it will feel real
The day your first book comes out will be the best day of your life. You’ll do an interview for BBC Shropshire, appear on a podcast hosted by a couple of SOAS DPhils, someone with a Substack you once read will review your book for the Swindon Advertiser. You’ll go to your book launch, where everyone you’ve ever met will be in one room, and you’ll feel like a rock star. You’ll get drunk and make a slightly foolish speech where you talk about the power of storytelling and compare Boris Johnson to Heinrich Himmler. Your editor will give a speech where they make wild claims about your literary significance. The audience will cheer. Your parents will be proud. Your friends will look at you with new found respect. You’re a writer now. Your words matter. Your judgements matter. People will treat you with a certain reverence.
but there’s a club and you ain’t in it
I regret to inform you that the Daily Mail is correct and the luvvieish London media world does, in fact, exist. These people work at Channel 4, the Beeb, the Observer, etc. and they look after their own. Membership of this club will secure you a blurb from Caitlin Moran, an appearance on Good Morning Britain, and a serialisation deal in the Times (Sunday edition).
You are not in this club.
there’s another club and you ain’t in that either
Your average Literary Review piece is Stephen Spender’s grandson favourably reviewing the latest novel by Cyril Connolly’s great-niece. Both reviewer and reviewee are agented by Vita Sackville-West’s daughter’s son-in-law and once a year all three holiday on Stephen Runciman’s nephew’s cottage on the Isle of Mull. Unless you have memorised Debrett’s you would have no way of knowing this – but it’s true.
Newsflash: you are also not in this club!
there will be no events
Which may actually be a good thing. Most literary evenings for no-name authors have an audience size of zero. While the pages of The Fence are no place to offer medical advice, trust me when I say that explaining your book to five rows of empty chairs is bad for your mental health.
there will be no literary festivals
Which one will it be? The Jaipur Literary Festival? Hay Cartagena? A little jaunt to Brooklyn, San Fran or Aspen? Oh come on, you’d settle for Edinburgh, Cheltenham perhaps, or the one held in that country house where appeasers used to meet in the 1930s.
Such, such are the daydreams of writers-to-be. Surely once you’re published your inbox will be brimming with invitations to literary festivals? You’ll travel the world! You’ll swap jokes in the green room with Ian McEwan! You’ll stalk around a stage wearing one of those weird headsets you’ve seen on TED talks!
