What To Expect When You’re Expecting (A Book)

What do we ‘deserve’ once we have written a book? For the amount of blood, sweat and tears that goes into them, I would say ‘everything’. We deserve our books to be Sunday Times Bestsellers, instantly go to number one, stay there for weeks. We deserve to be in the front window of bookstores, on those centre tables that greet customers when they walk in. Hell, we deserve booksellers to be pressing them urgently into people’s hands. We deserve billboards pasted with 12ft high posters of our books. We deserve those revolving digital screens in railway stations. And we deserve to be reviewed (favourably, of course) in every newspaper, and invited onto every TV and radio show to be interviewed.

We deserve all that and more. But, sadly, that’s not how things work in publishing (or, in fact, in life). You see the publishing world is all a bit of a gamble and it involves quite a lot of bet-spreading. Because there is no magic formula that will make your book a bestseller, there is hard work, but there is also a LOT of luck.

Yesterday I saw a post by British TV presenter Stacey Duguid who published a book, In Pursuit of Happiness: Mating, Marriage, Motherhood, Money, Mayhem in hardback last year. 

It was pre-empted by her publisher, which usually means she got a favourable deal, and it is about to be released in paperback. From a quick internet google it seems she had some great publicity around the release of her hardback, she was interviewed in various newspapers, and reviewed very favourably in The Times, this is the stuff that many authors can only dream of. But in her instagram post yesterday she said she wished she had never written the book:

‘… I wish I hadn’t written the book. Wish I hadn’t bared my entire fucking soul and then some. Wish I hadn’t had that nervous breakdown. And for what? Nice comments, good Amazon reviews? Nope. It wasn’t worth it. It broke me. I presumed by telling my story every fucking nook and cranny – because of course, I WENT THERE – would have some rewards… It wasn’t worth it.’

She says in her post that she turned down work to spend six months writing a book that ‘hasn’t really sold well’. She says she is now selling her house, though I am unsure how this is related. She says her book is found in the health and wellbeing section and that booksellers ‘don’t know where to put me.’ She says she feels she was left alone to promote the book on her instagram page, and she mentions another book which is currently sitting at number one in the Sunday Times Bestsellers chart, MILF – Motherhood, Identity, Love and F*ckery by Paloma Faith. Her publisher, she says, sent her an email saying that this book sounds ‘eerily similar’ to hers, and so I guess her question is why has this one reached the Sunday Times number one spot and hers hasn’t? Two books on motherhood by two women in the public eye? How come one gets the top spot and the other doesn’t?

This is a hard thing for writers to witness, and yes, you might feel frustrated that it isn’t fair and your publisher could have done more, or they expected too much of you in terms of promotion. None of this is fair, but … this is the publishing life and perhaps this is harder for those who are not writers to handle, perhaps that’s why celebrities are often compensated financially far more than the writers who are doing the hard work day in, day out.

It is hard to see one of your peers experiencing success with their book when you think yours deserved equal success, but this I’m afraid is a very common experience, and one you need to get comfortable with if you want to write books. Because the world of publishing is unpredictable, it is a gamble, it involves a lot of luck. And sometimes when our book is not the great success we had hoped it would be, we forget that we were lucky once too: lucky to get a book deal in the first place, lucky to be reviewed in a national newspaper, lucky to be interviewed to promote that book. There have been lots of lucky steps along the way and now it’s time for someone else to have a bit of luck.

I’m reposting this piece that I wrote about experiencing envy as a writer because I think that we don’t talk about this often enough. There are some ugly feelings that can come up, but they are very natural.

As my bestfriend reminds me, the tide rolls in, and it rolls out again. Some days we have good fortune, some days it feels we lose it all.

The problem with social media is that we write a post to express this and potentially p*ss off our publisher in the meantime.

I do think writers should talk about feelings of envy more, and in the post above I wrote about how I deal with mine. But all I think you can do when that green-eyed monster strikes is be as generous as you are able to be, congratulate that other writer, make reference to your own book writing on a similar theme. And remember all those people still trying to get a deal, dealing with rejections, longing for a chance to be in the position that you are in.

Writing books is a feast or famine lifestyle. Mostly famine. If you have a second career as a TV presenter, you’re one of the lucky ones.

We all get a turn at luck rolling in, but we’re not entitled to that luck, we don’t deserve success simply because we wrote a book, remembering that is how we can be grateful for it when it comes, and not knowing when luck will strike is one of the unexpected joys of life.

The tide rolls in, the tide rolls out…