My Kickstarter Failed

This is what I learned I ran my first ever Kickstarter from 9th July to 9th Aug. I wanted to raise £3400 for my new series, Arabian Dreams to print 100 copies of the special edition hardback and to pay my artist and editor. After 30 days, I managed to secure 43% backing, with £1465 […]

Seven Earths Publishing

Its not enough for me to just write a book, self-publish it and move on to the next one. I want to build something more sustainable. I understand that my readership is out there but they just don’t know it yet. I have to reach out to them through the screen and the page so […]

Kickstarter Diary Day 11

The last couple of days have been the hardest so far on the Kickstarter campaign. The first couple of days pledges were coming in throughout. Then come Saturday night the taps closed. Not a single pledge came in for two whole days. You may think I’m overreacting, but I keep on Kickstarters and the ones […]

Day 8 Kickstarter Diary

The Kickstarter campaign launched this morning (10th July 2026). The campaign was actually approved on Tuesday evening, so I activated the prelaunch phase. It seems people tend to keep their projects in prelaunch for quite a while to gather support before they actually launch their campaign. I’m working to a tight deadline, so delay the […]

KICKSTARTER Diary Day 5

I got a response from Kickstarter today. Embarrassingly, I got flagged for AI use. So today’s lesson is to make sure to disclose when you have used AI. I used Gemini to produce mock-ups of what the books may look like, using the artwork produced by my artist daughter, who currently goes by Velenyx on […]

Arabian Dreams Kickstarter Diary Day 1

Today is a big day. I’ve just finished shooting and editing my Kickstarter project video and have uploaded it to the page that I have created for my Arabian Dreams Kickstarter. The aim of this diary is to make notes and share my experience of running a Kickstarter with my readers. It took me a […]

10 Rules for Writing Muslim Fiction

Welcome to my 10 Rules for Writing Muslim Fiction series. There are corresponding podcast episodes on YouTube which you can watch alongside or instead of reading this post. I will update the page as I write more of the rules down. So come back in a months time to check if its been updated. Rule […]

Covers Revealed

The last time I released a book was 14th June 2014. Since then I’ve been absent from the fiction market. A lot has changed. I changed careers, went back to uni to retrain as a teacher/lecturer and completed a Doctorate in Education. Now, 12 years later I’m finally looking to release not one, but two […]

February 2026

January seems to be the longest month of the year. Fantasy&Faith Season 3 launched and so far I have interviewed M D Ndogo, Dan Hanly, Umar Ditta, Tanweer Dar, James Barclay and Anna Smith Spark. I’m interviewing Adrian Tchaikovsky this week and J E Hannaford next weekend. I have a few more in the pipeline […]

Fan Fic Collab

M Carmel is the author of the Arkavian Intelligence Services series. Earlier this year we agreed to collaborate by producing a piece of fan fiction based in each other’s fictional worlds. J M would write a story set in the world of The Changeling King, focusing on Det. Karen Rainbow’s catholic roots, and I would […]