Blog posts
-
Are you an aspiring writer summoning up the courage to finally send off your beloved manuscript to a publisher or agent but suddenly assailed by crippling doubts? In fact, the envelope bearing the print-out has been sitting on the kitchen table for a week or your finger is continuing to hover, paralysed, over the keyboard’s…
-
There is one thing that gives the writer in me more pleasure than anything else, and I suspect it is the same for many more authors, and that is when a reviewer refers to your fictional characters as if they are real. That happened recently when an Amazon reviewer of The Girl in the Meadow…
-
I mentioned in a previous post about the Amazon Organised Crime ebook best-sellers chart being topped by the DCI Jack Harris boxset. . Well, this morning (Monday June 30, 2025) it has been joined in the top 100 by three further John Dean titles published by The Book Folks, a Joffe Books Company. The novel…
-
One of the key skills that a crime writer has to master right from the beginning of their career is how best to use the Red Herring, the technique whereby the author drops in information that has been deliberately designed to mislead the reader. It’s a massively useful tool (not for nothing is the Crime…
-
Three of the top four bestsellers in the Amazon ebook Organised Crime chart this morning are crime writers with The Book Folks, a Joffe Books company – namely my DCI Jack Harris boxset at Number One, the brilliant Ray Clark, second, and the much-admired Pete Brassett fourth. You can check them out by going to…
-
New Writing North has named the 25 writers who are joining England’s largest and longest-running writer development programme. The charity, which is based in Newcastle and is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, works to develop creative writing and reading in the North of England. It believes that ‘writing talent is everywhere, but that…
-
Writing can be a lonely experience, especially if you are an aspiring writer finding your way and beset by questions. Are you doing it correctly? How do you know you are doing it properly? Who do you ask if you suspect that you’re not doing it properly? Maybe you would benefit from bringing in some…
-
Picture: Kirkcudbright by John Smith Crime fiction author John Dean has written before about the importance of a strong sense of place for crime fiction writers and reflecting that theme is the success of the website www.tripfiction.com, which allows readers to track down books by searching for favourite places rather than favourite authors. The result…
-
Joffe Books, which recently bought publisher The Book Folks, has continued its relaunch of John Dean’s popular Detective Chief Inspector John Blizzard crime fiction series. The relaunch of A Flicker in the Night, which tells how the detective and his team try to track down a deadly arsonist, includes a new cover for the ebook…
-
The origins of fictional characters has always fascinated me, particularly the extent to which many creators draw on real people as a starting point. I talk to a lot of authors and many of them freely admit that some of their major characters are partly taken from real life. I have no problem with that…
