When I decided, maybe a decade ago, that I was going to spend a considerable chunk of my life having a serious crack at writing novels, I developed a little fantasy.
At the time, I was spending my days making little green ticks on a printout of numbers, checking that those numbers matched up with another printout of numbers. Both sets were obliquely connected to the London Underground, who were paying me, I think, £5.50 an hour. That worked out at about a tenth of 1p per tick, for almost six months. I had a lot of time to think.
What I often thought was this: one day I will have a novel published. When I do, on that very day I will walk into Borders Books, just down there by Oxford Circus, and buy my own book with my own credit card. And, as I do this, I will stare into the smug shop assistant’s eyes and see if they have noticed.
It would have been at about this time that I bought my first copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. You have to, when you have decided to be a writer or an artist. It is the only proactive step you can take. You stare at the lists of publishers and agents and magazines and newspapers, and they look like a code that you have to crack.
In the right combination, you tell yourself, this is your way in. And you’re wrong, of course. Or, at least, not entirely right. You also have to write something. It took me a while to realise this.
Advertisement
Of course, even once you’ve written something or, indeed, several somethings, your job isn’t done. You then need to sell it — to an agent, then a publisher, then everybody else. These three sales, I think, get progressively harder. I was lucky. I wrote a book about a gossip columnist. Then, somewhere around the second sale, I actually became one.
This was helpful. For me, hopefully, it has made the third sale a bit easier. It has won me mentions in newspapers, a few reviews, the chance to write articles such as this, and the occasional appearance on radio. I’m very fortunate. The big fear, I have come to realise, is not that you get bad reviews. It’s that you get no reviews at all.
So what is it like, finally publishing a novel? Well, it’s weird. Even if, like me, your proper career also involves getting paid for writing things, it is still very, very weird. However much you try not to care about it, the stakes are so much higher, and you have to. You may as well be honest about this — you google yourself constantly. Amazon sales rankings become supremely important even if you haven’t a clue what they mean. For me, a high point was when the website decided that, apparently based on my past purchases, I might enjoy reading my own novel.
And my fantasy? Well, I bottled it. For one thing, they didn’t have my book in Borders. So I went down the road to Waterstone’s, pulled it off the shelf and looked at it. Also thrilling. But then, when I got to the counter, I noticed that the shop assistant was actually a few years younger than me. Not so smug at all. Maybe trying to write a book of his own. So I stared at my feet, blushed, and paid with a tenner. Maybe next time.
Overexposure, by Hugo Rifkind, is published by Canongate, £9.99