Why Authors Are Mad
… let me count the ways!
Neurotic tracking of reader’s reviews and their ratings on amazon.co.uk… and .com… and any website ever which has ever sold a book. Keeping graphs of sales figures for all territories in which the novel has sold, in the believe, that perhaps knowing the state of the thing will allow you, a lone writer sat alone in a lonely room, to Make It Better. Visiting not only your local bookshop, but every bookshop within a five to ten mile radius, offering to not only sign any (if any) copy of your works that you might find, but turning them all cover-out, occasionally over the book of your enemy if you’re feeling spiteful. Engaging in long and fruitless online discussions with people who, inexplicably, don’t think that your book is the greatest thing ever written ever. Recruiting your mother… and aunts… and uncles and cousins… to do the same. Fear the power of a proud grandmother, for her name is Terror in the bookshops of Europe.
Writing angry letters to critics who don’t think – impossibly! – that your book is the best book ever, in which you outline the ways in which they got it wrong and why they really shouldn’t be in their jobs. Stalking critics who criticised. Hiding from publishers and editors who disagreed. Offering up every form of emotional and physical blackmail – tears, threats, genuflections and indecent acts – to a PR lady who stubbornly refuses to spend £50,000 on posters advertising your book on the London Underground. Writing earnest letters to publishers, newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV stations, attempting to explain why they should talk to you and how interesting you (and your works) truly are. Phoning your editor at 11 p.m. at night to ask – nay, to demand – why your book is only number 2 on the Bestseller list, and yay, why it has not verily reached the top and then burst straight through it. Writing hate letters to cover designers who you think Got It Wrong because Christ knows, if your tome – ‘Five Different Flavours of Snot‘ – hasn’t sold very well in the U.S., it’s invariably because of the cover art, rather than the content.
Hand-drawing and printing flyers advertising your own book which you hand out to strangers at conferences, conventions or quite possibly anyone who you meet in the street. Carrying a copy of your own work to show to admiring strangers at a first encounter, with the immortal words, ‘as luck would have it, I just happen to have a copy about my person now….’ Paying thousands of pounds to a PR specialist to inform you that you are great, you are brilliant, and it’s only the fickle nature of the market which means your work won’t ever sell. Trying to play the online algorithms so that, no matter the search on amazon, or indeed on google, your name is always the highest hit.
Having illicit love affairs with dangerous people to raise your public profile. Attending parties where no one knows you but blimey, how you try. Nominating yourself for awards and boycotting the ceremony where you did not win. Attempting to acquire a second career as a glamorous journalist, or a sexy actor, or someone – anyone – who people will notice, admire and, of course, inevitably, read. Quietly dismissing the works of rivals, making loud, political statements that you don’t really believe but which you hope will get you noticed. Resolving, in the end, to throw in gratuitous sex because it sells well, or, failing that, sexy vampires because they’re in vogue. Conducting flawless, ruthless studies on the sales figures of Harry Potter to try and corner the market, and see whether you can do it again.
Failing all that, there is at last the Elvis solution. Dying, as his agent put it, did wonders for Elvis’ career. And after all, none of this is about you. It’s simply about your art.
