What is the hardest part of getting a book from finished draft to published? Editing, design, the cover, the listing, or being found? Tell us which, and why.

Wishing our author @SteveAskham well as he faces some health issues. He is a very funny guy and his book Life’s a Peach shows it. Thinking of Steve and every author on the mend. dreamengine.co.uk #LifesAPeach #SteveAskham #GetWellSoon

Tina Zee wrote the epic Cartimandua trilogy. Now she has turned her pen to popular women’s fiction with The Black Funeral Hat, and there is more to come. dreamengine.co.uk #TinaZee #TheBlackFuneralHat #DreamEngine #WomensFiction

Erin Smith is thirty-six, unpublished, and still telling everyone she is fine. The Black Funeral Hat by Tina Zee is a warm, wickedly funny, quietly devastating novel of love, loss and second chances. Available now in paperback and Kindle. DreamEngine Publishing. Link in bio.

Many congratulations @TinaZeeAuthor The Black Funeral Hat paperback is out today! amzn.to/4yToCiD

Tomorrow 1st August 2026 is publication day for The Black Funeral Hat by Tina Zee link.amazon/B0hMT8aaH

The Black Funeral Hat A Novel of Love, Loss and Second Chances She buried her heart with him. Three years on, she still owns the black hat she wore to his funeral, and she is about to find out which of two very different men is worth burying it for. Pre-order on Amazon link.amazon/B03gpxzNw Pre-order on Apple Books: books.apple.com/.../the-blac…

The Black Funeral Hat by Tina Zee Out on 1st August

Dr David Baboulene co-founded DreamEngine, holds a PhD in story theory, and has consulted with Bob Gale, Lee Child, and Willy Russell. He also ran away to sea and wrote two of the funniest memoirs on our list. dreamengine.co.uk/david-babo… #Author

We are sometimes asked what distinguishes DreamEngine from the upload platforms and assisted publishing companies that have grown quickly over the past decade. The answer is not primarily about what we offer – the editorial process, the cover design, the distribution, the marketing foundation. Those are features available, in some form, from more than one source. The distinction is selectivity. We review manuscripts. We decline more than we accept. An acceptance from DreamEngine is a statement about the work – a judgement made by people who have spent their professional lives reading, editing, and publishing fiction and non-fiction to traditional standards. That judgement carries something a self-publishing upload cannot carry. We also work differently from traditional publishers. We do not ask authors to surrender rights, wait years for a decision, or accept an advance that ties them to a house indefinitely. We work with each author directly – not through automated systems, not through a production queue that erases the author from their own book. The author retains full rights and receives higher royalties. What we ask for in return is quality. We are selective because selectivity protects what our authors have produced, and because readers who find DreamEngine books deserve to know they can trust what they are picking up. We are not the publisher for every manuscript. But for the ones that are right for us, we are a serious partner. We review manuscripts. If yours is ready, we would like to read it. Get in touch via direct message or the link in bio. #Publishing #IndependentPublishing

Communist East Germany. A scientist and a dancer. A turbulent affair that ends in disappearance. When she returns, anticipation turns to dread. Paul Curtis. The Shock Tube. Published by DreamEngine. dreamengine.co.uk/the-shock-… #PsychologicalThriller

Paul Meachair's readers know him as the author of Belleau Wood – DreamEngine's World War One novel of a US Marine falsely accused of desertion in the fields of France. What fewer readers know is what preceded that novel. Before Belleau Wood was a book, it was a screenplay. And not just any screenplay: an award-winning one. Belleau Wood took the Liverpool Indie Awards and the Birsamunda International Film Award. These are not consolation prizes. They are the formal verdict of people who read dramatic scripts for a living, and their judgement was clear. What Paul Meachair did next is rarer than it sounds. He took a formally acclaimed script and expanded it into a novel that honours both the story and the medium. The result is a book with the structural assurance of a screenplay – scenes that earn their place, tension that builds without waste – and the depth of character that prose allows. Liam Kierney's story – a man falsely accused in a war that reduces men to their worst and best – is told with a discipline and economy that reflects its cinematic origins. Paul writes under a pen name, keeping his fiction identity separate from his professional background. That discipline carries through to the work. Belleau Wood. Published by DreamEngine. Have you ever read a novel that began life as a screenplay? We would be interested to know. dreamengine.co.uk/paul-meach… #HistoricalFiction #WWI

Our social media management is built on the Author Content Kit – the same mythology that underpins everything we do. Every post is drawn from the author's identity, not from a template. If you are a DreamEngine author and want us to handle your content, get in touch. Link in bio.

If you enjoy Bill Bryson – the specific pleasure of reading someone who genuinely knows their subject, writes with precision and dry wit, and finds the comic in the detail without forcing it – we suspect you will enjoy Life's a Peach. Steve Askham's memoir covers forty years in the international fruit trade. That is the straightforward description. The subtitle – "the secret life of an international fruit trader" – implies there is considerably more to it, and Steve is not particularly forthcoming about what that more consists of. What he does give you is four decades of global commerce: the negotiations, the relationships, the movement of produce across borders, the places and situations that most of us will never find ourselves in. He draws on all of it with authority, warmth, and a wit that earns the Bryson comparison not as a marketing shorthand but as a genuine point of reference. The "secret life" thread is real. It gives Life's a Peach something Bryson has never quite offered: genuine intrigue alongside the comedy. We are not going to give it away. Published by DreamEngine. Do you have a favourite travel memoir? We would love to hear what makes it work for you. dreamengine.co.uk/lifes-a-pe… #TravelMemoir #Humour

Tina Zee grew up in Yorkshire and has spent her life studying the real women of Iron Age Britain – in particular Queen Cartimandua, the ruler who held Brigantia together while Rome advanced from the south. She is not simply a writer of historical fiction. She is a woman who has built her life around the philosophy she attributes to Cartimandua: energy in, energy out. That commitment to lived principle shows in the Cartimandua Trilogy in ways that research alone cannot produce. Wild Brigantia, Fires of Brigantia, and Blood of Brigantia together form one of the most complete acts of historical imagination we have published. Tina does not transplant modern sensibilities into period costume. Cartimandua is a woman fully of her world: politically astute, driven by duty and faith, capable of decisions that make twenty-first-century readers deeply uncomfortable – as any woman of real authority in Iron Age Britain would be. We chose to publish Tina Zee because she embodies what we believe serious historical fiction should do: restore voices that history silenced or overlooked, and do so without apology or simplification. The Cartimandua Trilogy is now complete. All three novels are available in paperback and Kindle. Do you have a favourite period of ancient British history? We would love to know what draws you to it. dreamengine.co.uk/tina-zee/ #HistoricalFiction #WomenInHistory

We have a working theory about why most author platforms fail before they find their audience. It is not that authors are unwilling to do the work. Most serious writers understand that publication today requires more than a good manuscript. They know they need a website, a social media presence, something that gives agents and readers a reason to believe in them before they have read a word. The problem is not willingness. It is that most authors build their platform around the wrong things: the book, the genre, the plot. A biography that reads "author of the forthcoming [title]." Content that begins at a publishing milestone and has nowhere to go in between. That approach does not build an author identity. It builds a promotional channel for a single product. When the product moves on, the platform stalls. Author Mythology begins differently. It starts with who the author is – their perspective, their expertise, their reason for writing, the questions they have spent their life asking. It produces a content architecture that sustains years of posting because it is grounded in identity, not in a title. Dr David Baboulene has spent his academic career analysing what makes stories work at the deepest structural level. He brings that rigour to every Author Mythology session. No other publisher offers this. If you are ready to build a platform that outlasts a single book, the first conversation costs nothing. Get in touch via direct message or the link in bio. What is the first thing you think an author platform needs to do well? #AuthorPlatform #Publishing

Monday Monday begins when Vonnie is ten years old and her mother disappears. Frances J MacGregor spent forty years as a social worker before writing this novel. That professional weight is in every chapter. dreamengine.co.uk/monday-mon… #LiteraryFiction

Carolyn Goodyear trained at Richmond Drama School, won the De-Leon Prize for best actress, and worked on set with Brad Pitt and Robert Redford. Then she wrote the most singular novel on our list. dreamengine.co.uk/carolyn-go… #Fiction

An acceptance from DreamEngine is a statement about the work. We do not publish everything we receive – not every manuscript is right for us. But for the ones that are, we publish to the highest standards. Get in touch via direct message or the link in bio. #Publishing

"Scandalously funny. Black Mirror eat your heart out." That review, from Caroline McCudden, does more in twelve words than most blurbs achieve in twelve sentences. Paul Carroll's debut novel is a dark satire on assisted dying. That description should probably put a lot of readers off. It does not – and the reason is that Paul, who built his career in PR for Boddingtons and Heineken, brings the same precision and tonal awareness that effective public relations requires to every page of his fiction. He knows exactly what he is doing, and what he is doing is funny in the way only the best dark comedy can be: not despite the subject matter, but through it. The Black Mirror comparison earns its place. This is a novel that trusts its readers to hold discomfort and laughter at the same time – which is to say, it treats them as adults. We chose to publish Shaking Hands with Elvis because it is exactly the kind of fiction we look for: original, confident, formally accomplished, and impossible to describe without sounding either too serious or not serious enough. Published January 2024. Have you read fiction that made you laugh at something you probably shouldn't have? We would love to know. dreamengine.co.uk/shaking-ha… #SatiricalFiction #DarkComedy