We kick off 2025 with a brilliant special guest! Nicola May is a hugely successful bestselling author renowned for her heartwarming and humorous …
Join Nicola May on the Creative Differences livestream
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And please take a moment to enjoy the stunning cover design by Andrew Bowden…
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This month’s special guest GB Ralph reveals his preferred social media platforms for marketing his books…
TRANSCRIPT
MARK: Marketing wise, which platform do you find the most successful for your books?
GB RALPH: I presume you mean, like, social media platform? All sort of have different purposes.
My Instagram is sort of… I’ve inherited friends and family who are very lovely. There’s only so many times you can sell the same book to your friends and family. Then Facebook. I’ve picked up a lot of readers who I wouldn’t have expected. TikTok was really fun. It comes in waves where I get enthusiasm to do some videos and then it drops off again. But that is… because TikTok shows your stuff to a lot of people who don’t follow you. So I think that has been really interesting to pick up people who’ve never heard of me because my videos have been shown to them or whereas on the other platforms a lot of it is your stuff getting shown to a subset of your own followers who already know you. I don’t know. Probably the most engagement is through my mailing list actually, because that’s the most reliable. It gets sent out and I can see roughly how many people open it. That’s where it starts. And then it’s sort of like, okay, I have the content now, I need to now I can recycle that to the social medias.
This month’s special guest GB Ralph reveals when he’s ready to start writing a draft…
TRANSCRIPT
MARK: What’s the thing that makes you think you’re ready to start writing on a project?
GB RALPH: When I back-calculate from my deadline and find that I’m already behind schedule. (laughs) I don’t know, where is even the start line? Is it jotting down ideas, sketching them out? Plotting? Is it start writing, ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’? I’m ready to start drafting my next book now. Like, as in, chapter one, scene one as of this week. I have a victim. I have a handful of suspects, each with their potential motives, and that’s about it. But I have I have about two novels’ worth of content and that I want to fit into one novel. So we’re bursting at the seams, and I need to start writing to see what ideas are actually smaller than I thought they were. Ones that don’t fit in at all. Ones that are maybe bigger than I had originally thought and will spark more ideas.
Or watch the whole show on Youtube…
I’ve done a fair few podcast interviews, but I’m in a strangely reflective mood in this one. I’m interviewed by the excellent Chris Deacy, and in lieu of finding a studio to record in we did this in my car (hence the occasional gentle whoosh of passing motors) and it was recorded the night before the US election. My favourite bit is my thesis that nostalgia is a slippery slope to fascism… Yes, I was in one of those moods! Do please enjoy…
This month’s special guest GB Ralph reveals the importance of deadlines, and why he sets up a book for pre-order before it’s even written…
TRANSCRIPT
MARK: What small thing has made a big difference to your writing process?
GB RALPH: A small thing that has made a big difference in my creative process is having a deadline. No deadline, nothing happens. Deadline: Let’s go. I work well to a deadline, which is something I learned back in school. But as an indie author, there’s not really such a thing as a deadline, so I had to create one myself, which is… the main one is setting up a preorder for the next book, which forces me to get going through that, don’t you?
MARK: Because if you get that wrong, certain online retailers get very upset with the authors.
GB RALPH: Oh yeah. I know, I know which is is motivating. It can be stressful, but I think it’s a good kind of stress, the motivating kind, not the debilitating kind. It’s still deadline. It can be a year away, which is forever. And I need to constantly remind myself that I need to make little deadlines along the way. Ones that have consequences. Otherwise, I’ll pull a Douglas Adams and enjoy the wooshing sound as deadlines go by.
This month’s special guest Mike Shackle reveals the importance of deadlines, why releasing each book is like a pay rise, and whether he’ll ever retire…
TRANSCRIPT
MARK: How do you know when you’re done?
MIKE: Deadlines, deadlines. Basically, every time I release a book, I. It’s like giving myself a pay rise each month of $1,500. So, yeah, it starts a big pay rise each each time over a year
and things like that. So if I was being really cynical about my career, I would just be writing
the next detective book and putting out… I had a discussion with this Sebastien de Castell, because he was talking about, you know, when do we know we’re going to retire? I mean, but, I need I know the, the money I like and I need to live on, but I have to make this stuff. I have to tell these stories. Even if it was just me doing it. And that desire to do that is only got greater as the years have gone
on, I probably end up in a loony bin, dribbling in a corner, talking about Simon Wise and, you know, everything else…
MARK: Reserve a space for me…
Or watch it on Youtube…
This month’s special guest Mike Shackle reveals how he knows when to start working on a project…
TRANSCRIPT
MARK: What’s the thing that makes you think you’re ready to start writing on a project?
MIKE: I have lists of ideas that I want to write that go back years. I write a Witchfinder, I write a Michael Dylan book. Right now it’s the Witchfinder. I should be writing a fantasy
for the next couple of months. It’s like a little production line, but I have all these notebooks everywhere with different things that I’m working on, just so I can keep the ideas straight in my head. With the books that I write, my ambitions, and what I want to write. I they push me on and they’re the devil on my back, but they’re also the cheerleader saying, you can do it.
Or watch it on Youtube…
I’m joined by Mike Shackle, author of the epic LAST WAR fantasy trilogy, and he also writes thrillers under the name Michael Dylan: we talk about the perils of writing epic fantasy when publishers are imposing word limits, the pros and cons of self publishing and traditional publishing, writing cop thriller fiction, setting a mission statement for each book, and Michael creating his own artwork!
And we’re also joined by Buddy. Who has a squeaky toy that has an urgent message for the world…
WATCH ON YOUTUBE
LINKS
THE LAST WAR TRILOGY
THE WITCHFINDER CHRONICLES
MICHAEL DYLAN’S DI SIMON WISE THRILLERS
MIKE SHACKLE’S ART
REBECCA MILLAR EDITORIAL
ANDREW CHAPMAN (REMEMBER HIS NAME)
PRIMAL SCREAM: COME AHEAD
FURY OF THE GODS BY JOHN GWYNNE
DAY OF THE JACKAL ON SKY UK
NAUTILUS on Amazon Prime UK
THE PALIN DIARIES 1999-2009
BOBBY DAZZLE
Edit by Kai Newton
Production assistance by Emily Stay
Jingle by Dom Currie
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Mark Stay Writes 