Today, I’m delighted to welcome Rohan Quine to Virtual Book Club, my interview series which gives authors the opportunity to pitch their novels to your book club. Rohan is an author of literary fiction with a touch of magical realism and a dusting of horror. He grew up in South London, spent a couple of…
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Today, I’m delighted to welcome Ali Bacon to Virtual Book Club, my interview series which gives authors the opportunity to pitch their novels to your book club. After graduating from St Andrews University, Ali worked in Oxford’s Bodleian Library where she found a cache of famous Victorian photographs, sparking a life-long interest in early photographers….
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We’re nearing the finish line. Now we turn to the book’s interior. What is it going to look like? And how will that add to (or detract from) the way that the reader experiences the book? From Wiki: Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical types or the digital equivalents. Stored…
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This week we come to the final edits and the proofread. And for this I used Perry Iles. He describes his job as ‘look after the small stuff’, but attention to grammar, spelling and consistency (is it proofread, proof read or proof-read?) is vital at this stage, when the temptation might be think you’re on…
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This week we come to the copy edit. The structure is in place. The beta readers have had their say. It’s getting interesting.  I first approached John Hudspith when I was working on My Counterfeit Self because I felt that I needed to be challenged a little more. He steered my writing in subtle ways to…
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Beta readers are an essential part of my editorial process. I couldn’t do without them. What is a beta reader, and how does this differ from an advance reader? Confusingly, authors use different terms to describe the same role, or sometimes one term is employed to describe different roles. When I use the term ‘beta…
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In this week’s blog, I focus on the structural edit. It includes a contribution from my structural editor, Dan Holloway, the person Stephen Fry might have had in mind when he said, “We are not nouns, we are verbs.” “I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who…
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This week will be the first of a short series of posts about the production of Smash all the Windows. Its cover design has been attracting compliments, with many people wanting to know about my cover design process.  One of the other huge joys of self-publishing is choosing how to present your work. Given that…
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Since winning the Daily Mail First Novel Award in 2008, I’ve become known for writing about big subjects and giving my characters almost impossible moral dilemmas. What interests me is how people behave under pressure, because it reveals so much about them. And as the tagline of Smash all of the Windows suggests, my new…
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Today, I’m delighted to welcome Chantelle Atkins to A Day in the Life, my occasional interview series in which authors talk about their writing processes and inspiration.  Chantelle was born and raised in Dorset, England and still resides there now with her husband, four children and multiple pets. She is addicted to both reading and…
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