writing
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NielsenIQ BookData and GfK Entertainment have released their international data for book sales in the first eight months of 2025, and it reveals a mixed picture. Eleven out of 19 territories reported revenue growth, often accompanied by significant price increases, with crime fiction performing particularly well. The authors of the report say that international book…
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Publisher Joffe Books has announced the winner of the Joffe Books Prize 2025, which has gone to T.L. Haseeb, for The Portrait Maker, the first in a new police procedural series featuring Amber Kash, a seasoned British Asian Detective Inspector in her forties. The author receives a two-book publishing deal with Joffe Books, a £1,000…
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The first Northern Writers’ Awards for 2026 – The Hachette Children’s Novel Awards and Young Writers’ Awards – are open for submissions. Debut writers of middle grade and early teen fiction can win £3,000 and a nine-month programme of mentoring and support from Hachette Children’s Group. The Young Writers’ Awards are also open for ages…
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Best-selling crime writer John Dean has posted another article to help aspiring writers and offer insights for readers, this one focusing on injecting emotions into flat passages. I, as you may know from recent posts, am in the final weeks of editing the next DCI Blizzard novel to send to my publisher The Book Folks,…
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Best-selling crime writer John Dean has considered the challenges in writing Point of View in his latest article to help aspiring writers. You can read it here or drop into the Handy Hints sections of this website which has many such pieces. This article has also been added to Handy Hints – Characters where it…
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This is why I do not like, nor trust, Artificial Intelligence (AI). I am at the age when dementia becomes a consideration – my father died with it – so I have been somewhat concerned over recent weeks and months to return to the previous day’s writing on my laptop for a quick refresh before…
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I feel that it is time to address a subject which I have avoided for far too long and yet is, by far, the most important challenge that today’s writers face. I am talking about running out of teabags. No, seriously, I am referring to AI, of course. Let me be clear right from the…
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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…
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Here’s a salutary lesson for all those writers who, like me, would ideally prefer to use plenty of description to describe places in their writing. Think of a tree in a park. Done it? I am pretty confident that you will have and that, even though you were only asked a millisecond ago, you can…
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As work progresses on producing a final draft of my latest DCI Jack Harris crime novel, that means going back to the opening pages, so it’s a good time to recap on some of the rules of beginnings. One of the key things that a crime writer, indeed any writer, must bear in mind is…
John Dean - Crime Writer 