The author of two bestselling self-help books has said his own readers are to blame for a decline in sales of his products as they have been taking some of his stories way too seriously.

Pan-dimensional deity God’s first book, The Old Testament, charts the adventures of an omniscient benefactor who impulsively decides to build a universe in under a week, and then spends the rest of recorded time trying to get the creatures in it to stop fucking things up for themselves.

The sequel, imaginatively entitled The New Testament, tells the story of the son of the original designer, who tries to get everyone to be nice to each other and ends up getting nailed to a tree.

“The thing is, I put a bunch of stories in there to jazz it up a bit and now everyone’s saying that it’s all got to be literally true,” God told The Chatty Chimp’s correspondent. “I mean, Game of Thrones has all these ridiculously implausible plots with dragons and tits in them, and everyone knows it’s just supposed to be fun. My stuff, they just go, ‘well that wouldn’t happen’ like it’s the bloody News at Ten or something. I can’t even get away with sex scenes – I had to make my son’s mother a virgin, for goodness sake, and then everyone’s like ‘yeah right.’

“Frankly I’d never have sold the millions I have without adding some colour, like burning bushes and turning people into salt, or turning water into wine, or coming back to life at the end. Jason in Friday the 13^th does that, but no one worships him for it, do they? It’s fiction, people! If I’d just said ‘let’s all try to love and respect each other’ I’d have shifted diddley squat copies. You don’t get to top the bestsellers list for a millennium with preachy shit like that.”

God, who has shunned personal appearances and book signing sessions, admits that he’s been slow in producing the third volume of the trilogy. “It’s on its way but two thousand years isn’t all that long when you’re eternal,” he explains. “I’m thinking I might just turn up and do a Q+A or something, maybe go on Graham Norton, but until then if everyone could just stop taking everything I’ve written as Gospel and just read between the fucking lines a little bit, that’d be really lovely, thanks.”