I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. That's not to say that graphic violence does not exist. It's just that I find it quite harrowing and I much prefer if it isn't completely outlined for me because my imagination can do that.

Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.

As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too.

Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content.

We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.

I am completely unflustered by whichever medium people choose to read my words. I'm just delighted they're reading them at all!

History was my favourite subject at school and in my spare time I read historical novels voraciously from Heidi to the Scarlet Pimpernel and from Georgette Heyer to Agatha Christie.

I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there.

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.