My blogs

  • Cheating the reader – by Matt Johnson

    Back in the traditional days of publishing, many writers viewed self-publishing as the option of last resort. To an extent, self-published authors were unfairly regarded as second-rate because they couldn’t find an agent or sell their book to a big publisher. They were ridiculed as “vanity” authors. We don’t hear much of that anymore. Self-publishing… Read more

  • Matt Johnson on ‘Getting noticed’, the seedy side of social media

    As an indie author, getting noticed amongst the huge pool of talent that exists in the social media world is an incredible challenge. If there were an easy way, we would all be doing it. Only yesterday, I read a tweet from a fellow independent author asking to people to do an ‘exchange review’ with… Read more

  • Humour in age

    Yesterday my daughter e-mailed me again asking why I didn’t do something useful with my time. Like sitting at home writing a book is not a good thing. Talking about my “doing something useful” seems to be her favourite topic of conversation. She was “only thinking of me” and even suggested I go down to… Read more

  • Matt Johnson on ‘Writing a sequel – Second Novel Syndrome’

      Stephen Fry put forward an interesting theory about second book syndrome. “The problem with a second novel is that it takes almost no time to write compared with a first novel. “If I write my first novel in a month at the age of 23, and my second novel takes me two years, which… Read more

  • Twitter interview with Fraser from @Feedmyreads

    With my focus on writing the sequel to Wicked Game and keeping the marketing plan going, it’s sometimes difficult to find the time to sit down and complete written interviews. Add to this, recent exciting developments that resulted in me signing up with Literary Agents Watson Little and, as I am sure you can imagine,… Read more

  • What is SEO?

    SEO is a term that caused me some confusion. As an acronym, it means different things to different people. To me, SEO stands for Senior Executive Officer. So, when I was contacted recently by Sue Duncan and offered some advice about my SEO, I was initially a bit puzzled. I was also interested enough to… Read more