CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

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

Here’s a classic pattern that most stories follow:   A protagonist, usually a young boy or servant, is missing at least one parent and is being brought up by a close family member or social superior. Early in the tale, he encounters an old man with a stick who orientates him to the antagonist, opening up the basic premise of the story. A journey or quest commences, usually physical, during which the protagonist is scarred, wounded or otherwise damaged; he also acquires a comi

Do you think that authors push readers through their stories? Or pull them?   You probably have not thought about your progress through a story in these terms at all. For readers, the sensation is that they themselves are in control of whether they read or not. A reader picks up a book, reads a page or more, then puts it down - everything is reader-controlled, surely?   Except that it isn’t.   Truly powerful fiction uses mechanisms which are hidden just out of sight in storie

I’ve written in earlier articles about the power that is at work in stories which both attracts readers and keeps them glued to the page or screen or stage. If a story lacks this power in any degree, a story fails to that exact amount; but add even a small part of one of the components of that power and attention is caught, engagement occurs, forward motion begins. The only works of fiction that survive for any length of time are those which contain a high enough amount of th