CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

If you are aiming to make a living as a writer, your success depends on your ability to produce a piece of writing - and probably many pieces of writing - that others want to read. Readers pay you for this work so you can live. Let's call this work your product.   The more impactful, popular and well-known your product is, the more money you earn. Becoming ‘well-known’ has to be part of it: no point in writing a masterpiece if no one has heard of it. It’s mind-boggling to im

There’s a lot of talk these days about the ‘freedom of the press’ and the power of the media. It’s probably even more important today to recognise what we are talking about in relation to these things than it ever has been.   We all seek meaning. As human beings, we are on a quest, knowingly or not, to find significance and shape in the events of our day. On a small scale, we try to put order into our immediate surroundings and day-to-day routines; on a larger scale we turn t

I’ve looked at what makes up a story, and what actually happens when a writer communicates something to a reader.   Put in basic, mechanical terms, we can imagine a writer forming a ball out of some kind of clay and hurling it across a space to a reader. For the ball to arrive at the reader successfully, we need a number of elements to work together: the ball needs to be aimed accurately; it needs sufficient impetus; and it has to hold together in flight. But it also needs to

As a writer, you probably have your ‘grand novel’ (or fantasy series, or family saga, or whatever) sitting either on a shelf, or in a hard drive, or still forming in your imagination somewhere. I think most writers have this to some degree: that ‘perfect’ and usually lengthy piece which one day they hope and imagine will be published and read by millions.   Writers then have a kind of angst about whether or not that work will actually ever get written, or, if it already exist

There are probably hundreds of ways of promoting a book.   In this new world of independent publishing, in which writers new and old can choose from a smorgasbord of options as to how to publish their books, it makes sense that there is an equally wide range of choices about how to get one’s book known to the public at large.   Not all of these ways are equal, though. I’ve started off here by listing some of the easier ways. What do I mean by ‘easier’? Well, in most cases, wr

Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day , was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, so this is a fitting moment to take a look at that novel in a new light.   The novel is a masterpiece on many levels and one of them is the way in which it is framed. The invented Darlington Hall, home of a deluded lord, is the centre of fascist visits to Britain in the 1930s, the hub, within the novel, of world politics - here, Nazi politicians and sympathisers find a home as Lord

The wild, desolate Yorkshire Moors, a landscape of solitude and stillness where one can easily become overwhelmed with vastness, form a starting point for understanding the poems of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, both of whom wrote a poem named ‘Wuthering Heights’. The marriage of two world-famous poets is not a common occurrence in history. Both Hughes and Plath have garnered a certain respect and admiration otherwise not distributed to them as single geniuses because of this.

I thought I should put in writing some things about internet marketing which are based on direct experience.   It’s useful to parallel internet marketing with what might be called traditional marketing, or even running a shop on a high street. If you consider your book or your product placed on a website to be similar to a shop on a street, you can see how to better employ some basic marketing approaches.   In the old days, before ‘marketing’ became more than taking one’s goo

If you’re a writer who has investigated writing techniques, especially to do with writing longer stories, then you have probably heard of the concept of the ‘Hero’s Journey’. It’s a widely recognised and used template for stories which involve a hero going on an ‘adventure’. In this model, there is a climax and the hero wins a victory, and then comes home changed in some way.   Most people think that the idea started with Joseph Campbell’s 1949 work The Hero with a Thousand F