Wearside-born Adam Maxwell has found that the ebook market is ideal for his short stories and detective novels. Viv Hardwick reports.

A N award-winning North- East creative writer is celebrating after downloads of his eBooks exceeded 25,000 copies in the past year.

Northumberland-based Adam Maxwell, 34, who was born in Sunderland and grew up in Hetton le Hole, explains: “It’s brilliant to have so much interest in my work. I’ve now produced four eBooks and while the downloads have come predominantly in the UK and USA, people have been downloading them worldwide.”

Maxwell, who runs his own web design business called Superhighwaymen, now lives in Newbiggin by the Sea since moving there from Wearside five years ago. He specialises in short stories and flash fiction which are stories of around 1,000 words.

He adds: “I started writing stories when I was at Sunderland University although I didn’t really start to take it seriously until 2000.

“I completed a master’s degree in Creative Writing at Northumbria University in 2003 and then things really begun to happen for me. I got a lot of my work published on websites and in printed magazines and in 2006 my first collection of stories called Dial M For Monkey was published as a paperback.”

Seeing an opportunity to market his stories on the internet, Maxwell started a podcast in 2007 featuring him reading his stories and put it out through iTunes and his own website. Soon afterwards he won the 2008 Best Podcast prize at the North East Digital Awards.

Building on the existing interest in his work, in November 2009 Maxwell put Dial M For Monkey on the website Feedbooks. Since then the collection has been downloaded more than 11,000 times.

He explains: “Feedbooks offers eBooks in a variety of formats for everything from Kindle to iPad to mobile phone. Their books are free and they predominantly deal in either out of copyright and new, original works.”

Maxwell followed Dial M For Monkey with another collection of short stories, then two instalments of The Defective Detective, a comedy about a narcoleptic detective, which he aims to build into an ongoing series of novellas.

These works have notched almost 16,000 website downloads and The Defective Detective is also available in paperback format.

His latest project Chills, Kills and Snowflakes, a Christmas-themed horror series featuring four chilling Yuletide stories, was launched on Boxing Day and shifted more than 300 copies in the first 24 hours. The book can be downloaded via his website adammaxwell.com.

Maxwell says: “The past 12 months have been fantastic. My aim for 2011 is to continue building up my readership, making them laugh and occasionally scaring them witless.”