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To pave the way for the release of my new novel Dead Headz in 2026, I’m duty bound to promote the book that establishes the main characters and the apocalyptic world that dominate the new book.   Flying Ant Day is the book in question. One of my favourite novels if I do say so myself, although reviews so far have been lukewarm. But you know your own mind so see if this floats your boat or sinks like a ship.   FLYING ANT DAY BLURB It’s 2030, and junior eco-warrior extremists a

Confession time: I find it hard to review audiobooks. When you read a print version, you’ve got the text to refer to, serving as a reminder of character names and sections you’ve enjoyed which help with a review. Not so when someone’s reading to you, as Bob does with this.   As with Bob’s other books , there’s a decent enough plot revolving around the relationship between Matt, a former bathroom salesman and Harriet, a current fraud lawyer, that seems to be going down the plu

A free sample of a Christmas book this close to Christmas? What is this, Christmas come early? Here's an excerpt from The Ghost of Christmas Threeve by Jon Lymon. He flung his legs off the bed and assumed a sitting position. As he did so, he sensed the bedroom change colour from a pale grey/blue to a vivid yellow/orange like the sun making a rare December appearance. He turned back to the window to confirm no break in the slate grey sky. The source of the light was in the roo

There’s only one surefire way for a writer to achieve zero sales, and that’s to write and publish precisely nothing.   Nothing fails quite like failing to produce anything to get out there in the public domain.   But what if you have published works and are still seeing a line of stubborn goose eggs on your sales dashboard? A novel that registers no sales. A short story collection you can’t even give away via a freebie offer?   The temptation to give up, throw in the towel, c

The debate pages, sorry, rages. Will eEbooks spell an end to traditional hard and paperbacks? There's compelling evidence from the high street that they will. Music stores closing down. Bookshops disappearing from the scene faster than a murderer having claimed their victim in an opening chapter. People wandering around, heads buried in their phones and kindles, not hardbacks or paperbacks.But I say all's not doom and gloom for the traditional book. There's life in the old do

It was never meant to be so omnipresent. This place called Turpenton. It was just a name for a place that I thought up because I needed to think up a name for a place in an early draft of  Last Night at The Stairways . And I got so attached to it, I never thought of a better place name. So the name stuck, and I'm stuck with the name. I mean,  Stairways  is loosely based on a couple of old night clubs in my hometown of Croydon, south London. But I didn't want to namecheck Cro

Wouldn’t it be good to know the time of the week when Mr and/or Mrs Book Buying Public is most likely to acquire your action/adventure story, shell out for your saga or hand over the cash for your horror novel?   Such information would enable us authors looking for ebook sales to time tweets, adapt ads and line-up launches to capitalise on our audience’s propensity to buy.   This is not an advertisement by the way. I’m not about to offer to sell you data that proves that 3pm

Yes, a couple of my books have had 1 star reviews . They probably would have got zero stars had that option been available. But, do you know what? I prefer getting the lowest possible rating than a 2 or 3 out of 5. And that's not just me trying to look on the bright side. Two or three stars is mediocrity. It's so-so. It's this book made no discernible impact on my life. It's the white lines on the road. It's plain Rich Tea biscuits. Bland. Vanilla. Insipid. (I’ve had a few of

You won’t find the city that’s the setting for Last Night At The Stairways on Google Maps.   Turpenton is nowhereland. And so’s its neighbour West Bertram.   But, the eponymous club does exist. Sort of.   The name’s taken from a club I used to frequent in the early 1990s in South Croydon.   The Stairway (not plural) was above The Blue Anchor pub, (now The Treehouse) which used to be the only pub where students hung out in central Croydon. There really was very little choice b

A free sample of a Christmas book this close to Christmas? What is this, Christmas come early? Here's an excerpt from The Ghost of Christmas Threeve by Jon Lymon. He flung his legs off the bed and assumed a sitting position. As he did so, he sensed the bedroom change colour from a pale grey/blue to a vivid yellow/orange like the sun making a rare December appearance. He turned back to the window to confirm no break in the slate grey sky. The source of the light was in the roo

Everyone bar the most extreme Analogue Activist can see that digital book sales will soon far outstrip revenues generated by hardbacks and paperbacks.   Good news for self-publishers like myself and a few million others. Or is it?   The way I see it is there’s weakness in numbers when it comes to self-published authors. With so many of us scribbling away and uploading our words to Amazon, Kobo and Draft2Digital, the market is saturated with works by authors 99.9% of the book

Ups and downs are all part of the book writing process   The good sessions where words are flowing and the plot twists you come up with surprise even yourself.   Then there’s the down days when ideas come fleetingly, if at all. Where it all seems a little pointless, that no one will like what you’re writing enough to pay to read it.   When you think of having to write the synopsis and wonder how you’ll ever be able to summarise the 100,000+ words you’re anticipating writing i

Never read a Jeffrey Archer novel before. And fair play to the guy, the opening of End Game had me hooked, not quite like a pike, but well enough to see me get through this 350+ page hardback in about a week.   There’s nothing spectacular about the language or style, but the plot’s as tight as the lycra some of the athletes featured probably wore back in 2012. There’s not a lead character as such driving the narrative. Warwick’s as close as we get, although his daughter, son

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”   I’ve seen this quote, delivered by the bloody brilliant Jeff Goldblum playing Dr Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, quite a lot recently. Mainly by people struggling, like I am, in similar battery powered jeeps that are breaking down right outside the velociraptor enclosure of life.    You see, I once earned a living as a copywriter. Rephrase that. I’m still scraping a

In my book LAST WRITER SITTING , an unemployed copywriter is asked to write a speech and deliver it at The March For Humanity - mankind's last chance to express its disgust at how many livelihoods artificial intelligence is destroying. Here's a transcript of that speech: Discrimination. It’s illegal to discriminate against someone in terms of their age, skin colour, sex, sexual preferences, and ability. And yet, here we have no action being taken at all by governments across

Like most kids, I never liked doing homework. Or tidying my bedroom. Especially when I knew my friends were playing outside.  But a chore is a chore, and when I was told I couldn’t go out and do what I really wanted to do until the tasks were done, I rushed to get them done. I put in the bare minimum of effort to get my homework finished fast to an acceptable but not great standard because I wanted to go and do something I was more interested in doing. The bedroom tidy was hu

A free sample of a Christmas book this close to Christmas? What is this, Christmas come early? Here's an excerpt from The Ghost of Christmas Threeve by Jon Lymon. He flung his legs off the bed and assumed a sitting position. As he did so, he sensed the bedroom change colour from a pale grey/blue to a vivid yellow/orange like the sun making a rare December appearance. He turned back to the window to confirm no break in the slate grey sky. The source of the light was in the roo

“Wow!”  “Awesome!” “Amazing!” The toys are out of the cupboard and luring the unwary into a fun new playroom with promises of the miraculous – the chance to have new talents bestowed upon you by new toys. “Just look at what it can do, OMG!” Books, essays, ads, emails, articles, on-demand. “I can be a writer!” All kinds of visual fakery delivered in a flash.  “I’m a designer, retoucher, illustrator.” Yet they don’t know what they’re doing. “You’ve got to work with it,” they im

It starts with an email I receive from  Campaign  Sunday Supplement,  Campaign  being the newspaper of the UK advertising industry. Digital only now of course, and not a publication I subscribe to anymore, being over 50 years of age and a copywriter of some 27 years standing (spent mostly sitting), both of which make me a dinosaur in the eyes of that most ageist of industries. And who needs human writers (or art directors, or illustrators or designers these days anyway when w

But it’s nothing to do with my colour, gender or age, and everything to do with me being a human being. Employers in multiple sectors (I’m a copywriter) are discriminating against people by giving our jobs to machines. Machines that don’t need paying, or holidays or lunch breaks. Machines that don’t have families to support, mortgages and bills to settle. People can’t work as fast or for as long as these machines, so they are being shunned and sidelined in favour of AI. And e