Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : literary advice from quill to keyboard

Part I. From fictioneering to Wattpad

Learning fiction by subscription : the art and business of literary advice 1884–1895

“You will be surprised that fiction has become an art” : the language of craft and the legacy of Henry James

“Your successful man of letters is your successful tradesman” : fiction and the marketplace in British author’s guides of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

“Do you use a pencil or a pen?” : author interviews as literary advice

“Stand out from the crowd!”: literary advice in online writing communities

Part II. Case studies of literary advice

Tools for shaping stories? Visual plot models in a sample of Anglo-American advice handbooks

The “ready-made-writer” in a selection of contemporary francophone literary advice manuals

Taking self-help books seriously : the informal aesthetic education of writers

A pulse before shelf life : literary advice on notebook-writing as event

“Writing by prescription” : creative writing as therapy and personal development

Part III. Adopting and resisting literary advice culture

Reproduction as literary production : self-expression and the index in Kenneth Goldsmith’s uncreative writing

Creative writing crosses the Atlantic : an attempt at creating a minor French literature

“Mostrar, no decir” : the influence of and resistance against workshop poetics on the Hispanic literary field

Work and the writing life : shifts in the relationship between ‘work’ and ‘the work’ in twenty-first-century literary-advice memoirs

“If you can read, you can write, or can you, really?”