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.

What’s changed?

I started ELB in 2013 with the intention of sharing the tips I was using in my teaching, and gradually expanded this to cover tips relating to my writing and editing work, as my professional focus drifted into these areas. As I’ve done less teaching and tutoring over the last 6 years or so, I’ve had less material to share, but I kept finding things to dip into because the site continued to be so popular, and I wanted to keep helping people who came looking for it.

Two things have made this much more difficult. The first is that my own professional circumstances have taken me into areas that feel much less relevant to ELT, so it’s harder for me to focus on material worth sharing here. The book market and online advertising overall are forever shifting and I’m sad to say I can no longer make a reliable income from my books – this year, I’m looking at sales as low as when I first turned to self-publishing full-time, about 8 years ago. Necessarily, I’ve had to adapt, and that’s taken me away from here (and I’d terribly aware of not having been able to produce the books I wanted to for this site).

Secondly, and far more discouragingly, though, my website traffic has seen a huge decline in the past year or so, especially over the past six months. This has coincided with the rise of reliance on AI in search engines, and in writing overall, so that search engines no longer send visitors to original articles, instead presenting their own (often erroneous) AI summaries that discourage onward website travel. And when people do click through to a website, the ones that top search engines are now more likely to be ones that recycle others’ content.

Whereas before it was good practice to release a monthly article to encourage more people to visit my website, now it feels increasingly unlikely that I’ll reach an audience with my writing. For 10 years, I was steadily growing an audience, reaching more people with time, but now it’s the opposite, with visitor numbers rapidly declining.

The situation is actually a lot worse than just reaching fewer people, though, because the proliferation of AI tools that scrape and copy existing writing without any legal recourse means that when I put effort into producing any original material, it’s likely to be stolen and reproduced by someone else rather than linked back to my own site. The AI summaries in search engines, after all, present this entire process in miniature.

So, while I appreciate there are still a lot of you reading, as it’s costing me more time and money for diminishing results, and especially when what I write here is likely to be stolen anyway, I’ve had to focus on other commitments. In fairness, not wanting to pile all this on the shifting landscape of the internet, this has converged to make it too hard for me to give this site the focus it needs.

What Does this Mean for ELB?

This may all sound rather bleak, but I have no intention of shutting this website down – it does still reach people. Right now, I’m seeing the same number of visitors in a week that I used to see in a day, which is much fewer, but not insignificant.

The website itself isn’t hugely expensive to keep up, though the newsletter is a bit of an outgoing, especially when I fail to send anything. I’m very grateful for my Patreon supporters, but this has never covered the costs of the site, and it’s probably only fair that I start considering shutting down the subscription platform, if I’m not producing more material.

But I do have plenty of existing material left to offer, and over the next few months I want to send out something more substantial to my loyal and eager readers, before I review where I’m at and come up with a fresh plan for 2026. So, on a more positive note…

Free Books for All!

I have four books available to help foreign learners, and I want them to reach as many people as possible while I still have some semblance of a platform to reach. Seeing as it’s become so hard to even get people to read the free articles on my website, for the next four months I will cycle through each book as a free gift, with a little introduction and retrospective on each.

Next month, I am going to offer the complete book of Word Order in English Sentences for free on the web store (possibly with a donation option, if anyone feels kind!).

I will follow this with the other books: The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide will be free in October, the Exercise Book in November, and Advanced Writing Skills in December.

I’ll announce each of these through the newsletter, so you’ll see it first here. If I can find time, I’ll also try and keep more of the archive messages going, to revisit old content, and following these releases I might dip into some broader retrospective looks at the archives, to curate the existing material. There’s so much still up on the site, I’d love for people to keep discovering it.

I’m not sure where I’ll take things after that, but it feels like a better use of my newsletter and my money to be sharing my books, even if for free, than to keep paying for my site and my email list with nothing new being shared.

It just feels like there’s so much greed, and hate, in the world at the moment, which is only growing as it actively suppresses what used to be a much freer and more generous online experience. My platform here might be diminishing, but as long as people are still visiting, I’d like ELB to be somewhere that continues to give a little hope, and a little help, to anyone who wanders across it.

Have a lovely day – and keep learning!