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 not difficult to find. Why an earth would you go on holiday and take a dozen paperbacks along with you, with all the weight and inconvenience that that implies, when you can slip a smart phone that contains your entire library – and allows you

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  

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 the two legally-conjoined combatants, and gives the husband a place to which he can retire to pursue whatever solitary and sordid pursuits float his particular boat: model railways, smoking, or just viewing high quality porn. Unbound? Shed? I’m talking about what, exactly? Oddly enough, it

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 locked away in a garret or a shed somewhere trying to persuade my brain to produce a story that can hopefully be wrestled into some sort of shape and eventually end up as a book. In my case it’s a small oddly shaped room on

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 it came with an unannounced extra: a Trojan that took me the better part of a week to track down and eliminate. That might be a story for another time, but for now, back to the plot. A few years ago we had to fly

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 familiar with the signs posted by greengrocers, who certainly know that a punctuation mark called the apostrophe exists and seem determined to use it as frequently as possible, which is why you can be invited to buy lettuces’s and carrot’s and potatoe’s and tomatoe’s and

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 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 the house in Andorra that necessitated driving 200 miles to another house where the concrete

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 few years ago I ghosted a non-fiction book entitled ‘Joint Force Harrier’ for the Royal Navy’s most senior frontline Harrier pilot, and that was all about Afghanistan and the Taliban. So for what it’s worth, let me give you my take on what’s happened. The

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 books in his or her pocket or bag rather than having to lug a case of physical books around. The Kindle also included a free wireless connection to the American Sprint EV-DO network, named Whispernet by Amazon, that allowed books from a library of 90,000

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, despite our fears fuelled by the typical bad press the NHS so often attracts, startlingly good, she died in July 2011. Quite apart from the mental anguish that such an event produces for all family members, there are also the sheer practical aspects of the