Early life

David Moody grew up on a diet of trashy horror and pulp science fiction books and movies. He worked as a bank manager and as operations manager for a number of financial institutions before giving up the day job to write about the end of the world for a living.

After reading Wyndham's Day of the Triffids and H G Wells' War of the Worlds, and watching the original Night of the Living Dead in the middle of the night during an epic thunderstorm, he was hooked. 'It was the power of these stories which really got to me, the way that events outside the control of any authority might one day impact on absolutely everyone.'After leaving school and ending up working in a high street bank. David then decided he wanted to make the kind of films he spent so much time watching. Unfortunately, with no relevant training or expertise, it was never going to be easy. So he looked for an alternative route, and found it. Within six months he'd written Straight to You which was published by a small UK publisher. Sales figures were microscopic, but Moody immediately started work on several other novels.

Career

After David had written Straight to You he soon started work on Autumn while starting a family. But by the time David had completed Autumn the Internet had taken off. David saw an opportunity to do something special instead of trying to get the attention of every publisher willing to listen.

Autumn became an on-line phenomenon, racking up more than half a million downloads and spawning a series of sequels. In 2005 David formed 'Infected Books' - his own publishing house through which he independently published his books.David sold tens of thousands of his 'Infected Books' and went on to publish a novel called Hater in July 2006. Within three months of its release he'd had contact with a major US production company who were interested in acquiring the film rights. A deal was done and the movie is currently in production with Guillermo del Toro and Mark Johnson producing and J A Bayona directing.

Within months of the Hater deal, the film rights to the first Autumn novel were sold to Renegade Motion Pictures in Canada.In November 2007, Moody sold Hater and its two planned sequels to Thomas Dunne Books, a division of St Martin's Press in the US. Subsidiary rights were subsequently sold to the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy, Russia and several other countries. In the summer of 2008, Thomas Dunne Books acquired the Autumn series and Moody shut down Infected Books, removing the previously free downloads from the Internet.