1: Your web presence by which you communicate with fans is more extensive than most. Does this level of interaction with your audience feed into your writing?

2: Does the fact that your work is considered 'speculative fiction' limit its audience any? Are you writing for the masses or for a select few?

3: Does being the 'Thursday Next guy' make it difficult to break out into other projects?

4: Since your second book, you've been pretty much writing 'under contract'. How does this compare to writing the first one?

5: What's Swindon got that Slough hasn't got?






1: Your web presence by which you communicate with fans is more extensive than most. Does this level of interaction with your audience feed into your writing?

I'm not sure my website is really much of a communication medium in truth - aside from the forum which I scan through every now and again (mostly for obscenties or spam), the level of two-way communication is limited to the 'reader's contribution' page which hasn't seen many additions recently. I tend not to think too much about what people think when it comes to book expectation. I'm very concious of the unspoken contract between reader and writer - you give me your hard-earned money and in return I agree to entertain - but I don't try and harvest my readers for ideas or anything unless it is something specific that I need to know, such as whether the 'happy families' game is known in the US, or something like that. I want to deliver the goods, of course, but I t end to regard my website as 'after sales service' for readers who only see a new Fforde book every year, and might want some Fforde-based tomfoolery in between. Where the website does help me is that I often use it as an 'R&D' lab for ideas - the 'Hamlet' and 'Pete and Dave's' page both helped me to figure out the context of the ideas and how they fit intoThursday's world.

2: Does the fact that your work is considered 'speculative fiction' limit its audience any? Are you writing for the masses or for a select few?

I didn't know that my work is considered 'speculative fiction'. I tend to think of it as fiction, pure and simple - I write the books and make them as good as I can to appeal to the broadest range of readers - it's up to others to mark out the labels.

3: Does being the 'Thursday Next guy' make it difficult to break out into other projects?

Not at all. I had a new series out this year and am working on several new projects, only one of them a new Thursday Next book. It's an exciting time for me as a semi-established author; established enough to be able to get books into print, but not established too much that the audience only wants the Thursday Next.

4: Since your second book, you've been pretty much writing 'under contract'. How does this compare to writing the first one?

I wrote six books before I was published, and four under contract. The only difference is that I have to write to a deadline, something that focuses the mind wonderfully

5: What's Swindon got that Slough hasn't got?

The letter 'W' in its name.





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