‘People are no longer buying your books’, I was told. ‘They’re just too expensive.’ And I fully understood where they were coming from, for there’s no disputing that Christian books are often not cheap. But I’d hate you to labour under the false impression that authors or publishers are raking in the cash, for nothing could be further from the truth. Put bluntly, the religious book market is facing incredibly tough times, many companies struggling to make ends meet and having to make all kinds of cuts simply to get by. The majority of Christian bookshops across the UK have closed in recent years, leaving just a few soldiering on, and though sales have grown online, many of the older generation are wary of internet shopping or do not have access to it.
For authors, this has been little short of catastrophic. For example, despite my having written over 150 books, my royalties have declined year on year for well over a decade now, dropping to a fifth in 2019 of what they were twenty years ago when I had only four books published! Though I want to keep on writing and posting if possible, I may soon have to call a halt to both, simply because I cannot afford to do otherwise. Given my illness, my priority has to be to provide for my loved ones and to focus on editing, which almost exclusively pays the bills.
Please don’t think I’m touting for sympathy or financial contributions – that’s the last thing intended – but if you’ve valued my books, or found this website helpful, please tell your friends or contacts about them if you think they might be interested in turn. You and they might particularly like to know that, following discussions with Kevin Mayhew Ltd, promotional discounts will shortly be available (each for a limited period) on some of my books via this site. I will be featuring various titles over the weeks ahead, posting extracts from them to give a flavour of their content, and including a code that can be redeemed when purchasing from the Kevin Mayhew website. In the meantime, thank you to everyone who has continued to log in to this site over these past months; your encouragement and support means a lot.