About Blue Flame
An independent publication about the business of writing — and why it started.
What this is
Blue Flame covers the business end of writing: advances, royalties, rights, contracts and what publishing actually costs. Craft only where it is practical. No motivation, no “ten tips to unlock your creativity” — the internet has enough of those, and none of them tell you what a bad royalty clause costs you.
The reason to exist is narrow and specific. A first-time author cannot easily find out what a normal advance looks like, what a standard royalty rate is, what “all rights, in all media, in perpetuity” really costs them, or whether a service quoting them £2,000 is fair. Almost every site that answers those questions is selling one of the services in question. That conflict is the gap this fills.
When it started
Blue Flame started in 2026. It has no heritage, no decades-old founding, no acquired archive — it began when it began, and we would rather say so than borrow a history we don’t have. What it has instead is a method: publish the numbers, source every one of them, and date them.
Who runs it
Blue Flame is edited by an independent team with working backgrounds in publishing and editing. Articles carry the Blue Flame Editorial Team byline rather than individual personal brands, because the standard we want to be judged on is the sourcing, not the personalities. Where an article states a figure, the figure carries its source; where it explains a clause, it links to the model contract language it is drawn from. You do not have to take our word for anything.
Three conditions we hold ourselves to
- Publish the numbers. Advances, royalty rates, editing costs, what a bad contract term costs you — with a source and a date on every figure, and an honest “insufficient public data” where none exists.
- No borrowed history and no invented authority. We say when we started and what we can and can’t verify.
- No review-swapping. No “[site] review” pieces, no reciprocal arrangements, no link exchanges.
What we never publish
- Vanity-press or paid-publishing promotion.
- “Get published fast” content.
- Fee-charging contest and award listings, unless flagged as such.
- Unchecked AI-generated content. We use AI to help draft, but every article is edited and fact-checked against its sources by a person before it publishes — see our AI policy.
- Paid guest posts, or recommendations we haven’t tested.
How the site makes money — and the money it refuses — is set out in full on the disclosure page.