It’s time for the final instalment in my free book series, as explained in my recent blog post, and I’ve saved what I feel is the best for last, for the festive period! All December, I’m offering Advanced Writing Skills for Students of English absolutely free on this site.
This completes my series of free books, which I set up because I’ve had less time to produce new material and overall web traffic is slowing down. This is ahead of me reviewing where to take the site next in the New Year. I wanted to finish this year on a high point, with the book that I think demonstrates the most personal and unique of my content.
To help present the book, I’ve written another introduction and reflection on its origins and history.
What made Advanced Writing Skills special to me
After three books aimed at grammar and rules (even if they explored bending them), Advanced Writing Skills for Students of English was a change of direction into something more subjective: skill-based tips and matters of style. It was more personal than my other ELT books, as while it did require some broader research, it mostly draws on tips from my own experience as a writer and editor, as well as a teacher.
My intention was to help foreign learners develop skills in areas that many native English speakers also struggle with, or might not be aware of. I wanted to demonstrate a flexible approach to writing, while also exploring context and the evolution of language. A focus here was understanding the differences between essential rules that clarify understanding and patterns that merely provide consistency – as well as some considerations for where these cross over.
When I released this book, my grammar guides were selling very well, but this still felt like taking a chance, doing something more subjective. It proved immediately popular, though, and was labelled a #1 New Release on Amazon (see the image below!) before going on to become a bestseller in multiple categories.
In fact, Advanced Writing Skills remains, to date, the quickest book I’ve released to turn a profit (at least, from any that had serious expenses – which excludes Word Order!). Soon after its release, I was flying back from abroad and on landing noticed a large number of orders had been placed, covering the editing costs all at once.
It also quickly gathered reviews from strangers, unlike the previous two books for which I spent many hours contacting reviewers with few results. And, most surprisingly, I was asked if it could be included on a university linguistics course!
Naturally, it was incredibly rewarding to have this more personal guide do so well.
Even now, Advanced Writing Skills remains one of my most consistently successful books; it hit a 10,000 sales milestone around its fifth anniversary, and even though sales have slowed down, it continues to sell as well as any of my other books. I always intended to follow it up with a couple of other books. One, presenting exercises which demonstrated these skills in practice, proved a lot harder to write than I expected. The second, aimed more at editing professionals, was intended to look at similar topics from a more technical, native speaker’s point of view. I hope to complete that one day.
For now, it’s my great pleasure to put Advanced Writing Skillson offer, so it might reach even more people, with this month of it available for free. I hope those of you who are new to the book find it useful, and those who are already familiar with it, please do share the offer!
