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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

What’s the best way to unite the whole world? Negotiation around a table in the United Nations? Nah, that’ll never work. Pacts and treaties? Tried that. Fail. But what about an aggressive alien invasion? That would force everyone to unite to repel the unwanted extra-terrestrial invaders wouldn’t it? Well, yes, but no, not everyone. You see, while most of the world would surely unite to fight for the human race’s survival, there would be one group of people that would likely w

Here’s a book sales insight I can share that may ring true with other writers: the first 2 days of a month and the last 3 days are consistently my worst days for sales.   This seems strange to me as most people pick up their pay packet at the end of the month, so you would have thought these days might be the time when book buyers would be most likely to have a few spare dollars/pounds (most of my sales are in the USA by the way) to invest in one of my masterly novels, novell

I keep a close track of my book sales, KENP reads and Amazon giveaways. It’s enabling me to see what’s generating the best sales – and whether any social posts are directly responsible for an uptick.   When it comes to X (Twitter) I’ve experimented with getting one of those blue ticks that supposedly increase your reach and engagement.   One thing about those blue ticks - they’re not blue. They’re transparent at best, but usually white. Minor detail but a major gripe if you’r

A free sample of the Jon Lymon novel Seller V this close to Christmas? Does that still count as Christmas coming early? I’m shocked when I return from a prolonged visit to the bathroom to find a different guy standing beside the filing cabinet with the middle drawer open. He’s smoking a pipe which is daring as smoking is banned in the apartment block. “Put that out!” I demand at high volume, but the guy’s unflustered. “Get in,” he says, pointing a long forefinger at the filin

How do you know when a project isn't working? Is it when a short story is short of an exciting lead character or a brilliant ending, or a gripping beginning, or all three? Or is it when writing a novel turns out to be not quite so novel as you imagined it when you first thought of the idea? Most writers have projects lying unfinished and abandoned in drawers like a shopping cart left in a multi-storey car park. We hope they won't be there forever, rusting away, but right now

Got there. It took over a year but I finally nailed this epic doorstop of a tome. But I'm not sure how I can review it, as I can't remember the first half of it (like I said, it's taken me over a year). All I know is a lot of people died, some getting dragged into the gutter, like loose dog stools. Nasty way to go. It was long, IT. Short title, long book. Could it have been trimmed in places? Quite possibly. But I'm no editor or hairdresser. It was certainly episodic, flip

Let’s start with the painful truth: I’m not a particularly successful author/novelist. Moderately successful, yes.  But successful enough to send the day job packing off into the sunset with a raw behind? Nope.   So here’s what I’ve learned in over a decade of not being a particularly successful novelist. A list of 6 quick and easy things you should not do unless you want to risk being in roughly the same place I’m in now ten years down the line.   DON’T NOT CHEAT WHEN IT COM

It's the moment all writers dread. Writing a synopsis. You 've written 70,000 plus words, and now's the time to distill all the twists, turns and character arcs into a few hundred words. Gulp. So , imagine my discomfort when I wrote my first synopsis for one of my novels, and came up with some story ideas that were better than what I'd written. Forcing yourself to explain your story in as few words as possible and in the style of the sort of thing you'd read on the back of a

Getting book reviews are big currency in the self-publishing world. A shit one is better than none at all, certainly if the Fifty Shades series is anything to go by. But how do you get them? I've approached a few bloggers and reviewers (very politely, I might add) and have yet to receive a reply, let alone a review. I've resisted the urge to write my own under some alias or other as that just seems a toe-curlingy bad way to go. But as I've only received a few on Amazon, I'm o

It's not all about getting it right first time.Those who write don't mind getting down some crap on the page. They know they're going to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite until they get it, well, right. Those who think they can't write get frustrated by a blank page. They won't put anything on it until they think it's perfect, and often, that means nothing gets put on the page at all.To write, you've got to be prepared to write crap first. And you've got to believe that the cr