The Kindle, ebooks and the future of publishing
It’s undeniably true that the impact of the ebook and this new form of reading technology has alarmed the publishing world more than most people who work in it are prepared to admit. Sales of Kindles, tablets and especially smart phones have been spectacular, and for people who enjoy reading on holiday the reason is […]
2021 Cyber Awards Ceremony
I banged on a bit about the National Cyber Awards Ceremony a couple of weeks ago, and the vlog linked below was prepared by the people at Pinpoint Media, who actually did all the work for it. Enjoy! Cyber Awards Vlog
Unbound Books and the Man in the Shed
Actually, it isn’t necessarily a man at all. It could just as well be a writer of the female persuasion, but men are traditionally supposed to own sheds. In fact, a large number of people who claim to Know About These Things believe that a shed can save a marriage, because it provides space between […]
News: the National Cyber Awards Ceremony 2021
People who regularly read my ramblings on this website will probably be aware that although I create a blog post about once every two weeks, I don’t often produce anything that might reasonably considered to be news. The main reason for this, of course, is that like many authors I spent most of my time […]
Off my hobby horse and back to the mountains: another retrospective
This blog post is a bit late because I’ve been a bit distracted for a couple of reasons, one good and one bad. The good one you can read about in the News section, and the bad one was because I downloaded a piece of entirely legitimate software from a major company and discovered that […]
Lost in the land of the illiterate …
I’ve visited this topic before, but I think it’s both kind of important and desperately sad that we seem to be surrounded by people who very obviously can’t spell or use English properly and who also clearly don’t care that the products of their illiteracy are displayed for all to see. Of course, we’re very […]
Writing speed and research
The first ‘Jack Steel’ novel was published by Simon & Schuster in April 2012. 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, I started writing it on 4 February and delivered the final, pre-edited MS of just under 100,000 […]
The Afghanistan fiasco
My blog posts are almost always about writing and the world of publishing, but the shambles in Afghanistan, a shambles that has been entirely caused by the bumbling idiot Joe Biden, the utterly incompetent ‘leader of the free world,’ is too important to ignore. And it’s actually a subject that I know something about. A […]
The Kindle – a short history of the device that changed publishing forever
In November 2007 an article appeared in NewsWeek magazine announcing the introduction of a brand-new electronic gadget named the Amazon Kindle. It was a hand-held device dominated by a 6-inch oblong E Ink display with a version of a QWERTY keyboard underneath it, and was intended to allow the owner to carry a library of […]
A very short personal retrospective – looking back a decade
The year 2011 was, by any standards, pretty bad. In 2010 my mother-in-law – a lady with whom I had a very good relationship and who was the very antithesis of all the mother-in-law jokes – was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Despite two very major operations and treatment from the National Health Service that was, […]