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I was never writing for commercial success. It's nice that it has come, but it is not important.

No, my publisher has always done the marketing.

If it weren't for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn't have any ideas at all.

It's not like publishing is perfect. Far from it. The industry is struggling to adapt and survive, and it's incredibly frustrating trying to break in.

I think it would be a good thing in the creative community if there was less embarrassment of this word 'commercial' because that's how you make a business.

I write literary, not commercial, fiction - or so I've been told by my publishers who are proud I write literary fiction but secretly wish I wrote commercial.

As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.

It seemed to me that I could write commercial fiction. I wasn't sure whether I could, or whether I wanted to write serious fiction at that point. So I said, 'Let me try something else,' and I wrote a mystery - but I didn't know much about it.

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

We try some really interesting things besides being outright commercial.