Ten years ago this week, I published my first novel. Not quite sure how I feel about that. Maybe a little tummy-hurty? It’s not the same as the weird feeling when my daughter left to go to University last year, or even when my youngest sat his first GCSE exam yesterday; this isn’t anything to do with an impending sense of my own mortality, or time passing like a raging river like when some prick confronts you with the fact an album you think of as 'new' came out thirty years ago.

This feels a bit different.

Blood Dawn

I had spent a good few years before writing Blood on the Motorway dicking about with a silly idea about two stoners going on a Kerouacian road trip, the joke being that a road trip around England wouldn’t take more than a few days. I had the rough characters, but not much more than that. Then I read the comic of The Walking Dead, and I thought about making the road trip one that meanders through an apocalyptic wasteland. As a child raised on a steady diet of John Wyndham and Stephen King, I realised that as much as I wanted to be a snarky, Douglas Coupland-esque ‘voice of a generation’s ennui’. My particular set of skills was perhaps better aimed at a pulpier outlet.

Robert Kirkman spoke in his intro to the first Walking Dead book about getting to the end of every zombie film ever made and wondering what happened next. This resonated with me because I felt the same way about every end-of-the-world tome I ever came across. Hell, I even thought The Stand could be longer.

Only kidding.

With Blood on the Motorway, I started to explore that same idea, except removing the zombies altogether. I have my wife to thank for that particular decision, with her withering ‘oh god, not zombies, how boring’ putdown sending me back to my office to hastily delete the undead.

But what I wanted to explore was twofold. I wanted to know, come the end of the world, what would happen when the real threat to the survivors was their fellow man. So were born the stories of Tom, Jen and Burnett. But I also wanted to tell a story of some little spark of hope. About how, when you strip people back to nothing, there’s a kernel of good in all of us.

Okay, maybe not Ewen.

Blood on the Motorway came out into a world that felt, at the time, like it was on the verge of something. Not necessarily something good, but something. The barriers between writers and their readers had never been lower. You could put a book out on a Monday and have strangers reading it by Tuesday. It felt, if you squinted at it in the right light and didn't look too hard at the royalty rates, like a revolution.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. But I loved every second of finding out.

I immersed myself in the indie publishing subculture, joined writing groups made up of total strangers on the internet, and somehow got addicted to podcasts because three men named Johnny, Sean, and Dave used to talk shit about being publishers online every week on the Self Publishing Podcast. This was also the early days of Twitter, and everything felt so…fucking cool.

I know, it’s hard to imagine now, right?

Growing up, pretty much all the media I consumed and loved had a pretty clear position on commerce: it was the enemy. Not a necessary evil, not a complicated negotiation. The Enemy. You sold out, or you kept your integrity; if you chose the former, you deserved everything you got. I nodded sagely when Bill Hicks told me that anyone involved in advertising or marketing should kill themselves.

I genuinely fretted over whether punk bands had sold out by joining a major label, even though all the bands I’d listened to to get me to those same punk bands had been released on major labels. I rejected the very same monoculture that had served a middle-class white boy at an English boarding school the chance to see Nirvana and Pearl Jam play at the MTV VMAs, an event that would change my life.

I absorbed all of this so completely that when I finally had a book to sell, the act of telling people about it felt faintly embarrassing, like being caught making an advert for Chinese supplements because you assumed that nobody would pay attention. Marketing was for people without principles. I had principles.

I also had a novel that nobody was reading.

It turns out the Internet's great democratisation of publishing came with some small print. Yes, anyone could now reach anyone. What the brochure neglected to mention was that reaching them was now entirely your problem. The gatekeepers were gone, replaced by something considerably worse: an audience that had no idea you existed and no particular reason to find out. I had spent years developing an online presence based entirely on moaning about The Fucking Tories and extolling the virtues of the overlooked back catalogue of mid-nineties post-hardcore bands; now I was expected to leverage these into a marketing funnel.

It did not come naturally.

Punk Publisher

A few years in, I tried to make sense of all this by writing a piece for Medium in which I declared myself a Punk Publisher. I know, cool huh?

The argument, roughly, was that self-publishing needed to stop apologising for itself and start owning its outsider status. We weren't failed traditional authors, we were the independent labels, the zine makers, the bands who pressed their own seven inches and sold them out of the back of a van. We didn't need their validation. We were doing it ourselves.

I still believe that, more or less. But what I was slower to reckon with was the tension at the heart of the whole enterprise. Because punk, properly understood, was not just about independence from the mainstream. It was about the ecosystem that grew up around that independence: the venues, the fanzines, the word of mouth, the community. The Clash didn't just put records out; they built a world that people wanted to live in.

What indie publishing largely built, instead, was a dependence on Amazon and Facebook and algorithms that none of us understood, controlled by people who had precisely zero interest in whether any of us succeeded. We declared independence and then immediately handed the keys to a series of corporations whose business model was to extract value from our presence while giving us as little back as possible.

Then came The Algorithms, and made it ten times harder. Then Amazon introduced ads, and Kindle Unlimited, and the whole thing became increasingly pay-to-play. Facebook ads. Bookbub ads. Hashtag mechanics. Grifters swarming your inboxes like they were the aliens in the deleted scene in Aliens where the miniguns run out, and Hicks realises they’re all in the ceiling.

Why the fuck did Cameron cut that out of the film? I’ll never understand that.

The Quit

In 2023, I took all my books down and stopped. Partly this was burnout, the specific exhaustion of trying to maintain a creative life on top of a demanding job, a family, and the ambient horror of the news cycle after the second coming of fascism descended an elevator and ran for president because a black man was mean to him, once. Partly it was that I'd looked at the publishing landscape, looked at what I was being asked to do to participate in it, and thought: I don't actually want to do any of this.

The books came back, of course, because they always do. Once a writer, etc. But something had shifted. When I came back, I didn't want to just replicate what I'd done before. I wanted to think more carefully about the world I was building. I decided, quite frankly, not to bother doing anything if I didn’t want to do it. To my surprise, it worked pretty much as well as flogging my soul over and over and over again did.

What Ten Years Look Like

From the outside, a decade as an independent author might look like a fairly modest achievement. The sales numbers are not going to make anyone's jaw drop. There is no Hollywood deal. I have not, as yet, secured a six-figure advance from a major publisher, or indeed any publisher, or indeed anyone at all.

Blood on the Motorway remains, by a country mile, my most successful work. Let’s look into the numbers:

• Over 5,000 paid sales

• 20,000 free downloads

• 160,000 Kindle Unlimited page reads (a further 550 full reads)

• 693 global ratings on Amazon with a 4.2-star average

• 80 four or five-star written reviews on Amazon

• Category bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic on no fewer than three occasions.

• 358 Goodreads ratings, 52 reviews, with a 4.02 average.

• The two sequels, Sleepwalk City and A Final Storm, have sold a further 1,500 books between them, and have even higher ratings than the first on Amazon.

On balance, no matter the fractious relationship I’ve had with writing over this last decade, those are numbers to be proud of, I think. And the most curious part is that it’s selling as well today as it ever has. 2025 was, by some stretch, the book’s strongest year.

I have, over the last year, rediscovered my joy for writing, which is something I am genuinely glad for. And I’m still trying to tell stories of hope, in the darkness.

But I'm still not marketing. Or at least, I'm still terrible at it. So let me try, just this once, to be straightforward about it.

The ask

If you've never read Blood on the Motorway, it's been ten years, and I've never needed you more. It's priced as affordably as margins will allow, it's on Amazon, it's on pretty much every site that will sell you a physical book, and if you ask your local library nicely enough, there's a reasonable chance they can get it in.

It's an apocalyptic thriller set in the north of England, and as I say, it has nearly a thousand global ratings averaging over four stars, and 2025 was, quietly and without any fanfare whatsoever, its best year yet. Ten years in. Go figure. Oh, and did I mention that it’s funny as fuck?

Here are my two favourite reviews ever:

If you have read it (and, crucially, if you enjoyed it), then you already know what to do. Tell someone. Go knock on the neighbour’s door and spread the good word. Tell your algorithm. Tell a stranger on the internet who looks like they might be having a rough time and could use the end of the world to cheer them up. Hold up a picture of you with the book like it’s a hostage video and tell your social feed that you need them to buy it for unspecified…reasons.

Here's to another ten years of Blood.

About the author

Paul Stephenson writes pulp fiction for the digital age. His first novel series – the indie-published apocalyptic Blood on the Motorway trilogy – has been an Amazon bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. A former journalist, he holds a diploma in Creative Writing at Oxford University.

His stories have been featured on the chart-topping horror podcasts, The Other Stories and The Night’s End. His newest project, the eBook serial The Sunset Chronicles, is a dystopian sci-fi thriller that will delight and terrify fans of science fiction and horror alike. He is also the creator of the podcasts, Bleakwood, tales of terror from a mysterious English town, and Darkness Come Alive, a modern vampire tale set in York.

He lives in England with his wife, two children, and one hellhound.

Check out all his books here: