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

For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it.

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

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

The hard fact is that writing is available to readers because of market factors as much as particular writing talent.

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.

Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre.

Bookshops are at the coalface of our industry.

Digital distribution has widened the reading world.