I’ve always maintained that authors, and most especially the writers of thrillers which feature what might be termed ‘boys’ toys’, need to get their facts right. Over the past two or three years, I’ve been asked on several occasions to review books immediately prior to publication so that a short quote from ‘James Becker’ or ‘James Barrington’ could be included on the front, or a slightly longer quote on the back cover. I’ve always taken this task seriously, and I’ve always tried to produce the right kind of ‘sound-bite’ quote, and I’ve also tried to be honest about the book,

Talking with a friend of mine the other day, I was reminded of a television programme I saw about a decade ago that basically explored this question. The BBC had devoted an hour of prime-time viewing to exploring the birth, history and ultimate death of the book, in part by talking to authors, the people who actually write the stuff that other people buy. It was a fairly interesting programme, hosted by Alan Yentob, but also – because it was the BBC, after all – moderately pretentious. Two of the authors they interviewed stuck in my mind particularly. One did

I’ve mentioned Kindles and tablets a few times in past blog posts and I’ve just remembered one particular journey I did some years ago that brought very much to a head the sheer convenience of carrying an entire library in your pocket. I was driving from Andorra to the UK in a fully-loaded car. Fully loaded, more to the point, with four large and heavy boxes of books, a mixture of hard backs and paperbacks. Four boxes of books that I had had to hump into the back of the car in Andorra, and then unload the same boxes at

In the good old days, in this context meaning BA – Before Amazon – publishing a book followed a tried and tested routine, followed at a sedate and gentlemanly pace. An author would submit a manuscript to a publishing house, ideally through a literary agent. In due course it would, hopefully, be accepted, then edited and prepared for publication, the entire process taking at least six months and in some cases well over a year. As a personal example, Macmillan took eighteen months between accepting my first book – Overkill – and its first publication. Then the novel would be

Not exactly a news flash, but if you haven’t read Cyberstrike: DC yet, it will be available at a hefty discount this weekend. The link to use is: hellobooks.com/thrillers-and-action That’s it!

As most people know, Christmas has got virtually nothing to do with Christianity. In the early days of the Church, the fledgling religion faced competition from all sides, and one of their biggest problems was trying to combat paganism and other faiths, and particularly to subdue their long-established festivals and religious days. The 25th of December was one of these, an important pagan celebration known as the Festival of the Unvanquished Sun, the Roman god Sol Invictus, and rather than try to compete with it, the early Church simply hijacked it, decreeing in the mid-fourth century that that day was

I’m not normally in the business of promoting other people’s books – let’s face it, I have enough trouble selling those that I write myself – but very, very rarely a book is published that is so important and so crucial to our present way of life and our immediate and long-term futures that I believe everybody should be aware of it and ideally should read it. The book I’m referring to has been listed in and topped almost all of the bestseller charts, including Amazon, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Sunday Times and

Back in April 2012 Simon & Schuster published the first of my two ‘Jack Steel’ novels, The Titanic Secret. I’ve covered the circumstances of writing this book before, but just a quick recap: my agent came up with the initial idea in January 2011, I started writing it on 4 February and delivered the final, pre-edited MS of just under 100,000 words on 7 March 2011. This was a total of 28 days because I lost two days’ work due to editing another book and then having a water leak in our house in Andorra that necessitated driving 200 miles

Throughout history, there’s been a selection of anti-establishment figures whose dreams of creating a new world order have shone like the most brilliant stars in the firmament, and then burnt out and died. The world has been to the outermost reaches of extremism throughout the nineteenth century – from Fascism to Communism – and it has survived. When the Wall fell down we all breathed a sigh of relief, but there will always be anti-establishmentism, hell bent on suppressing free thought and democracy. Idealists will never go away; they’ll just surface again with a new corporate identity. Now they’re back

As a follow-on from my last blog post, if you want to publish a book there are three possible routes you can follow. The first – commercial or mainstream publishing – is by far the most difficult because you need to convince a publisher, or more likely convince a literary agent to convince a publisher, that your work is good enough for publication. And the publisher must be convinced because money will have to change hands: the publishing house will have to pay you an advance as well as fork out for the editing, cover design, typesetting, printing, marketing and