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Once upon a time, buying a book was relatively straightforward.

You walked into a bookshop, picked one from the shelf, looked at the price, winced slightly and bought it anyway.

Today, a reader can find the same author's books on Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, an author's website and goodness knows where else.

And the prices aren't necessarily the same.

Independent authors have very different ideas about pricing.

Some believe a higher price tells the reader, "This is a serious book."

...

History has a considerable advantage over the present.

It has an editor.

By the time we read about Henry VIII, Napoleon, George III or any of the other assorted kings, emperors, presidents and lunatics who have wandered across the world's stage, somebody has tidied everything up.

Dates have been checked. Battles have been named. Motives have been assigned. Historians have decided who was brilliant, who was incompetent and who was simply having a particularly bad Tuesday.

Living through history is...

At some point in my writing career, I decided typing was inefficient.

This was obviously ridiculous.

I had been typing perfectly happily for years, but technology had provided me with an exciting alternative.

Dragon voice recognition software.

The idea was magnificent.

Instead of sitting at a keyboard laboriously typing thousands of words, I could simply speak my novels.

I would stroll around the room like Charles Dickens, dictating glorious prose while the computer obediently recorded every word.

...

Despite humanity's best efforts at making everything digital, we are still a long way from drinking a digital beer or cocktails.

Which is probably just as well.

So, you may wonder, why do we have ePubs?

Grab a seat, settle into a comfy chair and sup your favourite brew while I explain the absence of pale ale in an ePub.

First things first. What the hell is an ePub?

An ePub is simply an electronic book.

That's it.

It isn't a mysterious piece of software. It isn't a program that's going to rearrange...

A small plastic battery-powered fan from Temu has been playing tricks on me. It sits on my desk, next to my keyboard, close to my computer screen, blowing cool air to sooth my fevered writer's brow.

Twice now I've looked away from my desk, only to find, when I look back, it pointing in a different direction. Being a writer, my first thought was that something unseen had decided I needed cooling from a different angle. Maybe a poltergeist. That would be cool in a very different way. But being a...

By September 2009 I had been living in Cyprus for twelve months, in a large house on the outskirts of the little village of Letymbou, north of Paphos. It stood in the middle of vineyards, surrounded by olive, apple, pear and fig trees. Apart from the birds, insects and my two English Springer Spaniels, Harvey and Holly, it was wonderfully peaceful.

One of the upstairs bedrooms became my office. It was there, in 2009, that my writing career really began to gather momentum. I was working on ...

When I moved from Middlesbrough to Cyprus in 2008, I imagined this new life would be filled with sunshine, vineyards and long walks beneath cloudless skies.

For once, reality wasn't too far from the dream.

The housing market in Britain had collapsed following the financial crisis, so rather than buying immediately, I rented a house in the hills north of Paphos, in a little village called Letymbou.

The house stood on the edge of a vineyard. It was wonderfully isolated, with no close neighbours...

I've come to the conclusion that Death and I have reached a sort of arrangement.

Not an official arrangement, you understand. Nothing written down. No contracts. No signatures.

More of a gentleman's agreement.

Death turns up every now and then, has a go, fails miserably, mutters something under his breath and leaves.

We've been doing this for years.

The first serious disagreement happened in Middlesbrough.

I was driving to work one morning during rush hour. Nothing unusual about that. Like millions...

There are moments in life when a man must stand and defend his home.

The Battle of Britain.

Rorke's Drift.

The Alamo.

And now, apparently, my house in Cyprus.

The enemy?

Centipedes.

Not one or two centipedes, you understand. Not the occasional wandering specimen looking for directions to the bathroom.

Oh no. I appear to be under siege.

Every morning I wake up and make my coffee and discover another dozen of them clinging to the stone walls inside my house like tiny alien invaders preparing for an...

Every so often someone declares that independent authors are disrupting the publishing industry.

It makes for a good headline.

The only problem is that it isn’t true.

Independent authors are not new. In fact, the idea that writers should control their own publishing is older than the modern publishing industry itself. What we are witnessing today is less a revolution and more a return to tradition.

Long before global publishing conglomerates existed, authors were often deeply involved in how...

There was a time when subtlety was thrown out the window and outrageous clothing was the in thing. The 1970s was my decade, the years in which I came alive.

The 1970s didn't whisper. They shimmered.

Platform boots. Glitter. Hair that required structural engineering. Vinyl records stacked like sacred texts. And music that did not so much play as announce itself.

Artists likeDavid Bowie, T. Rex, Sweet, and the deliciously theatrical Alice Cooper understood something important.

Life is dull without...

They did not wear uniforms on parade grounds.

They did not march to the sound of brass bands.

They travelled by bicycle along rutted lanes, or walked quietly through market squares, or sat in unlit rooms listening to the faint crackle of a wireless set.

The Special Operations Executive was formed in 1940 with a blunt directive from Churchill: to “set Europe ablaze.” It was an organisation built for sabotage, subversion and resistance inside Nazi-occupied territory. It required secrecy,...

It is easy, with hindsight, to imagine the years before the First World War as a kind of golden afternoon.

Polished silver. Crisp uniforms. Grand railway stations. Edwardian confidence. An empire painted red across the map. A civilisation convinced it had reached a summit of progress and refinement.

The Titanic sailed in 1912, at what many believed was the height of modern achievement. Electric lighting. Wireless communication. Engineering that seemed almost miraculous. The world was shrinking,...

This morning began, as many mornings in Cyprus do, with optimism and a power cut.

At precisely 8am, the electricity vanished. Didn't flicker. Didn't hesitate. It just vanished. Apparently it was a planned outage. The only missing element in this plan was informing anyone.

So, by 9am, the Armou area had reverted to 1890. Kettles silent. Wi-Fi blinked its last and the modern age politely withdrew into silence until the witching hour of 2pm arrived and power was restored.

Undeterred, I decided to...

Let us have a quiet word about artificial intelligence. Not a shouting match. Not a Twitter pile-on. Just a civilised cup of tea, a biscuit, and a small amount of perspective.

Every few weeks I see it again:

"AI is not writing."

"AI will destroy fiction."

"This is the end of real authors."

At which point I glance at my word processor, my spelling checker, my grammar assistant and my auto-saving cloud backup… and raise an eyebrow.

Because unless you are chiselling your manuscript into stone with a...

There is a particular kind of silence that follows publishing a book.

You press the button. The page goes live. The cover appears where you hoped it would. Then, more often than not, nothing much happens at all.

No fanfare. No sudden enlightenment from the algorithm. Just you, a cup of coffee, and the slightly unreal feeling that something important has been released into the world and promptly ignored.

This is the part nobody really talks about.

Most indie authors do not live in a state of...

I sometimes catch myself scrolling and stopping, not because something interests me, but because something demands my attention.

A video. A headline. A moment clearly taken from someone else’s real life, often at its worst, now framed for quick consumption. I pause, feel a flicker of discomfort, then move on. And it leaves me wondering when that became normal.

At some point, almost everything turned into content.

Not just the good things. Not just the funny or impressive moments. But grief,...

England has a long and proud tradition of naming places in ways that make perfect sense to people who have been dead for several centuries.

Take Oxford Circus, for example.

I’ve been there many times. I’ve never seen a strongman, a trapeze artist, or even a confused clown. Just shoppers, tourists, and the occasional person standing still in the middle of the pavement wondering why everyone else looks annoyed.

The truth is rather less dramatic. “Circus” comes from the Latin circus, meaning a...

There is a phrase I come back to often. Three simple words. No drama. No noise.

Onwards and upwards.

I did not arrive at writing through shortcuts, hacks, or sudden inspiration. I arrived the long way round.

I started with paper and pencil at the age of eight. Not because I knew where it would lead, but because something inside me needed to put words somewhere safe. I did not know then that writing would become a lifelong companion. I only knew that silence felt heavier without it.

It took over...

There are people who say you should never love a machine.

They are wrong.

The love of my life was a Triumph 2000 Mk 2.

She was white, with a black roof, and she carried herself with the quiet confidence of something built to last. Not flashy. Not loud. Just assured. Civilised. British and very 1970s.

My favourite sort of day was simply driving her.

I would think nothing of setting off from Leicester at first light and pointing her nose towards Land’s End, or the Lake District, just because the...