You might have been following this story on my Facebook page or on BlueSky, but in case you don’t use social media…

Recently, I spent ages making up a short reel to put on my social media, and it showed the first few Delamere books with static images, covers, text, etc, over some mysterious music. Having done that, I realised I wasn’t very good at it and it was time-consuming, so I thought I’d find an artist via People Per Hour and pay someone to put together one for the Clearwater mysteries. I chose a guy who lives and works in Sri Lanka, we had a chat about it, and he set to work on the first five books because all 10 or 11 would have meant a whole film. I was expecting a similar thing to the reel I’d made, but what came back was nearly two minutes of adventure, as you will see in a minute.

There are only a couple of things that are a little awkward about this. The first is that I think Facebook cuts off the reel at 90 seconds, so we miss the last of the video unless you find it under my videos, rather than reels. The second is the voice. We tried a British narrator voice but, tbh, the best he could find sounded like someone who’d been in a punch up and was still pissed from a week last Saturday. Most of my readership (70% approx.) is in the USA in any case, so we went back to the gravy American VO voice. I will post the English voice version on my social media soon so you can hear it. Obviously, the artist used AI to help him create the images, but the AI debate is for another day. I’m just putting this here so those who don’t follow me on social media can take a look. Enjoy!