I took part in the Bradford Book Festival last week, a small event at the Alhambra Studio.

There was myself, Bradford writers Bill Broady and Martyn Bedford, and Manchester author Emma Unsworth, all reading our work.

To be quite honest, I thought the people on stage would outnumber the audience, so I was very gratified to see 50-plus people in the auditorium.

I read from a new work of fiction that my agent's punting around the London literary scene at the moment, and everyone laughed in the right places and gave me a good round of applause.

At a time when we're told that publishing is a struggling industry and TV, movies and the internet are all eating into the time we used to devote to books, it's good and even rather humbling to see that people will turn out and pay good money to hear writers read from their work.

To anyone who came, thanks.