Crowvus is a small company, and there is no legal requirement for us to produce an annual report. That aside, it's both beneficial and gratifying to recap the year and revisit our aims and goals. It's gratifying because you can celebrate the parts that you got right through the year. And it is so important to take a step back and look at your achievements. In 2025, we sold a record number of books, built the newsletter to a surprising number of subscribers (if you'd like to subscribe to our monthly newsletter, then head over here !) and we had a phenomenal number of entries for the Crowvus Ghost Story Competition. Wow! What a year 2025 turned out to be! It's beneficial because it helps you gain an understanding of the business. Because of the records I insisted on keeping through the year, I now know the percentage of our readers who shop at Amazon, and percentage who prefer paperbacks to ebooks, and the country where we sell the most books. All of this information we...
This week, I'm delighted to be teaming up with The Coffee Pot Book Club to host Ellen Read's fabulous new book The Feathered Nest on the #HistFicThursdays blog! But, enough from me... let's meet the book: Murder comes to Norfolk Island, but is the killer after Alexandra Archer’s Tahitian black pearl or a lost illustration of the rare Green Parrot? The Thorntons, along with a small team of people, mount an expedition to Norfolk Island, a small island in the South Pacific, to study the Green Parrot and set up research programmes to help protect it and other endangered birds. As a birthday surprise, Alexandra’s father tells her she is to be the official photographer for the expedition. Her father gives her a black pearl brooch that Alexandra’s great-grandfather had bought off a merchant in Hong Kong in the 1850s. The pearls are Tahitian black pearls. Before they depart Melbourne, they learn that Norfolk Island has had its first murder. It sends ripples of unease th...