The Hobcast Book Show

Our guests on The Hobcast Bookshow this week have inspired thousands of people to become writers. Sam and Barry Hall combine their day jobs with running Wordsmithery , an independent literary arts organisation and publisher in the Medway area of Kent. Wordsmithery was founded with the aim of encouraging more people to get into writing and reading, and to work on interesting literary projects with...

Just ten minutes a day could make a huge difference to your writing productivity. That's the message from our guest this week, author, ghost-writer and book coach Nicole Johnston . Using that time to write, without self-editing, can help authors through writer's block she says, with the added benefit of increasing your overall creativity. Nicole has coached dozens of authors to overcome their writ...

This week is a departure for  The Hobcast Book Show,  as we focus on poetry with our guest Susan Darlington. Speaking to us from her home in Leeds, we learn how nature inspires her poetry, and Susan shares her love of the challenge verse demands, especially choosing the optimum words to express the themes she wants to explore. Susan has published three collections of her work to date , and is a re...

Are you a plotter or a pantser? It's arguably the question we ask most often on  The Hobcast Book Show  of our guests. This week we speak to an author who takes pantsing, or if you're being more politically correct, discovery writing to new levels. Abigail Osborne says the only way she can approach her craft is to write as her mood dictates, and jumps around the timeline of her stories as a result...

There are few cities, if any, that rival London for their literary impact, and whilst the grime of Dicken's London, or the elegant squares of Bloomsbury are celebrated as literary locations, there's one borough that can justifiably claim to match all others - Clapham. As our guest this week, author Julie Anderson explains, Clapham has been home to some of the most celebrated British authors, such...

We're delighted to focus on another debut author this week on  The Hobcast Book Show.   Caileen Steed 's first novel,  Home ,  a dark tale of a woman escaping the pernicious grip of a cult, has been showered with critical praise. Heat  magazine calls it "highly engrossing," and The Scots Magazine says Home  is "masterfully written, both enthralling and disturbing in equal terms." Praise indeed. So...

The  Hobcast Book Show  team would happily describe themselves as 'pantsers' when it comes to writing. Perhaps the politer and more politically correct term would be 'discovery writers,' exploring our muse and seeing where the story goes. That's not to say we don't envy authors who have the ability to map out their plots and story beats before they commit to a first draft. Perhaps a recently devel...

It's no surprise to us at  The Hobcast Book Show  that thrillers remain one of the most enduring and successful genres in fiction. Sharing the danger with our heroes is one of the key elements that attract readers, especially when the author is writing from experience to back up their creative imagination. Our guest this week, David Beckler , knows all about the courage and camaraderie that helps...

One of the joys of writing is using every experience you have to feed your creativity. That's certainly the belief of our guest this week, journalist and crime-author Anne Coates . She has vast experience to draw on too from her career as a journalist in some of the UK's most popular magazine titles, and as an editor for Reader's Digest. As she tells us, that's armed her with some valuable knowled...

Happy New Year! We start 2023 with our guest, UK drama and suspense author J M Simpson , whose Castleby series of suspense novels has built a loyal following recently. Castleby is loosely based on the Pembrokeshire resort of Tenby, but Jo draws widely on her upbringing in Devon and Cornwall to embellish the seaside setting. As she admits, the fictional town has taken on a life of its own.  Also th...

We often take a trip to the dark side on  The Hobcast Book Show.  It comes with the territory of being crime publishers after all. But this week's episode is darker than most, as we meet Sally-Anne Martyn who admits to developing a love and fascination of horror and the paranormal from childhood. It's that background that fueled her debut novel for Joffe Books, The Clinic   which was published in...

The Hobcast Book Show has been on its travels again, braving snow and fog to attend Halifax Noir at the invitation of our former guests and great friends, R C Bridgestock . It was a chance to talk all things crime and books, and take a realistic look at the state of the UK publishing market as we approach Christmas. We also caught up with Matthew Smith , who recently made the switch from publisher...

Well, we made it! Welcome to the 100th episode of  The Hobcast Book Show!  This week is a celebratory show, complete with a fabulous interview with one of the UK's most celebrated crime authors, Elly Griffiths . Elly has written almost 30 novels, including 15 in the brilliant Ruth Galloway series set in Norfolk. Her most recent novel,  Bleeding Heart Yard  is the third in her Harbinder Kaur series...

When four of our previous guests all paid tribute to the same person, we knew we had to speak to them on  The Hobcast Book Show.  Rebecca Millar has edited the work of a huge range of authors including Simon McLeave , Lucy Hooft , Morgan Greene and Cat Yaffe . Starting her career within both indie and traditional companies, a move to Australia forced Rebecca to become freelance. It was a challengi...

Our guest this week, Lucy Hooft , wins our unofficial award for being our most remote guest yet. She joined us from the tiny coastal town of Luderitz in Namibia, where it rains just 17 days a year on average, and a shopping trip can involve a 260-mile round trip for the basics. But adventure and challenges are no stranger to Lucy and her husband Daniel. They met in the Georgia, and the Caucasus pr...

The Hobcast Book Show had the delightful opportunity to attend the book launch for  The Confession   by Hobeck Books author, Maureen Myant in Glasgow this week. Believe it or not, it's the first time we've attended a physical book launch since we launched the company. The novel is a fantastically twisty noirish thriller with a great premise: Julie Campbell's decaying body is discovered with a note...

We've met many remarkable people over the past three years since we decided to set up Hobeck Books, but few are as inspiring as our guest this week, Cat Yaffe . We discovered each other online, and then met in person at Crimefest '22 in Bristol last May. It was Cat's first public foray during her battle with breast cancer, and as she explains to us, the period since that first meeting has been a p...

Kate Mosse is one of the UK's most celebrated authors. Her  Languedoc Trilogy  of novels which began with the multi-million selling  Labyrinth   brought her worldwide recognition, but she was a hugely influential figure in publishing before that, co-founding The Women's Prize for Fiction, now entering its 28th year and recognised as one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world. Kate is...

There's nothing more satisfying than attending a literary event and making connections with fellow travelers in the publishing industry. We met Greg Mosse at the recent  Fatal Shore  event in Shoreham near Brighton and immediately established a great rapport. Greg's contributions to two panels that day were full of insight and wisdom about what makes a great story, and Rebecca and I made copious n...

It's a bit of a departure for us on The Hobcast Bookshow as we delve into the world of comics and graphic storytelling. Charles Martin set up Literati Press in 2010 with aim of creating a home for Oklohoma's burgeoning comic book artists and writers. He admits it took several years and many mistakes before he and his team found their true path as a business, but this is a story of creative perseve...

Regular listeners to  The Hobcast Bookshow  will know that the art of audiobook narration is something close to Adrian's heart. He's not shy in sharing his views on what a narrator needs from an author to make the process easier, but is he speaking for others? Our guest this week is Greg Patmore , a British actor and hugely experienced and successful audiobook narrator. What are the challenges he...

Our guests this week on  The Hobcast Bookshow  are Bob and Carol Bridgestock. The husband-and-wife writing team have established themselves as two of the UK's best police procedural authors - writing under the pen name, R C Bridgestock . Bob draws heavily on his experiences as detective, retiring at the rank of Detective Superintendent in West Yorkshire Police. Carol was a civilian employee of WYP...

Eastenders, Emmerdale, Eldorado, Pobol Y Cwm, The Bill, Vera  and  Casualty.  If you check out our guest Rob Gittins ' credit list on IMDB you will be dazzled by the scale and variety of it. A winner of multiple awards for his work both on TV and radio, Rob is also the author of seven novels. His latest,  I'm Not There  is published by us at Hobeck Books this week. It's a brilliant novel that deal...

The events of the past week overshadow this episode of  The Hobcast Book Show.  We conducted our interview with our guest, Catherine Yardley , the day before the passing of Her Majesty the Queen on Thursday 8th September, but recorded the rest of the podcast on Saturday 10th, not long after our new king, Charles III, was officially proclaimed our new monarch. For this reason, the show has a differ...

Our guest this week on  The Hobcast Book Show  has an amazing story to tell. Several, in fact. Amy Le escaped from Vietnam as the war ended with the collapse of the South. She was just a few months old. Taken in by the United States, they fought hard to establish a new life, with Amy's mother pushing her daughter hard to achieve a better life through education and hard work. When her mother passed...