Does diversifying your writing offer a book marketing advantage?

At the Triskele LitFest

This post was updated in 2021.

It’s generally accepted that it’s easier to market a series of novels than separate, stand-alone ones.

It’s also more fun to write as you can introduce more entanglements and conflicts across several books. 😉

But if you already write a novel series you […]

Five quick and dirty writing tips

Writing friend Keith Dixon asked me in one of those round robins on Facebook to share five writing tips, but without copying his (curses!).

After nine, soon to be ten, books you’d think it would be easy, but the problem is that over that time, I’ve gathered a jumble of writing dos and don’ts. It […]

Lazy and Dozy on the Internet

Dozy (No offence to ostriches)

I love the Internet; its variety, its information, its madness, its connectivity and above all its denizens. I belong to groups, lists and forums, many of them inside Facebook, some on Twitter, some on email. After being on Twitter since 2009 and Facebook since 2011, I’ve sifted out […]

Throwing a sickie

And breathe…! Or not.

Well, I’ve been having some difficulty doing this over the past fortnight. I flew home from the highly energising Dublin Writers’ Conference with a raging sore throat and feeling like a superannuated wet dishcloth. The tiredness could have been due to the conference (it was fairly intense), but the sore throat […]

Crimefest 2018 - a tale of intensity and stamina

In the CrimeFest bookroom. Oh, look, INCEPTIO!

Crimefest 2018 is over. I enjoyed it immensely, but goodness, you need stamina as it’s full-on. I don’t mean concentrating during the excellent panels (full details here), nor the snatched lunch breaks nor the feast of books in the bookroom run by Waterstones Bristol Galleries.

No, […]