‘Are you ready?’ a kind but optimistic friend asked me a few weeks ago with a look of genuine concern. But I am not on the verge of moving house, getting married, starting a new job or having a baby, all of which might have merited her anxiety. Instead, my friend was cautioning me to prepare for the scrutiny involved in publishing a book.
The analogy is often made between childbirth and the moment of a book’s emergence into the world after a period of largely private gestation. But the unconditional applause given to the parents of a much longed-for newborn, wrapped in a soft blanket, is not guaranteed for the creator of something made of paper and enclosed in unforgiving boards.
Writers are not unusual in wondering whether they should ‘be careful what they wish for’
Up until the birth of the King’s cousin Princess Alexandra in 1936, a birth within the British monarchy had, by law, to be witnessed by a member of the government. The tradition for royal women, especially queens, to give birth in front of an audience was set up to avoid any trickery surrounding a hotly-anticipated heir, perhaps a substitution of a desired boy baby for an illegible girl. And if the gender proved satisfactory, speculation began at once about whether the child would thrive, embed itself in history as memorable, or fade into eternal insignificance? While the practice was eventually abandoned as being too invasive at a moment when respect for privacy matters most, a writer yearns paradoxically for their creation to have a public birth, while at the same time dreading the unpredictable assessment.
With the less than 1 per cent chance of a book being taken on by a publisher, gratitude at the good fortune of actually getting into print ought to be the overriding emotion. But writers, to follow a cliché that should probably have been edited out, are not unusual in wondering whether they should ‘be careful what they wish for’. One opinion can ruin a day, whether it appears in an accredited literary publication or as a low entry on the merciless scoring system of the Amazon books page accompanied by a review titled ‘Do Not Waste Your Money on This Trash’.
I write from direct experience. Even the opinion of an innocent individual can bring potential despair. My grandfather, a writer, was once on his way home on a train, delighted to find himself in rare circumstances. Sitting opposite was a stranger engrossed in one of my grandfather’s books, nodding in approval as he turned the pages. When the man got up to find the washroom, leaving the book on his seat, my grandfather quickly annotated the fly-leaf with the snappy sentiment ‘to an appreciative reader from an even more appreciative author’. But on his return and resumption of the book without noticing the new, personal message at the front, my grandfather’s erstwhile fan suddenly and inexplicably became enraged by what he was reading and, in a fit of indignation, stood up, flung open the window and hurled the offending book across the railway tracks into the oblivion of the passing meadows. My grandfather said not a word, willing the hasty arrival of his station stop so he too could vanish into the grassy ether.
But there is something worse than scrutiny and that is the lack of it. On my virginal publication morning many years ago, before a time arrived when I could look at a review in the half-light of my telephone screen, I was the first customer to arrive at our local town’s newsagents, a swift whip-through the newspaper revealing zero column inches had been devoted to my book.
But all was not lost. I noticed that a copy of the book was just visible in the far corner of the window of the adjacent bookshop. Adopting an expression of surprise and modesty, I went inside, assuming the other copies were piled up behind the counter in anticipation of the rush. I explained I was a writer, in fact the writer of a book in the window! I would be happy to sign the stock. A tiny hiatus followed, in the form of irritated mutterings and an exasperated clambering into the bay of the window until the single display copy had been retrieved from its place almost submerged beneath the pile of Goddess Nigella’s latest bestseller and handed over for a shaky signature. Bookshops have a way of becoming emotionally dangerous environments for the nervous author-in-waiting, places for them to steer clear of, where every other title screams ‘competition’.
And as I enter the final trimester of the pre-publication limbo, there is one other thing I have learned from experience and that is not to re-read a single line of my own book. The moment of arrival is looming and it is too late to change a thing.