In the beginning, all action was fast paced. If you could have been in the Garden of Eden, before that unfortunate incident with the apple, you would surely have seen Adam zipping about like a child overdosed on Sunny Delight, hurtling from one screwball caper to the next...

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I saw this Agatha Christie play in a beautiful theatre, tucked away near Richmond Green, and a complete contrast to the modern theatre-in-the-round called The Orange Tree, nearer the station.

It was good to spot Carolin Kopplin at the end of the performance. She's a fellow fringe theatre critic whom I met only last week to chat with on press night for 'Sense and Sensibility' at The Rosemary Branch.

She confirmed that despite the efforts of cast and creative team the play itself was a let-down. As she stated in her own review for the UK Theatre Network, she'd spotted one or two elderly patrons nodding off during the first half.

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Dr Ian Hocking is the author of two techno-thrillers, Déjà Vu and Flashback, as well as a rites of passage comedy, Proper Job, and a short story collection, A Moment in Berlin. All of them self-published though amazon. In fact, his self-publishing exploits – and more particularly his sales success – have brought him to the attention of Nicholas Clee writing in The New Statesman.

Just to get this out of the way, any relation to Amanda Hocking?

Yes, we’ve been happily married for years. No – wait! We’re completely unconnected.

So congratulations on those sales, Ian. The last time I looked, Déjà Vu was number 6 in the amazon.co.uk technothriller ranking – for all book formats, not just kindle. That’s quite an achievement. To what do you owe your success?

Like most authors, I only have clues but no definitive answer. Déjà Vu itself was first published in 2005 by the UKA Press. There, it was edited by the talented Aliya Whitely. The UKA Press angle didn’t work for a variety of reasons. Meantime, I kept working on the book. I genuinely thought it was good – or, at least, that it was the kind of book I wanted to read. The next step was a near-miss from a larger publisher. I picked up literary representation on the back of this. Along the way, I recorded Déjà Vu as a podcast, and kept reworking the material. Eventually, when my agent couldn’t place the book, I gave up writing. There’s a post on my blog about it. I redrafted Déjà Vu again in line with a short report from Scott Pack, hired Clare Christian to give it a proper edit, and put it out for the Kindle. What I’m saying, in a roundabout way, is that I never tired of returning to the story of Déjà Vu and polishing it. Those years in the wilderness paid off in terms of the quality of the book. I don’t know how it compares to other publications out there, but it has certainly received more attention than most, both from the writer and its editors.

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Lee Jackson is the author of a number of fine historical mysteries, including London Dust, A Metropolitan Murder and The Mesmerist’s Apprentice. His most recent novel is The Diary of a Murder, which is published by Snowbooks, though it first appeared as a self-published e-book. Alongside his fictional crime-writing activities, Lee is a well-known and respected authority on the Victorian age, in particular Victorian London. He is the founder and curator of the Victorian London website www.victorianlondon.org, an invaluable resource for anyone interested in researching the period. Recently, he has set up a publishing arm to Victorian London, Victorian London Ebooks, re-issuing electronic editions of rare Victorian (and Edwardian) texts. I recently read one of his publications, Journal of a Disappointed Man, and can honestly say it is one of the most extraordinary and moving books I’ve ever read.

What first made you decide to become an e-publishing magnate?

Magnate? The canny reader may surmise that Roger is flattering me here; but he will still not receive a discount on his next purchase. I should also point out that, at the moment, I’m just publishing via Amazon – not via Kobo, Sony, Apple or elsewhere.

I’ve always been fascinated by the possibilities of publishing historical material on the web. I’ve been using the internet since 1993 (when it still looked like this) and I’ve been digitising material for my own site for the last ten years. That, of course, was gratis – but the rise of Amazon, Kindle and Twitter seemed to offer a new model for self-publishing.

Also, I really needed the money.

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More and more writers are doing it. Putting their work directly out there, without the intervention of the middleman. Self-publishing through kindle.

I imagine that most of the writers who choose this route are ones who have been unsuccessful in getting a conventional publisher to take them on. They’ve grown tired of waiting for the Man from Del Monte to say “Yes!” (seventies advertising reference) and have decided to take matters into their own hands. A few have found phenomenal success this way. Many more, I suspect, have not.

But good luck to them all, I say.

But it’s not just those who haven’t broken through the normal way who are deciding to self-publish. Many writers who have been published are either self-publishing additional books alongside their “legacy-published” work, or ditching the conventional model entirely and turning themselves into their own publisher.

Michael Gregorio is a successful crime-writer (actually a husband and wife crime-writing duo, Michael Jacob and Dani de Gregorio, he English, she Italian), the author of a wonderful series of historical crime novels featuring Hanno Stiffeniis, a magistrate in Napoleonic-era Prussia.

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"I didn't fall asleep - I just started to think about death."

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Perhaps I shouldn�t admit this, being a crime writer. But I think I am actually enjoying Borgen even more than The Killing. And I loved The Killing. (Just to be clear, it�s the Danish The Killing I�m talking about here, not the American; I didn�t watch that, so I can�t comment.)

The real heresy for me, as a crime writer, is that what I admire about Borgen is that it doesn�t rely on an ever-increasing body count to keep the viewer�s interest. In fact, so far, there have been no murders in it all. Just one death by natural causes.

Now such an admission may end up getting me thrown out of the CWA. And it�s not to say that I don�t still enjoy a good, twisty, grisly serial killer thriller. But it is interesting to see how the writers have managed to maintain the drama and tension without recourse to gore. The political shenanigans are of course fascinating. But more than anything it�s the fantastically well-written and superbly performed characters that keep us hooked.

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When I asked Twitter last night what I should blog about, one suggestion was "How do you know when to give up on a work-in-progress? Or when to stop and come back? Or when to re-conceptualise the project?". It was a good question, so thank you Damon Young, although I'm absolutely sure there isn't a clear-cut answer, because it's always going to depend on you and the night and the music.... Sorry, you and the write(ing) and the novel. So, I think the best I can do is suggest some things to ask yourself and the novel, in the hope that things get a bit clearer.

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After a well earned break of sorts, one that saw me restless and writing both a short story, and trying to tackle something of a plan for the rest of the Delve series, I�ve started to get down words for the second book in the series, aptly named Evolve. I always think of a tag line for each of my novels, something to capture the essence of the book, and to keep me on the straight and narrow as I write it. This one is simple � Rowan�s powers begin to evolve, but she soon learns that she can�t save everyone, not even those close to her heart.

Having said that, it�s my first time tackling a sequel and whilst I have a rough outline in mind which no doubt will develop along the way, I�m pondering over the whole area of sequels and the temptation to �tell� i.e. to reveal backstory from Delve so that anyone picking up the second book without reading the first will have some idea of how Rowan, my main character, and the rest of the crew got to the point that they�re now at

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So it recently hit me that my novel will be published on (don�t snigger) April 1st and that the file labelled Marketing, which has hitherto sat on a shelf above my desk in a floaty, non-threatening, futuristic kind of way, has begun to jump up and down and beckon me � or whatever a marketing file without hands or feet does to signal Urgency.


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