25. Getting Published – Again!
Getting published – again: Your second book hits the shelves, and life goes on…
Through happy chance, my first book hit the bookshops as I was waking beside the Mediterranean, celebrating my 10th wedding anniversary in style (see blog #15). When my second hit the shelves on 8th September 2016, I was dropping the kids off at school and then running between meetings all day dealing with the day to day crap of real life.
You can’t always have your cake and eat it.
My publishers took me out for a quick lunch which I manage to squeeze in between yet more meetings a few weeks later, and sent me a nice bottle of champagne, which we’ve still not had the right occasion to open.
The point I’m clumsily making is that, like many authors, I still work for a living full time. Whilst getting published is undoubtedly like winning the lottery, aspiring writers should not expect to jack in the day-job and buy a sports car any time soon. That’s not to say it’s impossible. Catch the latest zeitgeist, get on the right celebrity pick list or win a prestigious award and you may indeed be off the races. It can happen for you and I hope it does. But if it doesn’t, you might find yourself looking around at more successful authors and wondering – why not me?
This is a mug’s game. And a risky one. Start chasing the commercial success of others and you might start trying to write more like them and less like you. My advice – Try instead to remember why you started writing, what you wanted to say and do, and that you got published for writing your book in your style.
I’ve said this before, but if writing what you know is the old mantra then writing what you’d want to read should be just as important. There are plenty of writers knocking out deliberately commercial books that I simply wouldn’t want to read, even if I had the time – some, mentioning no names, writing more or less the same book over and over to rapturous applause. If fame and fortune are your goal, knock yourself out. But if you got into writing for the love of it, the irrepressible itch to get the words down and wrestle them in submission, symmetry and meaningful storytelling… then when you finally do see your work in shops, let it be with unquenchable pride. Measure your success in that, and sod the sales figures!
All that said, if you do manage to run into a bookshop towards the end of publication day when you should really be running for a train, only to find your beloved masterpiece isn’t on the shelf yet, you are allowed to feel a little crestfallen. It’d been a long day. I didn’t cry.
In the end, I didn’t get to revel in the sight of Between The Crosses on sale next to If I should Die for over a week, but it swelled my heart all the more, and still does.
(… So much so, that I’ve raced (by my slow standards) through writing the third in the series and now have a first draft – start, middle and end with no gaps. I’m taking a couple of weeks off to free my head in a couple of titles from by towering TBR pile, before I read Book#3 front to back to see what shape it’s in (see blog #3). There’ll be plenty of polishing to do before I send it off to my editor, but right now, I’m riding high.)
