This month I’m proud to announce Advanced Writing Skills for Students of English has become my third book to pass 10,000 global sales!
It’s an especially important milestone for me and English Lessons Brighton for a few reasons, not least because the book also had its 5th anniversary a couple of months ago (not far off the website itself’s 10th anniversary).
So here’s an article going back over the book’s journey:
Why Advanced Writing Skills was an important book for me
Advanced Writing Skills for Students of English was my first non-fiction book to cover style and matters of personal opinion as opposed to teaching more regimented grammar rules. That made it more personal than my other ELT books, as here I was really delving more into my own personal experience as a writer and editor, as well as a teacher. The lessons I put into Advanced Writing Skills were therefore more unique to me, and unlikely to be recreated quite the same way elsewhere.
My aim with this book was to go beyond the basics of English to help foreign learners develop their skills in ways that might actually surpass the basic knowledge of many native English speakers. I intended to do this by teaching a flexible, considerate approach to writing, through a book which values an understanding of context and the evolution of language. One of the key aspects of this was to explore the differences between essential rules that clarify understanding and patterns that merely provide consistency – as well as some considerations for where these crossover.
At the time of releasing this book, I was very confident in selling grammar guides, but less sure how a book of this nature would do. But it proved popular from the very start – in fact it was labelled as a #1 New Release on Amazon (see the image below!) and later went on to become a bestseller in multiple categories.
I spent countless hours trying to get reviews for my Word Order and English Tenses books (mostly without success), and barely spent any time looking for reviews for Advanced Writing Skills. Once it was out, people started buying it straight away, and they left reviews without being asked – very soon, it was my most positively rated book.
5 Years of Advanced Writing Skills
I didn’t manage to celebrate this book’s fifth anniversary earlier partly because I was distracted by another anniversary – in May I looked back on five years of my Ordshaw fiction universe. I was shocked to discover, however, that I released my novel Under Ordshaw only a week before Advanced Writing Skills. I’m not sure what I was thinking at the time – but I do recall going on holiday shortly afterwards. It was when I was coming through the airport after a return flight that I checked my Advanced Writing Skills sales and discovered the book had turned a profit in just under four weeks.
It was, and still is, my fastest book to become profitable.
But there was more to come: within a few months of the book’s release, I was contacted by a professor at Antwerp University asking if they could use my book as part of a core text on a linguistics course. Which of course I was delighted for, though I’ve no idea how the course then went.
Since then, Advanced Writing Skills has been one of my most consistently successful books, though my marketing efforts have become increasingly less effective in recent years. For it to hit a 10,000 sale milestone now is a great encouragement, as things have slowed down so much for the books – and such a huge number makes me wonder how far and in what contexts the book has spread. It’s rare that I learn exactly where my books have ended up, especially as I see bulk purchases that I assume come from courses and book clubs, but the mail I’ve received has really touched me – from teachers passing copies on to students, to people buying books for friends who live in less-accessible countries.
I’m saddened somewhat that I can’t keep this website as active as it once was, or keep producing books at the rate I previously did, but I’m immeasurably proud that Advanced Writing Skills for Students of English has come this far, and is continuing to sell even as I’m struggling to keep marketing it. And while I’ll keep doing what I can here, there’s something about hitting five years and 10,000 sales that makes it feel that much more complete.
It’s a huge achievement and I have all of you, my readers, to thank for taking it this far. So thank you for joining me on this journey, and I hope the book has helped you!
