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!