Writers' careers

When I started writing my current novel, Paris Never Leaves You, I had no idea the protagonist, a young widow struggling to survive in Occupied Paris, would end up working in a New York publishing house. I knew she would get to America, but I assumed she would enter the fashion or beauty business as had many of the émigrés I'd known or read about who fled Europe after World War II.  Read more

For any author, being able to describe yourself as a bona fide bestseller is key to conferring your career with a certain gravitas - and will often bring you even more sales. In the UK, while most book charts are tallied by Nielsen BookScan, the Sunday Times bestseller list - like the New York Times chart in the US - has become the gold standard.  Read more

James Patterson introduces a mystifying new character into his Maximum Ride universe in Hawk, a YA novel he wrote with Gabrielle Charbonnet, out this month from Little, Brown's Jimmy Patterson imprint. The original nine-book Maximum Ride series, published between 2005 and 2015, has sold more than 13 million copies.

As lockdown eases around the world, George RR Martin has revealed he is currently isolating in "an actual cabin in the mountains" and hopes to finish his long-awaited fantasy novel The Winds of Winter "next year".

The publishing industry is stilted and archaic. I worked in it for seven years, and left due to reasons I can't legally talk about. Though, in that time, I was able to enforce and oversee some steps towards sustainable change. At 4th Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins, I started the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story prize (still going strong, five years later).  Read more