The Newcomer’s Guide to Competition Fencing available now
The Newcomer’s Guide to Competition Fencing by Robin Catling is available on Amazon now in e-book and paperback editions.
Lose yourself in timeless fiction from literary greats
A collection of one hundred stories in unabridged audio from BBC Sounds. A collection of timeless fiction from the literary greats from Austen to Elliot, Dickens to Maupassant, Conan Doyle to Wharton.
Seven Deadly Fears of Writing
What’s been stopping you from producing that magnum opus? Taken from the opening of Jurgen Wolff’s 2007 Your Writing Coach, what follows is our take on his Seven Deadly Fears of Writing; those fears that stop would-be, and even some professional writers getting on with the job of writing.
Artwork for blog posts
As I have to keep telling clients, the bad old days of text-only blogs is over. Every post needs at least one image at the top so that it has some visual interest on the page and in any list of search results. You need not only to find that image, but know how and…
How-to: Write a Blog Post
A couple of years ago, I calculated that I’d racked up about four and a half thousand blog posts across all my personal and professional projects. Yes, I’ve been doing this a while. I won’t say there’s a set formula (if there is, I break it regularly), but there are definitely good practices.
Outlining a book
Sixty, seventy, eighty thousand words or more. That’s your typical novel. Somehow you have to get to there from a blank page. Unless you’re an accomplished free-writer, that’s where an outline can help.
The Art of the Good Cover: the Re-design (re-post)
Back to where we started. Earlier this year we revamped The Art of Foil Fencing with a new cover because the original was, well, terrible. It didn’t even fit alongside our other draft covers on our imprint, never mind anyone else’s. In a search results list, you’d swipe right past it. Something had to be…
The Art of the Good Cover: Rules for good covers
Earlier this year we revamped The Art of Foil Fencing with a new cover because the original was, well, terrible. So what are the ‘rules’ for good covers?
The Art of the Good Cover (re-post)
You should never judge a book by it’s cover. But that’s exactly what we all do. The book stores are full of fantastic books with terrible covers that are never read. And also full of amazing covers selling terrible books that only disappoint. Which is why you have to create the best cover you can…
Understanding the ISBN (re-post)
Let’s start with the basics: ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. It’s an international system of identifying books by assigning a unique identifier to each separate edition of a book. This not only identifies the publication, but also the different formats in which it is available.
Re-boot for 2020
In the current state of lock down, an online spring-clean seemed in order and this blog is once again the creative centre for anything that isn’t movie, tech or fencing-related. New sites are up, old projects and sites have been closed down and Everything Express has been put to bed, Proactivity Press has opened for…
