You just might have an invaluable writing tool in your pocket or sitting on your desk right now. A smartphone. It’s a modern gadget with a key function that can have a fantastic impact on your life as a historical fiction author. It has on mine. From note-taking to...

The idea that another language gives us a second soul comes from Charlemagne. As a polyglot and ruler of a multilingual territory, he understood what other languages meant to individuals and to societies. Tolstoy understood it too. In War and Peace, his aristocrats...

For many writers, marketing a book is the hardest part of the publishing process. It requires us to go out into the world and smile at people and make them like us — all the reasons we chose to become writers in the first place (not). And after a while, all the book...

Women are the primary buyers and readers of fiction today, so it’s unsurprising that many writers choose to center their historical novels on women characters. Not only is writing about women a savvy marketing decision, it’s also interesting—historical novels about...

If you’ve spent any time lurking on the web recently, you’ve probably come across the intellectual debacle that is ChatGPT. It’s an AI processing tool that can generate written content in seconds, and writers are… concerned.Is AI the death knell of human creativity?...

We all know how valuable research is for our writing, and don’t we just love the research! It’s so easy to get stuck into a book, visit a library, find just the right archive. But it’s also so easy to get sucked into the research, almost forgetting your original...

Marketing is not a dirty word. It is simply introducing people to your book. Nor does it require a six-figure budget and a legion of Mad Men type executives. Anything you do to tell people about your book is marketing. However, whoever said "There's no such thing as...

Choosing the right names for your characters is crucial, not least when writing historical fiction. A character’s name, whether it be short and simple, or flamboyantly hyphenated, can convey a surprisingly large amount of information, and requires as much careful...

What are dual or multiple timeline novels? Essentially, these are novels which contain two or more separate storylines that alternate, eventually converging in some way by the end. In dual timeline historical novels, past events are woven with contemporary events, and...

Christmas in your story is a great way of marking time, bringing people together, and giving readers something to enjoy. But although Christmas seems unchanging, beware of assuming your characters will do the same as we do now. Christmas is a rich confection, added to...

One of the joys of historical fiction is to provide insight into the motives and emotions of characters living through historical events. Story writers plunge into characters’ minds, exploring their thoughts, in a way that is impossible for historians. Many novels are...

Gothic writing has chilled and inspired countless authors, and there is no reason why you can’t add a touch of the dark and brooding to your own historical fiction.  However, writing gothic historical fiction is more than just slamming a big button saying ‘Tim Burton’...