Hello from ELB! It has been a little while, so I want to address my increasingly irregular updates. It’s with great regret that over these past few months I’ve been unable to continue my monthly new articles, which I’d otherwise managed without fail for 12 years.

Unfortunately, I think it’s necessary to announce a change, and to admit I just can’t keep producing regular, effective ELT content right now. But I also want to offer some hope through all this, as the bulk of material I have managed to produce in those 12 years is still here, still freely available, and is going nowhere.

Why the ELB Newsletter is Stopping

The reasons are much the same as I gave for slowing down with my articles: with internet traffic overall being funnelled towards a handful of vaguely inaccurate plagiarism machines, the website’s now receiving perhaps 5% of the visitors it consistently saw for over a decade.

With significantly fewer people seeing the website, my book sales no longer cover the ongoing cost of running a mailing list (let alone the time I need to write regular messages). Meanwhile, mailing list costs have only been increasing, and with the large number of subscribers we have there’s no cheap option to keep it going.

Also, though, I simply don’t have so much to share right now, as I’m mostly working as an editor and drifting in my own writing and publishing towards experimenting with game design. There is plenty of advice I could offer in editing writing, but as it’s more technical and specific, I rarely have the spare time to organise these thoughts into something useful generally!

So, alas, I’m shutting down the ELB mailing list for now. This is not, however, a permanent goodbye.

ELB is Still Going

This website will keep running, and I will still be here, available at my regular email address and happy to answer questions and help wherever I can. The ongoing cost of running the site is fairly low and stable, and there’s so much content on here that I’m determined to keep it live, offering free advice, even if it can’t reach as many people as before.

It’s possible that I may also post minor updates on the website without sending these out to the mailing list, so if you can do make sure you follow/subscribe to the blog.

In addition, my author website is still going strong, and I’m planning to produce a new umbrella site to accompany that under my publishing house, Rumian Publishing. As the ELB books are published under Rumian, and I will be keeping my much smaller author mailing list active, I will potentially be able to also send out ELB news there, if I have any.

And while I won’t be maintaining the ELB mailing list or sending regular updates, there is always the option to revive it in the future, so if I do have more time and the inclination to produce more material, I’ll get back in touch to let you all know. (If so, this will always come with the option to unsubscribe if you are no longer interested.)

But for now, this will be my last message on here. I want to thank you all for your support and kind messages over the years, and for your insightful feedback and questions. I wish you all the very best.

Happy learning!

Phil

PS – On a separate note, to end on a positive: throughout September I’m doing a charity hiking event, aiming to walk 250km (hopefully more) in aid of cancer-awareness and support charity, BRCA+ Chat. The charity was founded by my sister in memory of our mother, who passed away 11 years ago.

If you’d like to learn more about it, and/or offer some support, check out my sponsorship page here. I’ll consider it worthwhile even if it just means more people learning about the charity!