As promised in my most recent blog post, over the next four months I’m going to give away each of my books on this website, starting with Word Order in English Sentences.

If you missed that post, I thought it time to put out the books a bit more freely, given that the website is growing less visible and I am unable to post as much. So, for the whole month of September, Word Order in English Sentences is free in my store!

In honour of the book, I’ve prepared a look back at its history, from where the idea came from to how well it sold and where it’s taken me today.

Where did Word Order in English Sentences come from?

When I started out making this site, my first focus was the tenses, which has somewhat remained my main area of interest on here. I had in mind to produce The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide from the start, but it was my wife, a foreign learner herself, who suggested looking at sentence structure as a simpler and more universal starting point for a book.

And that has proved to be the case: this remains my bestselling book across all areas and genres.

It’s gone on quite a journey to get there: I originally produced the guide as little more than a pamphlet, at about 60 pages long. I’d compiled thoughts from some of my textbooks and online resources to present the basics of sentence structure as I saw it – a simple system that takes you through word types to phrases and clauses. It was by no means comprehensive.

It was also originally available for free, to encourage people to join my newsletter.

However, at the same time I was working on publishing novels, so I thought to upload it to Amazon and put it in my own store as well. I was surprised to discover that people started buying the book, even though it was available free.

After a couple of years, when I had produced The English Tenses Grammar Guide and was struggling to sell that, it became apparent that people were still more interested in the Word Order book, so I revisited the topic and polished it up, expanding it into a 2nd Edition, with extra exercises and additional topics.

I no longer gave it away for free, and when I finally cracked a system for advertising The English Tenses, it was once again this book that sold more.

A Bestselling Guide

I never expected this little guide to go as far as it did; when the adverts started working, it quickly jumped to the top of various grammar categories on Kindle, and it stayed there. In fact, Word Order in English Sentences was the bestselling grammar guide on certain Kindle groups for the majority of about two years, rarely leaving the top spot, let alone leaving the top ten.

This probably says more about eBook grammar guides at the time than the book itself – it really wasn’t selling that much to maintain that top spot (over some six years of consistent sales, its grand total now is about 16,000 copies). But it was still a wonderful achievement for such a small and unassuming book.

Things weren’t always smooth, though. I’ve always been aware that the guide itself is limited by my own lack of expertise across different areas – this was, after all, a basic system that I thought was useful for understanding English, not an extensive academic study of the different ways sentences can be described. I have thankfully faced fairly limited criticism for that, though there has been some.

The biggest blow to the book came around 2019, when a plagiarised version of the book surfaced on Amazon, and I wasted some two or three months trying to get it taken down. Amazon were not interested in helping me, especially as the copied version was selling so well (it had hundreds of fake reviews to help it along, including reviews directly copied from my own books). This sapped a lot of energy and enthusiasm for me, and hit me financially, but I kept up my efforts.

It seems strange to think how long ago that was now – my sales never fully recovered, and have gradually declined since then, but I did manage to keep the book selling reasonably well until about two years ago when the advertising really became untenable. So while 2019 was the book’s true peak, a good 4 years or so of strong sales did follow.

Word Order Today

When I first released this book, I wasn’t aware of any simple guide that was quite like it. I’ve seen plenty of copy-cat guides appear in the meantime, though, making Word Order one in a crowd. I hope some have expanded on the topic and improved on what I started, but I’ve not reviewed any personally.

I no longer advertise the book, but it’s still out there, and I’m happy to say while it’s long past its heyday, the book does continue to sell. In the meantime, to keep its messages going, I also summarised the content of the book into one article on this website, which you can read free here.

I’m glad people are still finding it, and thinking it worth reading and purchasing, and it’s in the hope of it continuing to help learners that I’m running the promotion this month. All that remains to say is thank you to everyone for all your support of this book over the years. I’m sure it wouldn’t have gone half as far without keen readers keeping it in mind and telling others about it!

If you haven’t read the book yet, it’s now available in my store free, until the end of September 2025.