SJI Holiday- Do you really need a writers’ platform?What is a Writers’ Platform? If you search online, you’ll find several definitions, some more complicated than others. But in basic terms, it is a group of things that you do to get your name noticed...
ON EDITING AND BEING EDITED – Natasha CooperLooking back to my years in publishing, I sometimes wonder that I survived without feeling the blade of an axe in my head I knew my authors hated being edited nearly as much as I hated being caught be...
The Debut Dagger Dream – SJI HollidayYou know what it’s like… you spend years working on bits of novels, maybe some short stories, maybe you even finish a novel but it’s so bad you let it disappear into a file on your computer that you k...
A single event on a summer’s day, way back in 1975, changed my life for ever. I was fifteen and living in Melbourne, Australia, where my parents and I had emigrated the year before. I was kickin...
CWA Dagger in the LibraryEleven authors have been longlisted for the CWA 2015 Dagger in the Library award, thanks to your votes. The longlist was compiled by YOU right and we’re thrilled that so many of you stopped by to vote...
CrimeFest and the CWA Diamond DaggerThe CWA is excited to announce that the 2015 Diamond Dagger recipient Catherine Aird will be doing a series of appearances at this year’s Crime Fest. The acclaimed author, who follows in the footsteps...
I’d always toyed with the idea of writing a book set in my hometown. Haddington, East Lothian is reasonably small. The population ripples around 9,000, but it always felt like much, much less. It’s an...
When The Dust Settles – Jason FossEvery other Tuesday we feature a publication from leading independent publisher Endeavour Press. When The Dust Settles- Jason Foss When the young archaeologist Maddy Crowe is drafted in to work as cos...
SJI Holliday -From Crime Reader to Crime Writer: How I Got HereOne of the first things I did when I got my book deal was to join the CWA, so it’s a great honour for me to be writing here as May’s author of the month. I’m still very much one of t...
Thanks and WelcomeA massive thanks to our Featured Author for April- John Bayliss. We had four great posts from him. Hidden In Plain Sight The Butler Did It The Mystery of the Locked Room Mystery Lights, Camera, Write...
Case Files (Issue 14) is out nowCase Files Issue 14 is now available. To sign up for your copy please follow the link below. http://www.thecra.co.uk/join-the-cra/ You will be added on our mailing list and will receive a weekly email...
I’ve written throughout my working life. For many years it was non-fiction; scripts for training videos, committee papers, research reports and community development guides. Then I emigrated to Irelan...
Mark was born in 1953 and grew up in Swansea. After studying law at Cambridge and being called to the Bar, he embarked on a roller-coaster business career which culminated with him being a foun...
You know the situation. You can’t find your keys. You look everywhere for them: in drawers, in cupboards, in the pockets of the jacket you were wearing three days ago, in the cat basket, at the bottom...
Despite the phrase ‘the butler did it’ being such a well worn cliché, there appear to be remarkably few cases of murderous butlers in the whole corpus of crime fiction—not even from the Golden Age, wh...
We’ve all read them. We’ve all (hopefully) been mystified by them, too—those crime stories where how the crime was committed is as much of a puzzle as who committed it. They’re generally called ‘Locke...
Matthew Pritchard – Why Write Crime Fiction?Like most novelists, I write because I love to read. But when I first tried to set pen to paper, this posed me something of a problem. What was I going to write? After all, I loved to read everything:...
Sherlock Holmes & The Holborn Emporium – Val AndrewsEvery other Tuesday we feature a publication from leading independent publisher Endeavour Press. Sherlock Holmes & The Holborn Emporium – Val Andrews Get your free Kindle Edition toda...
If someone trained a camera on me whilst I was writing, I suspect that the results would not be as dull as you might expect. I don’t mean the typing part (which is dull), but the fact is that hammerin...
Every writer I know talks about Revisions. After submitting a book to an agent or publisher (and after a nail-biting wait (Do they like it?)), the response comes back in an email report outlining sugg...
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