CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

Another point that occasionally comes up is an attitude to do with ‘rules’. The attitude is 'To Hell with Rules.' It's a mistake. I can understand how it arises. I’ve seen many senseless arguments over the years about fiddly rules to do with the use of commas or quotation marks, or even about fonts and font sizes. It’s very possible to develop a viewpoint, if you see too much of that, that says that ‘All rules are rotten’ and to protest against them as a general… well, rule

It’s interesting that there’s an apparent fundamental dichotomy beneath the surface in the life of writers. Throughout their fiction, writers are striving to make themselves ‘invisible’: good writing is, by its nature, meant to be unseen. Usually, any hint of a author’s presence within the text throws the reader out of the story, unless the author really knows what he or she is doing (like John Fowles in his book The French Lieutenant’s Woman, who inserts himself into his o

I’m told fairly frequently that the Inner Circle Writers’ Group on Facebook is one of the best writers’ groups around, and the testimony from members reported by ProWriting Aid which appears in the group description seems to back that up. But I don’t think I’ve ever outlined exactly why I think that is. It doesn’t boil down to personal charm, though I might wish it did: there are in fact a number of strict principles which led over time to the group becoming well known as a

Earlier, we were looking at a magic long-term formula for marketing success, which I here present again in a reduced form: 1. Look at your prospect and calculate whether or not he or she is appropriate for your product and is ready to receive your communication. 2. Send your message precisely to your prospect, tailored to match exactly what your prospect’s particular needs are. 3. Wait until the prospect realises that your communication exactly matches what is needed.

Let’s assume that you have set up a Facebook group, an author’s page, or a dedicated website which has attracted some followers. You have, to some extent, developed your own group of people. These people have separated off from the wider 'herd' in some small way and decided that they like you or your books to some degree. It might not mean much - a ‘like’ is cheap in the fast-moving world of social media - but it’s something. All those identities who have indicated even a sma

Perhaps the best single business move I ever made was to open up a Facebook group. But that’s not necessarily the best thing for everyone. Let me explain. ‘Marketing’ for most people, until they learn how it really works, is a matter of taking one’s message and bombarding the airwaves with it - every possible channel, as much as possible, for as long as possible. You run into this all the time as a consumer - advertisements and other promotional efforts coming at you from

Here’s an interesting exercise for you - call it an experiment if you will. You’ve probably been ‘trained’ to think in certain ways about how to turn your writing into an income. A number of popular methodologies and images of how to do this exist in modern culture and are hard to avoid. The fact that only one in a billion of these approaches actually works doesn’t seem to put people off, but rather makes many of them think, ‘Oh look what just happened for him/her! I must p

Imagine, if you will, a science experiment in which you had before you an array of buttons to press, each of which activated a kind of magnet. The set of magnets linked to the buttons are suspended in a tank full of various metallic powders. Each magnet was attuned to attract a particular kind of metal, so that, by pressing a particular button, you could cause a whole set of sprinkled dust to move and be drawn towards its magnet. Perhaps it’s a convoluted image, but what I’

The late Steve Carr’s book, Getting Your Short Stories Published: A Guidebook, tells you all you have to know, outside the actual business of writing the story, about how to increase the likelihood of getting a piece of work into publication. It does this by reducing his experience over his last few years into a few pages and communicating directly what worked for him and what didn’t work - what he wrote in his cover letters, what he included in his bios, what he studied in o