CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

How do you build affinity with anyone? Well, it usually begins with finding something in common - either a working background, or some kind of common interest or passion. It can develop further when you find out more about an individual’s personal life, their preferences, tastes, foibles, habits and so on. Spotting what it is that you like or admire among these more intimate things is a kind of treasure hunt - you follow a trail, finding more and more about a person with

Earlier, we established (I hope) that, out of the two kinds of relationship that exist between people - the intimate and personal relationships that we have with family, friends and the like, and the less intimate and commercial relationships we have with elements in society at large - the relationship between the writer and the reader belongs more in the first category, and that the fact that a commercial transaction must take place in order for readers to access writers’ wo

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people in our lives: those with whom we have close relationships based on family affection, friendship, romantic attachment or care, and those whose relationship to us is commercially based. When we buy car insurance or a pizza, for example, we converse with people with whom we have probably never met and the substance of our interaction is the transaction in which we hand over money in exchange for a product or a service. We don’t u

How do you find your ideal readers? You start by listing out the characteristics, as far as you can describe them, of your ideal readership. Why would they like your work? What exactly would attract them to it? What else do they like that’s similar in some way to your work? And, crucially, are there places where these types of readers ‘hang out’? Magazines that they read? Groups they might belong to? Other purchases that they may have made? There are a lot more questions

When you send out posts about your work willy-nilly - plastering ads all over various groups or on any site that will accept them, with simple links that say something along the lines of ‘Please like and share this’ or ‘My new book’ - you hope, along with millions of others doing the same thing, that, by contacting vast numbers of people in this way, some small percentage of people will actually click ‘like’ or share the post, leading - after some long, convoluted process whe

Don’t worry, no violence was done by Doonican to me, or I suspect anyone else. Nevertheless, this is life-and-death tale. It’s particularly poignant for me as when I wrote this, it was the fifteenth anniversary of my father’s death and this little anecdote brings to mind the relationship that I had with him as a young child. One of Life’s greatest and saddest mysteries is the apparency that certain things can never be recovered. I hope with all my heart that it is just an a

Forty-five years ago, I was at university studying literature. As it happened, that year the Big S as the focus of attention - Shakespeare. I was fortunate or unfortunate enough, depending on how you look at it, to be part of a tutorial group composed of geniuses, all of them women apart from the elderly Dutch professor, all of them with enough intellectual power to outshine the cyclotron at CERN, and probably faster in their thinking than that device. I sat at the back all y

Having said all that I said in Part One, I began to notice patterns in the submissions which indicated that some more practical advice might benefit new writers in many cases. These are offered as tips to anyone interested in submitting their work to me in particular, but I daresay that other publishers would welcome such practical considerations. i) Many, many writers sent in submissions in all kinds of different formats, having clearly not read the submission guidelines a