An exploration into the development of the literary advice industry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this book examines popular author guides of the period, offering insight into the origins of writing advice, and reconstructing debates about the relationship between the author and their public, literary value and the teaching (and teachability) of creative writing. Making clear connections with the advice offered to aspiring writers today, Paul Vlitos historicizes the fields of creative writing and literary criticism, tracing to their origins some of the enduring platitudes of pedagogy whilst studying the matrix of attitudes and circumstances out of which they emerged. Works explored include George Bainton's The Art of Authorship (1890), Arnold Bennett's How to Become an Author (1903), Walter Besant's The Pen and the Book (1899), E.H. Lacon Watson's Hints to Young Authors (1902), Percy Russell's The Literary Manual; or, A Complete Guide to Authorship (1886) and The Author's Manual (1890) and Leopold Wagner's How to Publish a Book (1898).

In addition, Vlitos places the period's writing advice in dialogue with contemporary, fictional depictions of the literary life, demonstrating how authors each presented their own versions of what it might mean to be a writer in a changing economic and cultural landscape. Featuring such fiction as the short stories of Henry James, George Gissing's New Grub Street, George Paston's A Writer of Books, Edna Lyall's Derrick Vaughan, Novelist, Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan, Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage, H. Rider Haggard's Mr Meeson's Will, George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways and Sarah Grand's The Beth Book, this book offers striking new readings of texts both canonical and neglected, bestselling and consciously high-brow, to shed light on how the idea of an author, in its modern sense, is articulated.