CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

At every point of your business, on every web page, in every store, on every visit, you need to have mechanisms for getting what customers wanted, how they wanted it and whether or not you provided it.   This can be in the form of questionnaires, feedback forms, post-service interviews, testimonials, surveys and so on.   If you immediately think, upon mention of the word 'survey', of people out on the streets with clipboards, or of potentially painful and time consuming effor

Ideas underpin any piece of fiction. They make the difference between the book that doesn’t get sold and the bestseller; they also make the difference between the bestseller that a couple of years later you find on the second-hand bookshelf, and the bestseller which is read again and again and made into box-office-shattering films.   Get the ideas right, and the rest will come much easier.   But what ideas? Do you just dream up some clever ideas and then hope for the best? No

If ideas form the centre of a successful piece of fiction, does it matter what those ideas are?   Should a writer just dream up any kind of idea, and, as long as it remains central to everything else in the story, will that guarantee success?   First we have to define what we mean by an ‘idea’. The dictionary can easily confuse us at this point. ‘Idea’ is defined as ‘a thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action’ but also as ‘a mental impression’ and ‘an opinion o

It is an understatement to say that your client database is probably an under-utilised resource. You have to decide what kind of resource you want your former customers to be. There are probably at least three kinds of activity that you can list:   1. No or very little activity. This is pretty close to what you probably have today with the vast majority of your previous customers. People buy stuff from you and go out into the community, and you hardly ever hear from most of t

I am going to tell you the simple secret formula that lies behind every success in business and in Life.   I’m going to tell you right here, without any long, frustrating pre-amble about who I am, why you should listen to me, or what you need to do next. (You can find all that out later, if you want to.)   Once you have read the simple formula - and it is very simple indeed - you could, if you wish, drop this article right there and go off and succeed by applying it. That wou

A portal is defined as a recognisable object or symbol which has the unexpected attribute of transporting a reader’s or viewer’s attention into a totally different framework. Examples include the TARDIS, Lewis’s wardrobe and Tolkien’s Ring. Examples also include works of fiction and works of art themselves, since a work of fiction or of art itself transports its audience (if it is successful).   By ‘framework’ is meant a set of references which amounts to a genre or world-vie

What creates ‘appeal’ in a fictitious character?   Is it cute looks? Except in movies or a theatre setting, the looks of any character are limited. Surprisingly few works of fiction contain anything but the most superficial descriptions of the way their main characters appear physically; normally, appearance is referred to in passing, and with only one or two key details. This lack of description is in itself interesting: the gap or void it opens up invites reader contributio

Picture successful fiction as a kind of solar system: around a central star which is the theme or governing idea of a piece of work orbit planets which represent the images, characters, objects and events in a story.   Remove the governing idea, and everything else in the story flies off into the void; remove the planets and you have an idea, floating in space but without life or motion. Some writers have fewer problems coming up with images - protagonists, villains, events,