I'm a big fan of a series of podcasts called The Bestseller Experiment. They are two guys called Mark Stay and Mark Desvaux, who are trying to write, publish and market a bestseller in a year. They've been interviewing authors, editors, agents and all sorts of interesting people giving great advice. Because of them I read John Yorke's Into The Woods and that completely changed the way I write. I revamped my new book because of that and wrote an outline/spine that has made writing it so much easier (something I've never been able to do before.)

Two weeks ago, they interviewed Mark Dawson, an Amazon best-selling author, and during the podcast, they suggested if you had a book you were proud of, then maybe dust it off and publish it. Now I'm super proud of SWITCH/BLADE. It got me an agent, it nearly got me a three book deal with a major publisher but it didn't happen. But they got me thinking "why not put it out there?". I had nothing to lose. The book was written/edited/finished. So I did.

Sales are slow but I got three five star reviews and people are reading it. That's wild in itself. People out in the world are reading my book. Amazon's very cool too as you can see how many pages people on Kindle Unlimited are getting through. One day, 400 pages of the book were read! Did someone devour SWITCH/BLADE in one day?

Plus there's movie interest. I'm trying to write the screenplay now.

Plus I'm 78,000 words into the new book. So yes, I'm well and truly into the Bestseller Experiment.

when I write a book, I'll design fake book covers to help keep me motivated during the long days tapping away at the keyboard. It helps make the book feel real to me. I steal images from everywhere. The one below has a background from Blade Runner, the body of Kate Beckinsale from Total Reacall and the head of Zhang Ziyi.

SWITCH/BLADE has been on sale for 4 days. There have been some sales and each one is a thrill if I'm honest. I'm trying to work out how to promote the book. I've built this site and got on twitter but, if I'm honest, twitter just seems to be a bunch of self-published authors tweeting each other!

However, I've had interest in a design school visualising the book. This sounds so cool as I have no idea where they will go with it. There's also movie interest so I'm trying to write a script at the moment...

Available now on Amazon. SWITCH/BLADE is a roller coaster ride through 23rd Century Hong Kong as Choi Ziyi battles to save the life of the heir to the Chinese Empire. It's Run Lola Run meets Ghost In The Shell with a soundtrack by Kasabian.

Inspired by my time living in Hong Kong and Beijing and a few worrying newspaper headlines, it asks the age old question of "who do you trust when no one is who they seem?"