can listen to me reading it in audio form right here on the website and all up it was a great success.

But I’ll tell you what hasn’t been a success—as titles go, Till The Heavens Burst is kind-of fucked.

I remember when the title came to me initially. I’ve always been bad at titles. My entire career I put too much pressure on them. I have trained myself to not work under the threat of deadline pressure in every case except for titles, which I always come up with at the last second. I don’t know why, either. I think deep down, the title is the first impression you get of a piece, right? And in my head, I’m like ‘ooh this better be a great first impression or else I’m fucked!’

And so I’ll workshop a billion different ideas until the last second, and then I’ll pick the one that I hate the least and that’s that. The piece itself will have been finished for weeks at this point, and I’ll still be questioning the title until the last moment. That’s just how I roll.

But that’s not how it worked with Heavens. Will and Bob’s relationship hinged on that song (Always by Bon Jovi) in my mind, and the imagery of the Heavens bursting with webs/fingers/whatever you want to call them was so clear to me that I knew it had to be called Till the Heavens Burst. It was too perfect. It’s a song that seems to be one thing (a romantic love ballad) that turns out to be something different (a creepy song about a stalker) but nobody cares because they have attached their own meaning to it already. That’s the heart of the story within.

Still, I did my due diligence. I did some SEO analysis on it. It’s a line from a song, right? And Jon Bon Jovi is not some obscure artist, he’s a legend. Always is a legendary song. There was a chance, in my mind, that searching for a single line from the chorus of the song might doom my book to page 8 of the Google results.

But it was not to be! SEO-wise, “Till the Heavens Burst” did lead to Always by Bon Jovi, but not (heh) Always. It also led to the wikipedia page for Hesperides, the nymphs of the evening in Greek mythology. But in terms of traffic, it was a pretty low-ranking phrase.

I guess I should explain SEO briefly.

SEO means “Search Engine Optimisation”. It’s an acronym used to describe the habit of making sure what you’re writing places ‘well’ on google. Ideally you want to place first, but at the very least you want to be on the first page.

There are a lot of different ways to make this happen, but knowing how to do this probably doesn’t fucking matter any more as I’ll explain shortly.

Anyway, Till The Heavens Burst as a title had the juice. It was an SEO winner, it was meaningful to the story, it was a dumb reference in a book about a family of people who make too many dumb references and it had a deeper meaning you wouldn’t understand until you finished the book. I went for it.

And I placed number one when you searched Till The Heavens Burst. Great success! Someone could say “Hey, what’s your book called? Can I buy it?” and I’d say ‘sure, search the title and buy things the way you normally buy things online.’

Then Google changed its search engine. It added AI (I don’t want to get into how an LLM is not AI right now). And the AI wants to help people. It’s no longer a “Search Engine”, it’s a “Generative Engine”. When you search on google now, it gives you an AI overview of what it “thinks” (I don’t want to get into how AI doesn’t think right now) you were trying to find.

If you search Till the Heavens Burst now, the AI thinks you are trying to remember a song lyric from a Bon Jovi song, and it dumpstered my book down to number three.

Actually, it dumped my book off the front page, but I have spent some time doing some work to crawl my way back to number three. I can’t climb any higher. The top results are a lyrics page for Always by Bon Jovi and a link to the song (with lyrics) on youtube. If we’re being honest, that’s probably fair.

I do think I might be able to place a little better. If I write about my novel and contextualise it both in reference to Bon Jovi’s epic and the title, I might actually be able to enter the AI Overview, which is the new number 1 position. But the trick with the arcane art of GEO is that you need to really explore an idea a lot. And I don’t know if my blog actually has enough juice to push it that much higher.

Anyway, if I’m being honest, that’s the purpose of this specific blog post—to bump Till The Heavens Burst the ebook back up the page when you search for it. And then I need to hope Universal Music (the label that owns Mercury Records, who released Cross Roads, the Bon Jovi album Always was on) are so distracted by Drake suing them or whatever is happening to notice that I have manipulated the GEO in my own favour.

We won’t know if it worked until I deploy this post! That’s what being an independent author is all about in 2025 baby! I enjoy imagining Beatrix Potter and Mark Twain trying to manipulate Generative Search results when they were independently publishing back in the day. They’d probably be guns at it.

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It was my birthday this month, and I scored a Kobo Libra Colour! And I’ve been reading on it quite a bit. The initial idea had been to use the thing to replace the negative habit of ‘doomscrolling’ before bed, but I’ve just been enjoying the process of reading on it all the time to be honest. It’s a great little device, it’s a fantastic weight, the screen is easy on the eyes and using it is utterly devoid of distractions. Compared to the Kindle app on my phone, I think it’s a winner (although I can see how a Kindle might have also served the same purpose).

It inspired me to add my books to the Kobo store!

Sadly, however, only Blackbirded is available now. The other two (Till The Heavens Burst and Do Not Kill) are in the KDP Select Program at the moment, and as such cannot be listed anywhere other than Amazon (for now). When that changes, in January of next year, I’ll put them on the Kobo store as well!

Of course, if you currently own a Kobo ereader and you want to use it to read my stuff, well, you can buy Blackbirded from the store, and you can get a DRM free epub file of the other two directly from this site! 

I’ve also been reading loads too! Which I guess is obvious. I’ve never read any Jorge Luis Borges before, so I’ve been cracking through his collected works. Only the short stories so far. They’re a lot of fun to read, and I’ve been enjoying it quite a lot. So far my favourite has been The Lottery in Babylon, which escalated ad absurdum until it suddenly made way too much sense. Which is kind-of Borges’ thing in my reading, but the Lottery really nailed it.

Speaking of short stories, I participated in a prompted short story competition on writingbattle.com. My prompts were Horror, Plumber and Spiderweb. I was working under an unusual amount of time pressure—the battle began the same week I was travelling to Japan, which I talked about last month! Instead of the seven days allocated, I had a mere three to put together my story.

I didn’t win.

The short time wasn’t really why I didn’t win though. What really happened is I wrote a story that was ill-suited to the format. I wrote a 1200 word story that I needed to cut to 1000 to fit the word limit.

Actually, I wrote a 1500 word short story that I painstakingly cut to 1200, at which point I was very happy with it, and then I had to cut another 200 words from it. I wasn’t wild about the result, but I didn’t really have any other choices, short of writing a completely different story—that’s the only real reason time pressure might have a hand in my failure.

Anyway, I have put the 1200 word version of the story up on this website for you to read. It’s better than the 1000 word version. It’s a good reminder that some stories are simply supposed to be certain lengths. For example, if you commit to painstakingly describing the exact process through which a person might brew a beer inside another person, and you want that process to be so accurate that you consult the best beer brewer in your country to get their thoughts on it… you probably need more than 1000 words if you want a story to fit around your ghastly homebrew recipe.

Anyway, you can read the 1200 word version of my story Get Drunk here.

You can read the radio edit version over on WritingBattle and see what’s missing, if you like.

And in next book news, I think it will be done by the end of the year. I don’t know if it will be available by then, editing taking as long as it needs to, but it should be close! It’ll be worth the wait, trust me.