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CONNECTED is a speculative fiction thriller with touches of science and philosophy, which reached No.1 in Amazon UK’s Bestseller lists for both Thrillers and Science Fiction within 5 days of release.

Beginning with the funeral of a renowned classical violinist in a sleepy rural hamlet in the Lake District, a former theoretical physicist tries to make sense of his brother’s suicide. Across the country, a university student, enjoying the unexpected attentions of an enigmatic seductress, is disturbed when his best friend falls to his death from the thirteenth floor of a neighbouring campus tower block.

As each tries to unravel the mystery behind the apparent suicides, they are drawn into an obsessive search for a computer-generated fractal video sequence, with startling effects on human consciousness, and which might just pave the way for discovery of the ultimate Theory of Everything.

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For those of you who may have wondered why I’ve been so quiet for the last year, it’s because I decided to put the writing of my second novel on hold in order to design and build a truly unique international book promotion website for readers, authors and publishers, called Readers in the Know. The rest of this post explains why. When I published Connected back in June 2012, I knew nothing about book marketing but decided to try Amazon’s KDP Select programme and offer my brand new book free for its first 5 days. It took a couple of days to get started, but then, as luck would have it, in spite of having done nothing to promote it but email friends and colleagues, it took off. By the end of day 5, it was on 4500 Kindles (90% of which were in the UK), was No.1 in Amazon UK bestselling free titles for both Thrillers and Science Fiction and in the 3 weeks that followed, sold about 1500 copies at full price. I then tried a bunch of other marketing tactics including Facebook and Goodreads advertising, in the process blowing a good chunk of the profit I had just made, before returning to free and discount promos. Soon I discovered about a hundred websites (mostly US focused) with the sole purpose of promoting such book promos. Some were paid and some were free, although most of the apparent free ones only tended to guarantee your listing if you paid some nominal fee each time. I subsequently found that...

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The image of visiting aliens as ruthless invaders hell-bent on destroying mankind in order to colonise our little blue planet for themselves, may be good for the Hollywood box-office, but how likely is it to reflect reality? The deeper we delve into the cosmos, the more likely it appears that we not alone. Even if bio-genesis – the appearance of life from non-living chemical components – is a mind-numbingly rare event, the Universe is so vast, and the numbers of potential star systems so large, that even the slimmest odds could result in millions of occurrences. Of course, even assuming they’re out there, there’s no guarantee they’ll come knocking at our door. For this to happen, they would not only need to have evolved enough intelligence to have mastered interstellar travel, but would need to have done so in a part of the Universe not too distant from our own (unless faster-than-light travel is one day found to be possible). We know that it in our case it took 3.5 Billion years for life to evolve to the point of starting to explore the cosmos and although we’re not quite there yet, we’re probably not more than a few hundred years or so from achieving interstellar travel. So back to the original question: Is ET likely to be friendly or hostile? Back in 2010, Stephen Hawking, in a series he did for the Discovery Channel, said, “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to...

I’m not sure whether there are more strange things happening down here in Cornwall than in the rest of the country, or whether I’m just noticing more of them since moving down here a few months ago. Either way, my local on-line rag, the Falmouth Packet, while rarely covering events of earth-shattering significance, is often an amusing source of the bizarre. This morning for instance, the following headline caught my eye: Falmouth man who drove into River Fowey has ‘no idea’ why From reading the story, at least part of the reason seems likely to have involved alcohol, a theory strengthened by his subsequent refusal to furnish a blood sample upon being admitted to hospital. However, this once again got me thinking about the whole knotty problem of Free Will and why it probably doesn’t exist – at least not in the sense that most of us feel it does. We’ve all been there, in childhood at least if not more recently. We’ve all suffered the shame of being asked why we did some unfathomably stupid thing and then finding it hard to respond with anything better than an, “I don’t know.”  As parents, some of us may have asked the same question to our own children, perhaps followed by, “but you must know why you did it!” After all, are we not the conscious authors of our own actions? Intuitively, it feels as though we are, and yet an ever-increasing weight of  evidence from studies in both psychology and neuroscience, seems to indicate that this...

Following my post a couple of weeks ago about the recording process for the audio book version of Connected, I am delighted to announce that the finished product is now available for purchase: Download from Audible.com Download from Audible.co.uk 9 CD box set from Cherry Hill Publishing And very soon as an MP3 CD

The recent case of Edward Snowden and his leaking of top-secret government information relating to NSA snooping project, PRISM, has come at an interesting time for me, since the collision of ethics and morality is becoming an important topic for a new novel I am writing. There are no doubt many important questions raised by this case, but I’m going to focus on just two: Under what circumstances, if any, is it ever right to whistle-blow? Was Snowden right in this particular case? Most of us try to live according to certain moral principles and the philosophy of how we do this is referred to as ethics. The two terms, while closely related, have subtly different meanings: morality usually referring to an individual’s fundamental sense of right and wrong, whereas ethics are rules of conduct defined by an organisation or society. In my opinion, the dilemma of whistle-blowing occurs when ethics and morality collide. As an employee, we are bound by codes of ethics which forbid the leaking of confidential information. Yet sometimes our own moral compass may lead us to believe that the violation of such codes may be justified. But how can we reliably know when this is the case? For every whistle-blower, there are inevitably, many more employees who remain loyal to their employer. Now we could argue that such loyalty is misplaced, or that it’s fear of consequences rather than loyalty that keeps them quiet, but there must also certainly be a number for whom whistle-blowing appears not only unethical, but...

 CLICK HERE to hear the title opening of CONNECTED, the Audio Book When the nice people at Cherry Hill Publishing approached me last year, asking if they could publish an audio book version of Connected, I had little experience of this rich and rapidly growing format, or what the publication process would entail. So when given the choice of letting them choose an actor to narrate my book, or reading it myself, I decided to give it a go. How hard could it be? I thought. Throughout my career in IT, I’d done a fair bit of public speaking and have several times recorded the narration to on-line product demonstrations. Besides, I used to read to my daughters when they were little and they never complained (except when it was bed-time and they wanted me to continue). So I signed both author and narrator contracts, and a few days later took delivery of all the necessary professional recording gear (see photo above), all courtesy of Cherry Hill Publishing. Unfortunately, the quality of the microphone was so good, I soon realised that any recording made in the city apartment I was inhabiting at the time, would inevitably contain  traffic noise. And since this noise, while not especially loud, was changing and unpredictable, it proved impossible to completely filter out electronically. This, combined with the premature birth of our twins, and our subsequent move from Birmingham to Falmouth in March this year, all conspired to postpone the start of recording until around May. Now of course, although our new location in...

Prior to 2008, I had visited Turkey only twice, and both times for business events in Istanbul – the kind of events where sleeping, eating, partying… and of course a little business too… is all conducted within the walls of the same opulent yet generically international hotel. Then in 2008, I met the woman who was to become my wife, and so began a love-affair (well, two I suppose) and a certain fascination with the city and country in which she had been born and raised. As an Englishman of a certain age, I’m ashamed to admit that prior to this, one of the most enduring associations I had with Turkey was that of Turkish Delight – and not even the real stuff – the sickly sweet, chocolate covered version sold and advertised in the UK with beguiling yet grossly misleading TV ads such as this one from the early eighties. Over the last five years however, I have come to know and love Turkey as a country teetering on a knife-edge between tradition and modernity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Istanbul, a vibrant, colourful, yet chaotic city, heaving with over 15 million inhabitants, many of whom spend hours each day commuting between the continents of Asia and Europe across the mighty Bosphorus which, like a glistening scimitar, cleaves the populous in two. Istanbul is a city for which my wife feels both pride and frustration, and if the events of the last few days are anything to go by, it would seem these feelings are shared...

For some time now, the self-publishing world has been buzzing with word of a new promotional vehicle, the Blog Tour. To understand exactly what this is and how it works, I decided to take part in one – not my own, but that of US Author, Elizabeth Rose, who has organised one to promote her upcoming novel, When the Last Petal Falls. On this stop of the tour, Elizabeth has kindly agreed to answer a few questions about the tour itself, blogging, and of course her book. So Elizabeth, I must admit this concept is new to me. What exactly is a blog tour and how does it work? A blog tour is essentially an online book tour. The different ‘blogs’ agree to host something different from the author (i.e. interviews, guest blogs, excerpts) that deal with the topic of the blog itself. The author gives the hosts the material, and the hosts post the material- an online version of having an author come into a business or store. Tell me about the new book you’re releasing and why you chose this blog tour as a launch vehicle. My new book, ‘Till the Last Petal Falls, is my first woman’s fiction novel. It’s a modern re-telling of Beauty and the Beast sans magic, in an attempt to use a classic story to re-tell the story of one of the most pressing woman’s issue today- that of domestic violence. This blog tour is an attempt to reach out to readers who are already following blogs that...