Abomination

I finished working through the copy edits for THE CHILD THIEF several days ago and, since then, I've finished editing a novel which I'm not going to tell you about – yet. So now I'm at the stage where I'm thinking about what I'm going to write next. Well, I say that, but I've actually been thinking about it for quite a while now – the next novel is always skulking around in a dark corner of my mind, feeding on the woodlice and the dust mites, getting bigger and bigger.

In the meantime, the Frankfurt Book Fair is now in full swing and I, like so many other authors, am nervously wondering if my publisher will manage to stir up a good amount of interest in my books. Those foreign rights sales are important, and it's a funny old time for publishing at the moment – and by 'funny' I actually mean 'scary'. Traditional publishing is being beseiged by the ever-growing boom of the self-published e-book and by the ever-growing dominance of Amazon. Already Amazon has stood toe-to-toe with publishers and demanded cut prices and all the rest of it, but now they've got their new hardware. And very desireable it is, too. Seems to me that with the Kindle Fire and the iPad, the world of music and books is becoming more about the delivery system than it is about the actual content.

They'll be putting the two together next – books with integrated music. Imagine that abomination.

God help us all.