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
Join me live with author LJ SHEPHERD on Friday 20th September.
Join me live with author LJ SHEPHERD on Friday 20th September
LJ Shepherd is author of the stunning debut novel THE TRIALS OF LILA DALTON, which has…
Merry Christmas! That’s if you celebrate, if not then Happy Monday! Mondays have been ‘New Podcast Day’ for the last seven and a bit years, and today marks the release of my last ever episode of The Bestseller Experiment as co-presenter. Why am I leaving? I explain myself in full here. And rest assured that this isn’t the end of the podcast: Mr D will continue and it’s going to be amazing.
What will I be up to in the meantime? Well, stand by for an update in the New Year. Until then, here’s our special Christmas episode where I share some of my favourite moments, outtakes, and we get a visit from a very special elf…
Can’t think of a better author to wrap up 2023 on the Bestseller Experiment with than Mike Gayle. He’s celebrating 25 years of his amazing debut novel My Legendary Girlfriend and he’s got a new one out, A Song of Me and You. We chat about keeping warm in the winter (we’re middle aged writers, so this is relevant!), how to make unlikeable characters engaging, and the really important lesson he learned from being the agony uncle for the teen magazine Bliss in the 90s…
As if getting notes from an editor wasn’t stressful enough, this week’s podcast guest Jake Lamar recounts a time when he got his edit notes while recovering from a heart operation in an intensive care unit. He tells me that during recovery he found that writing was ‘Even more of a solace.’ And he’s right. Even as I’m typing this I’ve just had some notes come through on a project, and while it make me groan and think, ‘Here we go again…’ this thing we do is still better than spending a fortune commuting on a delayed train to an office that’s designed to grind me into submission. So I’ll take these notes on the chin and get on with it. It’s a privilege that I’m all too aware of.
We discuss all sorts in this week’s episode, including jazz, making your writing sing, and I recount that time I was in a minibus from London to Manchester with Joe Hill, Joe Abercrombie, Joanne Harris, Brandon Sanderson and more…
Soft Linkage sounds vaguely filthy (or that just might be my warped mind), but it’s a concept that the brilliant Graham Hurley — author of 49 books and counting — came up with when pitching his series of Second World War thrillers to his publisher. They naturally wanted a central character that the reader could follow through the war, but Graham wanted to tell the stories that fascinated him without having to shoehorn the same protagonist into every novel. And it really works. His latest novel, The Blood of Others, is well into the series but anyone could pick it up and if you love WWII thrillers you definitely should.
We also discuss the benefits of long publisher lunches, searching for the Titanic (yes, really) and writing in a genre you’re not a fan of. Full disclosure: I used to sell Graham’s books when I worked at Orion so there’s a little bit of nostalgia in here too. Enjoy!
A surprising number of traditionally-published authors don’t realise that their publisher only owns the rights to their novel for a set period of time. It’s usually five years, and yes there are caveats in contracts meaning that they can retain the rights for longer if the book is still “in print”, and print on demand technology can complicate this arrangement, but… there’s a good chance that one day you’ll get the rights back to your book. It happened recently with me and The End of Magic and opened the door for me to write a sequel.
Fiona Valpy discusses this and much more in this week’s episode of The Bestseller Experiment!
And in the extended version for Academy members and podcast Patrons, me and Mr D discuss reissuing books with new titles, why you should think of your books as lifetime assets, research when you can’t travel, and much more! If you want to support the podcast and keep us going click on this here link.
I first heard of Mira Shah after reading her excellent blog on how to manage the expectations of debut authors (read it here), which ended up on The Bookseller and on pretty much every bit of writers’ social media. She’s spot on when it comes to how the industry is great when it comes to the big deals and ad campaigns, but can be lacking when it comes to the rest of us and how the launch days for our books can be a bit of a damp squib.
We also discuss how her writing came about through grieving, but if all that sounds a bit heavy for a Monday, don’t be put off. Mira is a delight and this is a really uplifting chat…
And at the end of the podcast, I tell Mr D all about my night in London’s glittering King’s Cross where I was honoured to collect our award for Best Books Podcast at the inaugural Independent Podcast Awards. It was an amazing night celebrating the terrific indie podcasts and I’ve added a whole bunch of them to my pod catcher. You can find out more about the award and the evening here.
I did a panel with Michael R Miller at the MCM Comic Con yesterday and was once again struck by how generous he is with his advice. He’s done incredibly well since I met him at an Eastercon a few years ago, selling over 350,000 copies of his fantasy epic, but he’s always been the first to suggest new ideas and strategies for selling books and you would do well to heed his advice! It was great to get him back on the Bestseller Experiment to catch up on what he’s been up to, including getting Broken Binding editions of his books, having a D&D campaign based on his new series, and how he’s taken his experience with cystic fibrosis and used it in his fantasy world building…
And in the extended version for podcast supporters we discuss how you decided if you should write a series, trilogy or standalone, how to launch your audiobooks, and the differences between USA and UK editions of books. You can support the podcast here.
Ivy Ngeow is a powerhouse of creativity. A musician, a novelist and writer of cookery books, diet books, interior design, she’s done it. Her new novel is The American Boyfriend and she talks about how she studied bestsellers before writing it to better understand what makes a smash hit and it’s paid off as she now has an international hit and is signing books at places like Singapore airport!
Then in the extended edition for our Academy members and Patreon supporters, me and Mr D discuss the different routes to market for your novels, including airports, supermarkets and gift boxes and loot crates! You can support the podcast and get hundreds of hours of extra material here.
Mark Stay Writes 