Q&A: bestselling novelist John Connolly

You published your first book, mystery novel Every Dead Thing, in 1999. How do you think publishing has changed since then?

Well, obviously it's contracted, at least as far as the larger publishers are concerned. I can recall Every Dead Thing attracting interest from four different publishers when it came down to the final auction. Three of those publishers are now under the Hachette roof, including Hodder & Stoughton, with whom I've remained since my debut. EbooksDigital bookstore selling wide range of ebooks in 50 categories from Hildegard of Bingen to How to Write a Dirty Story and showing how the range of ebooks available is growing. weren't an issue in 1999, Amazon wasn%u2019t the force it is now, and self-publishing tended to be the last refuge of the desperate rather than a community in and of itself. It seemed like a less complicated time, but it probably wasn't.

Similarly, on the trade side, we had Borders, Blackwell's, Dillons and more, alongside Waterstones, but now it's largely come down to Waterstones - which endures, thankfully - and the independents. There was a period when I was very fearful for the trade, at least when it came to brick-and-mortar bookshops and physical books, but we seem to have come through that.