Research rabbit holes, genre-hopping confessions, and the odd writing-tool obsession.
Direct sales through Gumroad, wide distribution through Draft2Digital, different currencies, different payout schedules — without a system, this becomes unmanageable by book three. Here's the one I actually use.
You can't pay for a review, and you can't trade a free copy for one either — that's been against the rules since 2016. Here's what's actually allowed, and what's worked for getting a debut its first honest reviews.
£2.99 isn't an arbitrary number — it sits inside Amazon's 70% royalty band, and every price above or below that line changes the maths more than most new authors realise.
Most author newsletters die because they only ever say one thing: buy my new book. Here's what I send instead, and why consistency matters more than frequency.
5×8 or 6×9 isn't a stylistic preference — it's a decision that affects spine width, per-page printing cost, and whether your book reads as genre fiction or a textbook before a single word gets read.
The useful version of this isn't asking AI to make your prose better. It's asking AI to find specific, narrow problems and report back — never to rewrite a word. Here's exactly how I prompt it, and where I draw the line.
Free ISBN, or buy your own? The honest answer depends on whether you actually care who's listed as your book's publisher — and most new self-publishers don't realise there's a difference until it's too late to change cheaply.
A blurb's job isn't to summarise your book. It's to sell the promise of reading it, in under 150 words, to someone who's holding it for four seconds before deciding.
A professional edit isn't one pass — it's four distinct ones, done in a specific order. Understanding that is what lets you triage which parts you can genuinely do yourself and which are worth paying for.
Most copyright-page advice online is written for US authors and quietly assumes everyone else's conventions are the same. They're not. Here's what actually goes on the page on both sides of the Atlantic.
A flat PNG template with red and blue boxes on it is not a design tool. It's homework. Here's the free app I built so I'd never have to redo a wraparound cover by hand again.
Not a panic piece, and not a hype piece. Just an honest look at what generative AI is actually doing to publishing, self-publishing, and the daily working life of a novelist — from someone building tools in this space, not just talking about it.
From a mob boss guarding human cargo to an empire that has learned to measure its enemies, the antagonists I remember reading were never evil for its own sake. Here's how I try to build mine the same way.
Eighteen books in, I finally got fed up with juggling spreadsheets, sticky notes, and a dozen half-organised documents — so I built the writing studio I actually needed.
Twenty-nine years in the police, seventeen of them as a detective, taught me things about investigations that most crime fiction gets wrong on purpose — because the truth is slower, and less cinematic.
From Roman centurions to swarming beetles to a radio-host romance — readers sometimes ask why I don't just pick a lane. Here's the honest answer.
How much do you actually need to know about Roman surveying, Egyptian flood records, or Victorian beetle taxonomy before you're allowed to write the scene? Less than you think — and more than you'd guess.
Roman roads, real garrison logistics, and the maddening job of getting Britannia right — a look at how the Legions of Honour series gets built before a single scene is written.
