Davies's first professionally published fiction, a novelisation of his children's television serial Dark Season, had been released by BBC Books in 1991.

In July 2014 it was announced that Big Finish Productions were to produce an audio drama adaptation of the novel, as part of their licensed Doctor Who range.

The novel is set in Britain in 1987, and involves the Seventh Doctor and his companions Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester living on a working-class council estate while attempting to track down an infinitely powerful Gallifreyan weapon before it falls into the wrong hands.

Damaged Goods contains a gay character, David, and homosexuality is a recurring theme explored in much of Davies's writing, as he himself noted in an article for The Guardian newspaper in 2003.

I even wrote a Doctor Who novel in which the six-foot blond, blue-eyed companion interrupts the hunt for an interdimensional Gallifreyan War Machine to get a blowjob in the back of a taxi.

"[5] Davies's major breakthrough television series, Queer as Folk (1999), was centred around the lives of three gay men in Manchester, one of whom, Vince Tyler, is portrayed as a fanatical Doctor Who fan.

[6] Damaged Goods itself contains a reference to Why Don't You?, a BBC children's television series on which Davies was working at the time the novel is set.

"Author Russell T Davies is a welcome new addition to Doctor Who fiction, bringing a lucid, matter-of-fact style of storytelling that has more in common with Stephen Gallagher's modern horror novels than Irvine Welsh's stylised fables... Purists might argue that a book full of sex, drugs and squalor can't really be Doctor Who, but they would be forgetting that the essence of the series and those like it is in portraying ordinary people's reactions to the unprecedented.

Generally, however, reaction to the novel was extremely positive, with other online reviews around the time of the book's release praising Davies's work.

"In Damaged Goods, Russell Davies has marked himself as the best newcomer to Doctor Who fiction since Lance Parkin eight months earlier," wrote Shannon Patrick Sullivan on his own website.

[9] The adaptation was scripted by Jonathan Morris and produced by David Richardson, whose TV Zone interview with Davies in 1995 had in part led to the original book being commissioned by Virgin in the first place.

[9] The Doctor's companions in the novel, Roz and Chris, were played by Yasmin Bannerman and Travis Oliver, with Michelle Collins as Winnie Tyler and Denise Black as Eva Jericho.

[10] The adaptation included additional references to elements from the revived television series, such as the Last Great Time War and the Torchwood Institute, both of which were devised by Davies after the original novel's release.