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!

For the next instalment in my free book series, explained in my recent blog post, for all of November, I’m offering everyone The English Tenses Exercise Book absolutely free.

In case you missed it before, I’m running this series of free books because I’ve had less time to produce new material and the site is getting less visitors anyway, so I wanted to keep giving something back.

Once again, I’ve prepared a introduction to the book and a reflection on its history below, to take a moment to share its story.

The Origins of The English Tenses Exercise Book

The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide was one of my main original ideas for this site, and as a topic I spent a lot of time developing and discussing, it felt only natural that it should have exercises to accompany it. Over the years, I’d managed to produce quite a few accompanying articles on this site, and I wanted to compile them, and more, into a systematic approach to testing the principles of the grammar guide.

One of the big things that encouraged me to do a full book like this was that my most popular article on this site, even now, was a rather basic future tenses exercise.

It took me a long time to get around to creating enough for a book, however, as a large part of the grammar guide’s point was to make more flexible use of the rules. Other than with really specific tense examples, then, and without wider context, I found it hard to come up with exercises where I wasn’t left considering alternative answers might also be appropriate.

Eventually, I devised a series of more regimented exercises which could test understanding of the rules without leaving answers open up to too much interpretation (although this remained a problem with the many different options available for the future tenses!). It was still tricky to come up with variations of these exercises, though, and in the end there was about a six years gap between me releasing the practical grammar guide and this exercise book!

Making the Book Unique

Like my grammar guides, which have my own personal twist on teaching points of flexible grammar, I wanted to make this different to other exercise books, as there are plenty of excellent ones out there. I also didn’t want to make it too complicated though, sticking to mostly gap-fill and matching exercises.

I’m not sure I was fully successful with creating something that original, but I attempted to make it more unique by (a) following a structure that closely accompanied the grammar guide and (b) adding in some more quirky prose-based exercises, with short stories and even a functioning bread recipe!

Otherwise, my aim was to create drills that were simple and engaging enough to provide a flowing set of exercises that would complement similar books. After all, I think you can never have too many exercises when trying to master a language!

The Challenges that Followed

The English Tenses Exercise Book is by far the longest of the books on this site, as I wanted to give a robust offering of different drills. This meant it took longer to make, and made it the most expensive book to produce, both in editing costs and printing costs. As an exercise book, it’s always been primarily popular in print and not eBook, too, making it less profitable overall.

Its release also, unfortunately, came at a time when the effectiveness of my advertising campaigns started to plummet.

As a result of all this, the Exercise Book was not a runaway success, and it took a lot of work to raise visibility and sales for it. The difficulty I had is partly responsible for me not managing to produce another English book since. It did turn a profit before too long, though, and has proved a hearty book that continues to sell about as well as the others on the site, it just never had a boom period like the other three. As of now, it’s sold about a quarter as many copies as the Practical Grammar Guide.

That remains a fairly significant number, still. For an exercise book, in a sea of other exercise books, I’m happy to have reached a few thousand people across the world, which certainly feels like enough to justify its existence! Hopefully it will continue to reach people over time, especially with this month’s free promotion.

Do have a look and let me know if you find it useful!

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!

It has finally happened: The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide has reached 10,000 global sales and I could not be happier! 10,000 is an arbitrary number, admittedly, but it’s a high one, and was always a personal target of mine.

I thought, if I reach that, then I’ve done the book justice. And it was a long journey to justice! In celebration of this milestone, I’ve written this post to explore how we finally got there (and I mean we, I certainly didn’t do it alone!).

The Background Behind the Book

The English Tenses is the first book I published with a commercial plan (though actually my second book released, after the novel Wixon’s Day). The idea came about through my teaching, where I found that, with almost all students, exploring the practical differences between the tenses and their aspects tended to clear up a great deal of uncertainty, even with issues which did not initially seem related to verbs.

The aspects of English, covering the past, present and future in simple, continuous and perfect forms, form basic building blocks of the language. They’re covered in tons of grammar guides, and you can get the essential patterns and rules quickly from the likes of Murphy’s Practical English in Use. These guides brush over them, though, and it struck me that students would benefit from a more dedicated analysis of the tenses, studying the nuances and going over more examples and specific differences, to really clarify understanding.

This idea combined with my growing interest in publishing online content. I created a website for tutoring (this one) which quickly proved popular, and my English tenses timeline was the most popular page on it at the time. I was also doing a lot of business networking and met people who gave me ideas about selling books online.

So, I knuckled down and wrote The English Tenses, using my own experience and research from other books to produce a simple set of short lessons. I enlisted the help of an artist, Bob Wright, to illustrate the guide, and designed it to be colourful and have space for notes, all with the idea of creating a pleasant reading experience. I then got invaluable feedback by emailing English teachers across the world who were generous enough to look at particular sections.

All that done, I was ready to put it out in the world, and discovered that creating the book was the easy part.

Selling the First 1,000 Copies

Over a period of 3 years, I slogged away at selling The English Tenses with very little reward. I contacted countless people to review it, I ran book promotions and adverts and I put promotions on my own website. None of this generated many sales.

Then, I made perhaps the second biggest financial blunder of my life (the first involving the theft of a huge pile of cash in Russia) by hiring a marketing firm. I knew I had a book with potential, and felt I just needed more help in advertising, and I happened to come into a little bit of money at the time, so it seemed a good investment. I contacted one firm who turned me down, admitting they did not think they would be able to profitably market the book. But another, well known and highly respected company, who were apparently also less scrupulous, took it on for a big fee, with such promises as “up to 15 trade reviews” (translation: 0 – 15, where 0 was equally possible). They were very enthusiastic at first, but when the campaign started they did little more than set up some basic promos and send out a few emails without follow up. This whole enterprise cost me a lot of time and money (thousands), and the result was a couple of new reviews and very few sales.

At this point, it would’ve been easy to give up – honestly, it made me so miserable I didn’t even think about making a fuss with the marketing firm and maybe getting some compensation, I just wanted nothing more to do with them. But I saw it as a personal challenge to one day make the book profitable, recovering what I’d lost on that campaign. I tried various new tricks, testing different adverts and expanding my website.

The original cover design for Word Order in English Sentences, also, remarkably, designed in Microsoft Word – and it sold!

A Mature Bestseller

The big change that came for the ELB guides was the emergence of Amazon’s AMS ads. Facebook and Google ads didn’t lead to sales, but then Amazon rolled out ads on the website itself. This came at the same time that I was doing courses in marketing that encouraged me to really invest in the process, so when I tried these ads, and they worked, I was prepared to spend a lot more money selling books.

It was very much a case of being in the right place at the right time, with the right product. No one else was producing or properly advertising highly-focused grammar guides on Kindle, which became clear when my books quickly shot up to bestseller status in their categories. Years after they had been released with little fanfare, ELB grammar guides suddenly became the most popular TEFL books on Amazon, and they stayed that way from the end of 2017 right until mid-2019.

When I saw the ads worked, it was a question of expansion. Mostly, this meant spending more and money on adverts, but it also involved working hard to get more reviews to drive the average ratings up (in the early days, a mistaken review for a bad plumbing tool was left on The English Tenses page and brought its rating right down! That review is still there.). I also revised the book covers and worked hard to iron out mistakes.

Mistakes Were Made

There were typos in the earliest versions, and a single instance of the book saying “present perfect” where it should say “past perfect” continues to haunt me (somehow, people keep coming across this earlier mistake and making a fuss about it). There was also the problem that doing a full-colour book made the paperback much more expensive, and less profitable, than it should’ve been, and I never got around to producing a black and white alternative (also, people seemed to like the colour!). On top of that, using images that were too big meant that Amazon charged me a higher percentage as a “download fee”; it took me a few years to realise this and replace the image files.

In fact, the entire set-up of The English Tenses has been haphazard. I kept the books exclusively in Kindle Unlimited for a long time, as I was only advertising on Amazon, and this really undercut their value. More troublesome, the paperbacks have always sold in a very obscure way: Amazon’s KDP should print them, but they are also available through Ingram, a third-party printer, and for some reason Amazon buys in bulk from Ingram rather than print their own. This happens sometimes once or twice a month, or sometimes not for a few months at a time. The result is that it’s impossible to tell exactly where the paperback sales come from.

On top of these practical issues, I had the continual, niggling doubt that the book was not comprehensive enough, or accurate enough (e.g. was it technically fair to talk about the aspects as tenses, a common reference that may not be strictly grammatical for some people). One very bright chap emailed me to ask if it covered any of a list of dozens of “tenses” I wasn’t even familiar with. There were some very negative reviews and I kept encountering a certain type of teacher who would email with incredibly particular and rigid ideas that somehow made them remarkably angry individuals.

Ultimately, though, I consoled myself with two thoughts: firstly, I always believed that for whatever problems the book had, the world was better for it, and I was sure any student could derive at least a little extra knowledge from it, so it was worth continuing to push. Secondly, I was truly determined to see it becoming a success, and to one day hit this 10,000 mark, not just for myself, but for the many other people who believed in it – my early readers and teachers who’d collaborated on it, and those who’d said how much of a difference it made to them, and especially for my artist Bob, who so kindly agreed to accept royalties instead of payment for the illustrations (something I’m very proud to now be able to send him).

The Slow Rise to 10,000

With the aid of a lot of adverts, first America then the UK, then Canada, Spain, France and Germany, I kept pushing The English Tenses until the market on Amazon eventually caught up to me and my little books ran into too much competition from bigger publishers with greater ad spends. The ads slowly stopped working and I drew back in most locations. Now, I barely advertise The English Tenses, and it looked like it might slow right down when I was so close to hitting 10,000 – but things have come full circle, because I improved and reopened the shop on my own site, and now it’s selling here, too, and that’s helped me reach the target.

Amazing as this is, though, it’s the fact that I still see reviews or receive messages about how the book has helped students, which is truly rewarding. I believe in it as an evergreen, useful guide that I hope will continue to sell, even if only on a smaller scale in the future. For now, I’m absolutely thrilled to have reached this milestone, and thank you for joining me on this journey!

Finally – to celebrate I’m running a big promo for the book, and it’s 50% off in the store through all December! Please share this around!

I’m thrilled to announce that my bestselling grammar guide, Word Order in English Sentences, is now available in audiobook format!

You can skip straight to checking it out on Audible US here (Audible UK here) and it will soon be available from other audiobook providers here. (As a side note, all ELB books are now available from an expanding selection of stores – if they’re not in your favourite online shop please let me know.)

I’ve had a few comments recently that it would be good to hear examples and exercises from the books read out, so this marks the next step in delivering ELB lessons across different media – promoting listening skills as well as teaching grammar.

Word Order in Audiobook Form

Word Order in English Sentences is a fairly short reference book, and the audio version comes out to just 2.5 hours long. It is divided into over 90 chapters, to make it easy to listen to all the numbered sections of the contents with ease.

My vision with this audiobook is that it might be used as an accompaniment to the printed or electronic version of the book rather than on its own, as I imagine these are difficult concepts to learn from a short listen. But I am a visual learner myself, and I appreciate aural learners could find this more useful than reading. With the length, and this perhaps secondary use in mind, you should find it’s currently the cheapest version of the book available.

I produced the book myself, with a lot of help and advice from my brother, a prior musician, and the narrator of my Ordshaw fiction series, Fran Burgoyne, who is a very talented actress and producer. I have read and edited the text myself, in an aim to deliver my own teaching style.

As this is the first ELB audiobook, I’m keen to see what sort of reception and demand it draws. If you find it useful, please leave comments and reviews, and depending on how effective it is I will be looking into producing audiobook versions of the other ELB grammar guides in the near future.

Check out Word Order in English Sentences on Audible here or on all other sites here.

I’m delighted to announce that my latest English learning book is almost ready for release. This is my first exercise book, building on the success of the exercises on this website and the lessons provided in The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide. And it’s been a long time coming – I had planned to release an accompanying exercise book ever since The English Tenses was released 5 years ago, but perhaps the 5-year anniversary is an apt time to finally complete it!

The origins of The English Tenses Exercise Book

I first wrote The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide with to focus narrowly on a fundamental area of grammar that many students find tricky to master. The tenses are the backbone of English, structuring how relate events, but as there are many of them and their uses often overlap, perfecting their use takes a nuanced understanding and a lot of practice.

My first grammar book set out to make that nuanced understanding accessible. At the time, I hoped to follow it with an exercise book to offer a lot of practice on a single topic.

To start with, sales of The English Tenses weren’t strong enough to justify working on the exercises book. But over the years, with improved marketing, the ELB books have reached enough people to warrant returning to my original plan – and I’m happy to say the exercise book is finally a reality.

What to expect from The English Tenses Exercise Book

The purpose of the exercise book is to drill (1) your ability to form the 12 key tenses and (2) your understanding of when to use each tense. It does this primarily through “cloze” exercises, where thousands of examples are offered with the verb forms incomplete. Your task is to apply the correct tense. These examples vary from individual sentences to long-form prose, including short narratives, schedules and dialogues.

As well as cloze exercises, the book includes a selection of conversion, matching, ordering and ‘spot the mistake’ exercises. Each tense form is drilled, then the uses, with many mixed tenses exercises combining and comparing them.

In total, there are 160 exercises for you to complete, each with between 10 and 20 questions (or up to 40 in the longer-form exercises) – as a complement to more generalist grammar guides where only a couple of exercises are offered per topic. My hope is that through doing this monstrous amount of work readers will really cement their knowledge of the tenses (perhaps even just by reading all the examples!).

The book is with my editor now, and will be rigorously tested before its release. I’m currently aiming to release it on December 10th, just in time for Christmas – in both eBook and paperback form. In the meantime, brush up on your tenses knowledge with the grammar guide so you’re ready for the exercises to come!

If you’ve been following ELB for a while, you’ll know I like to run Halloween-themed posts around this time of year. A quick look at the keyword here brings up a range of vocab and reading exercises.

I got started early this month with an article on Shirley Jackson, describing her life and writing. It seemed apt to follow up with a study of an extract of her work. So today we have the opening paragraph of her most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House – an opening praised by a great many people. Read it below and you’ll soon see why – but be warned, this is not simple, everyday English!

The Haunting of Hill House – Opening Paragraph

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

What makes this paragraph so great?

A number of skills connect here for a lyrical whole, including Jackson’s careful choice of vocabulary, superbly structured. The nouns range from simple materials that easily conjure an image (wood and stone, walls, bricks, hills) to the specific larks and katydids, which evokes a more scientific mood and has a nice repeated ‘k’ sound.

Note also that while a lot of writers advise caution in using adverbs, there are many in this short passage: sanely, sensibly, steadily, neatly. They all complement each other, relating to a sense of order – perhaps not what you would expect from a haunted house, but effective because for that reason. This stirs a sense of permanence and immovability – it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more – that is troubling for a haunted house!

The overall style helps build on that image, as the formal introduction (including passive and respectful phrasing, no live organism, by some) makes the story sound serious and creates a more believable atmosphere. 

Another technique Jackson uses which many writers advise caution with is the semi-colon; here, she uses it brilliantly to weave the ideas tightly together. Indeed, this paragraph is only two rather lengthy sentences, drawing together what could be otherwise slightly mundane details in a close, tense flow.

Finally, the imagery of the “darkness” here is strikingly vague. The first sentence speaks of absolute reality, the second of darkness within and, most chilling, whatever walked there, walked alone. And there’s that sharp, unexplained contrast between the first, lengthy statement about dreams and reality and the dismissive aside that the house is not sane. The negatives surrounding this house are all the more unsettling for their uncertainty. This is a technique built on throughout the novel, which owes much of its success to how effectively Jackson doesn’t describe the threat – always uncertain, always frightening…

I hope you enjoyed the opening paragraph – there’s plenty to be said for the rest of the book, too, which is perhaps one our language’s most studied novels. As you can see, even a few opening lines can teach us a lot, so if you’re after a study in top-grade English, or just a good Halloween read, check the full book out now!