Mark Charan Newton

First, my next Amazon.com post is online, where I talk about the similarities of mystery and fantasy fiction. Feel free to jump in with your thoughts. Now to business. I thought I’d share the graph of my web stats, month by month over the last couples of years. Pretty cool, isn’t it? Yes I’ve covered [...]

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It is a balmy summer’s evening and a crowd is gathering. China Miéville, Adam Nevill, myself, publicists and organisers, all head into Forbidden Planet and down the stairs, preparing ourselves for the signing. China Miéville: I feel like there should be some kind of grand music on our arrival. Me: What, like the kind of [...]

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Whilst it seems I have to wait until tomorrow morning to collect my copies of my books from the post office, other reviewers are flicking through it already. One thing that has come to light is this: I just wanted to add that this isn’t some marketing ploy (I’d apply something much more sinister than [...]

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Think about it. You suddenly hear about Author X from a friend, but when you get to the bookstore you find out you’re ten years late to the party. Author X has a dozen novels under his or her belt, and a vast career stretches out before your eyes. They might have written series or [...]

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I don’t like to comment on the day job – mainly because I like to keep it distant from the writing career – but I did something rather fun yesterday. Three of us from work went into a secondary school, to try and enthuse a Year 7 class (12 year olds, to American readers) about [...]

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I came across a review recently. The reviewer and the book are not directly important to this post; I merely wanted to highlight this simple statement within the review: Then I thought: but what if I’m taking this the wrong way? The reviewer then challenges himself to consider his responses up to this point, and [...]

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I find some of this incredible, so I’ll highlight a big chunk: In the heyday of pulp fiction, writers churned their books out at a great rate, usually to earn enough money to live on. Prentiss Ingraham wrote more than 600 books, 200 of them on Buffalo Bill. Occasionally, he wrote a 35,000-word book overnight. [...]

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I’m afraid I’m going to have to bow-out of the very fine Sci-Fi London event, where I was due to pop along on the 1st May. The reason I’m not going is that, basically, I need to breathe. As some of you know, I work full time during the day, and write during the night [...]

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Author wins publishing deal after leaving manuscript on Richard and Judy’s doorstep: A struggling author landed a major publishing deal for her first novel after leaving a draft copy on the doorstep of television presenters Richard and Judy… The college tutor sent the manuscript to several publishing houses but had no reply and was on [...]

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Well, there were no tales of authors cooking each other eggs (well, not to my knowledge), but it was still a very fine convention. This was the first time that I’d really been to Eastercon as a Proper Author. What that basically means is that strangers know who you are and introduce themselves. As an [...]

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Huzzah for the changes at Waterstone’s: Waterstone’s managing director Dominic Myers has made his first structural change in how the business operates, since taking over in January, moving away from a category management system of book buying while giving stores back some of their buying power. The moves come ahead of an analyst and press [...]

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Despite the impression we authors like to give, publishing isn’t just about us. There are people who work behind the scenes and they work extremely hard in producing novels each month, and what’s more, they get little acknowledgement. These are the people who help shape careers, as well as an industry, yet they don’t often [...]

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