The dirty little secret of publishing is that, all along, each book sold has had an average of 5 readers. That's an 80% "piracy" rate if you insist on looking at it in those terms.

I began my first novel when I was 15. It went through three drafts, of around 40,000 words each. If I find it, I'll burn it.

If an idea is compelling enough it'll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it's forgettable, who cares?

I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.

Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians".

Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.

I was Computer Shopper's linux columnist for more than half a decade, from the late 90s onwards. Yes, I know about Linux. (My first review of a Linux distro in the press was published in late 1996.)