What's new at Fly on the Wall? June 2020

A hello! We haven't nattered in a while and I thought it was a worth a blog post. (I natter a lot on our monthly newsletter which you should definitely sign up to here, but if not, let's do a whistle stop tour of what has been taking place over the past few months, with a cuppa!



Just before lockdown, we published our 1st ecopoetry pamphlet, Awakening by Sam Love, who has been involved heavily with Earth Days for the past 50 years where he lives in New Bern, USA. We had some fun with this collection with satrical humour!

From the craziness of shipping bottled water 6,000 miles, to how bacteria evolves for a counterattack, this collection laughs at humanity’s war on nature.




We have/will be publishing 3 books in lockdown - we started with Grenade Genie in Thomas McColl, a politically-minded protest of a book, with a wonderful narrative tone

which lends itself so well to spoken word.

Like the trooper that he is, Tom has managed to get himself radio appearances right, left and centre, despite his cancelled performance sets to a live audience.







In May, we began to run around in circles as distributors closed down completely, meaning that Waterstones and Amazon did not order in small press titles, causing chaos for book launches already impacted by the COVID19 crisis.


Still, we soldiered on and launched 'House of Weeds' by Amy Kean and Jack Wallington (poetry and illustration and our first 2 author collaboration!) This collection was based around a wonderful narrative:


Between 1879 and 1941 two unlisted buildings in Peckham served as refuge to forty-seven individuals. It was a site of urban legend; asylum for the disgraced rebels and mentally unorthodox of the time. Neighbours spoke of wild all night parties, raucous laughter, mirrors thrown from the bedroom windows with such force they dented the pavement below, and sounds of babies crying bloody murder within the damp foundations.   House of Weeds is the story of these rebel humans. An illustrated poetry collection from Amy Charlotte Kean and Jack Wallington that gives a megaphone to the weird, restless and unruly. The battles they faced and the love they crafted for themselves.


New avenues for promotion have been created to tackle lockdown isues...


Recently, I set up a YouTube channel and a Facebook performance group to give my authors avenues to perform on during lockdown. The “House of Weeds” launch went online, Zoom with 80 viewers, a screen share video and 10 rappers, poets and performers to “lit up” to read from the book, becoming inhabitants of the house of weeds!





I'm really excited for our Youtube channel as I have content schedule for the whole of June with the ability for viewers to comment live at their 'premieres'! Do subscribe here to get exclusive content. If you are reading this and you are a Fly on the Wall author in any way (magazine/anthology/books) and would love to do a set or a piece for our Youtube channel, just get in touch :)


That's a brief overview - in June, we will be launching our first short story collection, No Home In This World by Kevin Crowe, which has already attracted the attention of The Northern Times and The John O'Groats Journal. Look out for that one!


Oh and Press achievement - we were shortlisted in the British Book Awards for Small Press of the Year 2020! Don't think anything has ever made me prouder :)


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