A free studio for novelists
Master the craft of historical fiction.
The past is not a costume. It is a set of limits, manners, dangers and desires that your characters cannot step outside. This site is a working guide to writing that world so readers will live in it — and to placing the finished book where they will find it.
Four rooms
Everything a historical novelist needs on the desk
The genre
Definitions, the readers who buy it, the sub-genres that sell, and the tropes they expect.
OpenThe craft
Word counts that agents accept, how to begin, and how to keep a reader turning pages.
OpenThe market
Authors to study, houses that buy historical fiction, and how to position a book — trad or self.
OpenThe desk
Writing guides chosen for this genre, with Amazon.co.uk links for the working novelist.
OpenThe contract
What historical fiction is — and is not
Historical fiction is a novel set in a past the writer did not personally live — usually fifty years or more before publication — in which the era is not wallpaper. Clothes, law, faith, money, medicine, marriage and war all constrain what a character can want and what they can do. Invented people may walk through real events; real people may be given invented rooms. The promise to the reader is the same: this could have happened, in this world, to someone like this.
It is not a textbook with dialogue. It is not costume drama that thinks in this decade’s slogans. And it is not a licence to “correct” the past until it flatters the present. The full map of definitions, age groups, sub-genres and tropes is in The Genre.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
At a glance
Length, readers, and the shelf
Adult novel
90–120k
Debut sweet spot around 100,000 words. Romance runs shorter; epics run longer once you have earned them.
Core readers
Adult
The commercial heart is adult women 30–70. YA and middle-grade historical are distinct markets with their own lengths and stakes.
How it sells
Both doors
Literary prizes and supermarket tables. Position the book on a clear shelf — wartime, Tudor, dual timeline, romance — not as “a story about the past”.