Ten Basic But Important Rules For Authors
Never expect anyone to read your book, even if you sent it to them for free. Do all you can to keep yourself in a non-presumptive state that will lead to a feeling of pleasant surprise if a fellow human reads your book.
Don’t let people whose job it is to think about the numbers that books sell influence your artistic decisions. If making artistic decisions was their strong point they’d probably not have a job centred around sales figures.
DO listen to good, harsh editors. And if they make you cry, go for a long walk, then come back and look at their suggestions with fresh wind-dried eyes.
If you are struggling with motivation, train your brain with treats, as you might train a puppy. (“Just one more paragraph without barking and you are permitted to eat this attractive cocktail onion on top of a small wedge of cheddar!”)
Get a good chair. Books are worth sacrificing nearly everything for, but the successful functioning of your body is hugely dependent on the health of your spine, which holds everything together, and nothing - not even books - is worth sacrificing that for.
Keep notebooks - real, physical notebooks - and never shy away from jotting down the weirdest thought that pops into your head. Prioritise physical notes over digital ones, always. Take your notebook everywhere and treat it like a valuable that is more important than your wallet or phone, because it is.
Research can be whatever the fuck you decide it is. If it’s contributing positively to your book, it’s research.
Don’t read books that sound, on the surface of things, like they’re going to be a bit like yours.
Do read books that sound, on the surface of things, like they’re going to be an entire planet away from yours.
Never pay any attention to ‘10 BASIC BUT IMPORTANT RULES FOR BEING AN AUTHOR’ lists on the internet.
Once upon a time I didn't quite understand what people meant when they said "gut feeling". These days I do. What's more, gut feelings are something I have learned to trust. This time last year I was about to publish a novel called 1983. A shortish, often silly novel, admittedly, laid out on a less epic canvas than its predecessor, but a novel which had been a huge, transporting pleasure to write and which I was told, by those closest to me, was my best book yet. Yet I felt uneasy, like I was forcing out a positive outlook beneath a sky criss-crossed with dark signs. Though I couldn't quite pinpoint it at the time, what that turned out to be was a gut feeling that something not quite right was going on with my publisher, that their airy positivity and obfuscation in the face of the questions I asked them about the book’s release concealed grave problems. A year on, that publisher, which was called Unbound, no longer exists, nor does the similarly named one its bosses arrogantly started from its ashes after clearing their debts to authors and readers via a formal insolvency procedure, and I and dozens of other writers must face the fact that we will never be paid the money (many, many thousands of pounds, in my case) we are owed for years of work. All my most recent seven books suffered as a result of Unbound’s failure but perhaps none - in terms of promotion and distribution- more than 1983, which was released in hardback just as the publisher began its death rattle. But as I have learned repeatedly, during almost three decades of writing for a living, good things can come out of bad things. I consider myself fortunate that, a week today, 1983 gets a second chance via my new publisher, Swift Press. It can be ordered here, with free worldwide shipping, via Blackwell’s UK. It will be followed shortly by my all-new novel Everything Will Swallow You (if you pre-order this from Blackwell’s you get a first edition hardback signed by me) and the republished Villager and Help The Witch on September 11th, the republished 21st-Century Yokel and Ring The Hill on October and the republished Notebook in spring.
Oh, and I got married last week.
It’s been quite a nice summer, so far. I prefer it to the previous one, that’s for sure.
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