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...
Today's #HistFicThursdays blog is a little bit different. The Horrible Histories songs I've shared so far have all been about specific people. Today, we're looking a little bit broader... Meet the Vikings: I have to say, the song above is my favourite Horrible Histories song! Both the songs in today's blog are my sort of music, even though they're not a lot like each other. But the music matches the theme and - without talking too much about the genius of the musicianship (my day job coming into play here) - these two songs show two very different sides of the Viking impact on Britain. The song above is what we are led to believe all Vikings were like. A couple of years ago, on a return from my sister's book launch in North Lincolnshire, we visited Lindisfarne. It is commercialised now, not a great deal like the Holy Island the monks had established there (although the earliest reference to this name appears to have been some 200 years after the Viking raid). B...