Mark Watson has announced his first printed autobiography.

Based on an earlier audio project, Mortification is subtitled "Eight Deaths And Life After Them", and will be published on 17th August by Phoenix.

8 Deaths (And Life After Them) was first released as an audio-only project just before Christmas 2021, with the comedian today promising the new incarnation to be "reworked and improved from the audiobook it once was".

Posting on Twitter, he wrote: "It's meant to be a fun read, but it IS a darker proposition than most books you'll see comedians release, so I wanted to briefly introduce it here.

"I've been pretty honest in public about the feelings of inadequacy and failure which have stalked me through the past 10 years or so: since it became obvious I was not as talented as I'd once been allowed to believe, wasn't destined to succeed in the ways I used to imagine.

"Comedy, writing, all my chosen fields are pretty brutal for this. The comparison with other people is near-unavoidable, and very public. If you do it for 20 years, like me, you see many more distinctive people overtake you, and you feel the burn of that every time you wake up. I've touched on it briefly on stage, but: I reacted to the incrementing disappointments of my career across my thirties by becoming a really bad, dysfunctional person, racked by addictions, selfish, endlessly running away from everything. This book is a reckoning with that.

"These feelings, though - of never being good enough, having failed to live up to some version of yourself that might have existed - are very common, whatever your goals. They never go away, but they can be grappled with, like all mental patterns. The book's also about that. I'm hoping it might be helpful to some readers out there, somewhere, to hear about the way a brain can torture a person over a period of many years regardless of the seeming desirability of their career/life; even if they once kicked a yoghurt against a wall absolutely sublimely. (Even THAT was only an out-take on Taskmaster, because it was a tiebreaker, but you can find it on YouTube, and it's one hell of a 60 seconds of TV. So there's that, legacy-wise.)"

He adds: "So the book's about the comedy industry and what it can do to you (sometimes in an amount of detail which led to involved legal discussions), but also about being a human, one among billions trying to find your purpose, and what THAT can do to you. A bit memoir, a bit self-help.

"Anyway, thanks for listening to all that. I'm quite a lot better than I was. When I first came to write the book, I think I imagined it as a catharsis. 'Here's what I've learned, you're welcome!' But no: it's more that life is just a long work-in-progress. And maybe that's OK."

Mortification is available to pre-order in hardback and digital eBook formats now.