A beginners guide to successful writing and publishing.

Asked to name their ideal job, more people in the UK say they would like to be an author than anything else. Yet with more than 200,000 books now being published here a year and over two million worldwide, the competition is getting fiercer by the minute. As editor in chief of a successful self-publishing house, Chris Newton spends most of his waking hours editing and ghostwriting books for other people, and he knows all about how books can go wrong and how they can be put right. He is also a successful published author, one of his books having been acclaimed by a professional reviewer as having ‘a good claim to be the finest biography of an angler ever written’.
 
Author Chris Newton worked as a newspaper and radio reporter in his youth before embarking on a career in media relations, becoming a director of a leading PR consultancy. His lifelong passion for the written word soon led to a specialisation in writing and editing books. Chris’ biography of a celebrated angling writer and wildlife broadcaster, Hugh Falkus – A Life On The Edge (Medlar Press 2007) was widely acclaimed by the national press and described by one reviewer as having ‘a good claim to be the finest biography of an angler anyone has ever written’. Since 2009 he has been Editor in Chief at Mereo Books, where he has edited or ghost written everything from literary novels, autobiographies and short stories to recipe books and how-to-do-it guides.