Moving to London at 17, Crofts took a variety of jobs as he struggled to establish himself as a freelance writer, (including a stint running a modelling agency in London's Bond Street), while submitting work to every kind of magazine and publisher. For a number of years he worked as a freelance business journalist and then a travel writer, spending a great deal of his time in the Far East, the Caribbean and the South Pacific. His career as a ghostwriter seems to have started seriously in the early 1990s.