Two of the questions I most frequently get asked when I’m talking to people about my books are, “How long did it take you to write?” and “How long have you been writing?”

Neither question has a straightforward answer.

I have always loved books. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t. I learned to read at the age of 4, romped my way through Janet and John and discovered Enid Blyton thanks to Noddy and Big Ears. I spent my childhood in the company of the Famous Five (and numerous heart-rending tales of brave and extraordinary dogs, horses, otters and other creatures.) From the age of 7, I was scribbling in exercise books the somewhat prosaic adventures of my teddy bear or the family dog.

I requested Lord of the Rings as my school prize for achieving good results in my ‘A’ levels. I remember spending one Easter holiday reading it cover-to-cover to a soundtrack of Andrew Cronshaw playing Breton folk tunes on the electric zither - I think the album is called ‘Earthed in Cloud Valley’. The music, much of it inspired by Breton tales of Arthur and Merlin, and Tolkein’s vividly imagined world of Middle Earth, left pictures in my mind. Over the subsequent years of life and experience, those pictures became my own imagined world of Shehaios, the Fair Land.

So while in one sense I started writing Cloak of Magic in 2000, in another I started it some time around 1972.

At that time, as a teenager growing up in Croydon (a town that may have become familiar to many in recent days for all the wrong reasons), my favourite haunt was a bookshop in the newly-opened Whitgift Centre shopping mall. I think it was called Webster’s, and to me it was like an Aladdin’s cave. I used to just like going in there to browse if I couldn’t afford to actually buy a book. It was set over two whole floors, all given over to books. Magic. I even went in and asked them if there were any jobs going the summer I left school.

Webster’s is long gone, but if I’m remembering its location correctly, Waterstone’s occupies the same unit in the Whitgift Centre today. It is also an Aladdin’s cave, two floors of books. It’s staffed by young people (everyone looks young to me these days) who love books.

On Saturday, I was there signing books and chatting to lots of lovely people - several of whom bought books - about my imagined history of the imagined world. I’m sure I’m not the only author who would say, that is what success means. It’s not about the number of books I’ve sold, or the amount of money I (haven’t!) made, or about what some opinionated know-nothing says about my books. Its about being able to share my pleasure in creating stories with others.

If the publishing industry is to find its way out of the celebrity-driven, pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap nonsense that is bringing it to its knees, its executives need to understand the true value of books to those who cherish the power of the written word to conjure up pictures in the mind. It needs to be looking after book-lovers everywhere. Those who write them. Those who read them. And all the hard-working, book-loving staff trying to breath life into bookshops that are being suffocated by the dead hand of corporate incompetence.

Technology changes the game and the economics, but there is still something special about real books. There is something even more special about storytellers being able to connect directly with their audience. Just as music is increasingly about live performance, there is still a role for a place where books and people can be in the same space at the same time. A place to share the joy of writing and make stories come to life. With libraries and bookshops both under threat from the money-men’s woeful mismanagement of the cultural heritage that constitutes the real wealth of this country, I hope there will continue to be such places in the future.