CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

This is how conventional marketing is supposed to work:   1. You have a group of ‘warm prospects’.   2. You place before this group a well-positioned ad, or a forum comment, or a free gift in a news feed to grab some attention.   3. Those prospects with a strong enough need for your kind of work will click on them. In a group of fantasy readers, for example, someone sees your latest novel about the inner life of dragons. The topic might be quite similar to some others around,

We have all heard the term ‘comfort zone’, usually in the context that we should be getting out of ours. The idea is that we have established an area emotionally, mentally and spiritually, in which we feel ‘at home’, and that this is not ‘good’ for us. We can only grow, they say, by leaving this zone behind and becoming uncomfortable on purpose - this leads to expansion, supposedly.   I’m not entirely sure that this is what happens. It seems to me that experience is relentles

If you’re having trouble putting a story together, try writing it backwards.   The question ‘What will happen next?’ occurs in even the most primitive stories - in fact, it forms the basis of the simplest story form. If a listener or audience member or reader knows what will happen next (unless some of the other characters in the story don’t know, and the tension is to do with if or when they will find out) then there isn’t much horsepower in that story. There are various tec

Whether or not a person recognises it, they are endeavouring to sanctify their experiences.   People enter the world and what visibly occurs is normally growth, learning, maturity and ageing, then death. What invisibly occurs is sanctification  - in other words, the product of processing the experience of Life. For some, Life is overwhelming and they fail to gain any kind of coherent integrity; for others, things come together in a wholeness.   That group of people called art

Thor was always my favourite Marvel superhero. It was the fact that he was feeble, even crippled, as a mortal man, Dr. Don Blake, but, by striking his walking stick - the symbol of his decrepitude, if you like - on the ground he could become the God of Thunder, majestic and powerful, that appealed to me. I was physically weak as a child, wore glasses, had to be skilful to avoid bullying. The idea that all of this might be circumvented by a bolt of lightning was attractive.  

Writing fiction is a wild thing.   Writers who just want to write can do whatever they like. They can take words, or even letters, and put them in any order; they can even make up letters of their own. If they form words, they can string them together randomly for as long as they like. Whole paragraphs, chapters, page upon page, can be devised in whichever way they wish, if they just want to write.   Just like a painter can take a brush and splash colours at random over a can

Let’s talk about the alchemy of dreams.   Many writers enter the fray wanting to become rich from their writings. Very many of them hope to be able to write a best-selling book which will not only make them famous, but will provide them with money for the rest of their lives. Just one book. So good, though, that Hollywood will call and offer vast sums to turn it into a movie. Then the movie will take off at the box office, thus ensuring abundant wealth for decades…   It’s a c

There are seven types of writer.   At the top of the writing tree are master authors.   Master authors can write something of any length, in any genre. They can transport readers from almost anywhere to almost anywhere else, mentally emotionally, spiritually. They are experts in conjuring up grand ideas and images, capturing attention, gaining commitment, structuring masterpieces, commanding respect and enchanting readers with style. Their works resonate with fulfilment and c

In earlier articles about marketing for writers, we learned that marketing is largely the same as writing.   ‘What??’ I hear you protest, especially if you haven’t read the earlier articles.   It’s true though: just as our imagination selects out key elements from the depths of our imaginations and then places them in a carefully crafted sequence to build an effective story, so does marketing select out key publics from the populations of the planet and then places a campaign