Further to my last blog about the enormous advantages of being on board a cruise ship in terms of time to write, no phone ringing, no shopping to do, lack of distractions, etc, etc, I suppose I should also have added the one obvious disadvantage. Unless you pay the quite high charges for Internet access over the satellite link, you don’t get that reassuring – or irritating, depending on your point of view – ping that tells you an email has arrived, and it’s lot more difficult and much, much slower to leap onto the Internet to check some obscure

Quite a few years ago I found myself on a cruise ship heading up the Baltic in the general direction of St Petersburg. In fact, that’s a somewhat trite statement. I ‘found myself’ on the ship because I’d exchanged quite a lot of folding money for the privilege of being on board. And I wasn’t by myself: my wife and her mother were with me, as well as an elderly friend of my mother-in-law, and one of my two abiding memories of that cruise was the two old dears getting gently but distinctly pickled drinking exotic cocktails while the ship

I’m sure most authors have had this sort of experience: I’ve lost count of the number of times when I’ve been at some kind of social gathering where most of the people are strangers to me, and when the conversation has, almost inevitably, shifted to a discussion of the various participants’ modes of employment. The statement ‘I’m a writer’, usually seems to produce one of two reactions. Either there’s a stunned silence followed by a detailed scrutiny as the other people stare at you as if you’re some strange and unexpected life-form from another planet that has mysteriously appeared in

I was thinking about mobile phones this week, which probably means I need to get out more, but there was a reason for it. We’re all familiar, probably far too familiar, with the NHS Covid 19 app which is allegedly designed to identify people near you who might be carrying the virus so that you can, presumably, run away and hide from them. Its more practical purpose is to allow you to scan a QR code to get inside a café or other facility without having to write out your name, postcode and telephone number on a bit of paper,

A tiny bit of a rant that’s been festering for some time. Illiteracy now appears to be the norm in Britain. Thousands of children emerge from what passes for our education system apparently barely able to read or write and incapable of doing even the simplest arithmetic without recourse to the calculator app on their mobile phones. And why, one is entitled to wonder, are we in this position? The answers, I believe, are simple enough. First, in many schools it is no longer fashionable or politically correct to insist that children learn to create proper sentences, employ accurate pronunciation,

My publishers have organised a couple of new promotions running this month. On BookBub today in the UK, Australia and Canada you can get a copy of Cyberstrike: London for less than the price of a cup of coffee! And on Apple there’s a three-week promo of the same book, again starting today. Read and enjoy!

Going off at a slight tangent this week, I thought it might be instructive to do a quick survey of the sales figures of some of the winners of what is arguably the most prestigious literary prize of them all – the Man Booker. First, a bit of history. Originally, the award was called the Booker-McConnell Prize, and was named after the company Booker-McConnell which began sponsoring the competition back in 1968. The prize quickly became known as the ‘Booker Prize’ or simply ‘the Booker’. In 2002, the investment company Man Group plc began sponsoring the event, hence the change

Accurate research can be crucial, and poor or no research can destroy an author’s – or a book’s – credibility. One classic example is The Da Vinci Code, where the albino monk escapes from prison in the Principality of Andorra and walks down to the railway station in Spain. Well, he was obviously very fit, because the closest railway line in Spain is at Barcelona, about 130 miles away. On the French side, it’s hell of a lot closer. Finding that out on the internet would have taken Mr Brown what, ten seconds? He also didn’t know that the Andorran

My publisher has just told me there’ll be a Kobo promotion for the ‘Paul Richter Omnibus Edition’ for four days from 16th to 19th April. So if you’re looking for a bargain, check it out.    

It’s become almost the norm these days, especially with hardback books, for the dust cover to feature a photograph of the author looking dangerous, brooding, amused, serious, sexy, irritated or whatever, depending upon the gender of the writer and the genre the book occupies. Presumably publishers have decided that sales might improve if browsers liked what they saw. But I do sometimes wonder how important the physical appearance of an author really is. I remember when my first book – Overkill – enjoyed a brief flurry of attention as a couple publishers tried to buy it. One publisher, who shall