I may have mentioned my involvement, in quite a small way, with the National Cyber Awards and the annual ceremony and presentation of those awards which this year will take place in London on Monday September 25. It’s quite a glitzy affair, where the great and the good of the world of cyber protection and security meet and greet and celebrate their successes in the ongoing war against hackers and other assorted nasties with bad attitudes, a desire for other people’s money and access to malignant software. Both the guest list and particularly the finalists reflect the incredibly diverse and

Obviously I’m not the first person to make a statement like the title of this blog post, but I recall an article from a decade ago that emphasised very clearly just how little money most authors of ebooks actually make as a result of all their hard work. The article referred to a report by Bowker which stated that the average price of commercially published ebooks in the United States fell by about 8% from 2010 to 2011, for fiction from around $5.69 to $5.24, with non-fiction dropping even more dramatically from over $9 per book down to around $6.47,

Ten years ago I remember seeing a list of arguably the most unpopular novels of the time, on the basis that they were the titles most commonly abandoned in hotel rooms, the data being compiled by the budget chain Travelodge. The publishing world was somewhat different in 2012 to the present day and I thought it might be instructive to compare the results then to the present day results, or as near to the present day as I could find, and see which current novels have also so displeased their purchasers that they simply discarded them, not even being prepared

As a nation, America is far more religious than the United Kingdom, and its residents appear to be far more sensitive to what they read, or can or should read, in books. There’s an annual programme called Banned Books Week (bannedbooksweek.org), that is intended to call attention to threats to the First Amendment of the United States’ Constitution, a programme which has been running for over 40 years. Its motto is ‘Books unite us. Censorship divides us.’ Believe it or not, books – a lot of books – still get banned every year in America, and the programme is trying

As I said in my last blog post, almost exactly ten years ago Simon & Schuster published my thriller The Ripper Secret. Their marketing was quite successful, with the novel being available in all the major supermarket chains and the high street retailers. As well as the usual kinds of promotions, the publishing house also broadcast a podcast I recorded on its website and featured a short article I wrote about Victorian detection methods in the site’s ‘Dark Pages’ section. It looks as if the timing was quite providential as well, with the second of a two-part BBC documentary being

This week is something of an anniversary, at least for me. Almost exactly 10 years ago, on 11 October 2012, Simon & Schuster published The Ripper Secret, the second of my two books for that publishing house. So the good news is that in this post I’m not going to be banging on about the parlous state of publishing and the uncertainties for the future of the industry of which I am a very small part. You might be less relieved to learn that I’m going to spend my time telling you about this book. The Ripper Secret was my

One of the perhaps unrecognised advantages of the advent of the ebook is the speed of reaction to real-world events that has been made possible by its creation. You will all recall the sudden and initially inexplicable disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 which vanished on 8 March 2014. To research the few established facts of the incident and come up with a reasonable and believable explanation for what had happened did not take all that long, and several ebooks were written and published in the weeks that followed. I was one of the authors, writing as Peter Lee, and

A decade ago, the world of publishing was very different to what we see today, for several reasons. Amazon had taken the world by storm, and not just in publishing though that is the most obvious focus. Figures released by Bowker Market Research in 2012 showed that the online retailer was then responsible for the sales of roughly one in every three books sold, in all formats and all types. The previous year – 2011 – its market share had been one in every four books sold. Not only that, but when all retailers and the market as a whole

I know we keep on returning to the same subject, but for that I make no apology. Anybody involved in any way in the world of publishing will be aware that the industry is in a state of flux, with nobody quite knowing what’s going to happen next. By far the most important factor driving that uncertainty is the deepening global recession and more specifically the escalating cost of living, which is clearly having an impact upon every industry in the world and upon what people can afford – or need – to spend their money on. This of course

As you might reasonably expect, on the occasions when I meet a fellow author we almost inevitably end up talking about writing. That shouldn’t come as very much of a surprise because authors, like people involved in any trade, usually take a keen interest in how other people approach their work. One author I met some time ago worked in an entirely different way to the method that I use. He had the patience and the ability to work out an enormously detailed synopsis for each book, a synopsis that might approach one third of the length of the finished