Publication day, and a book launch

 Thursday 13th February 2025, a day that shall live in infamy...

Yesterday my debut novel 'The Unrecovered' was published, and we had the book launch at Golden Hare Books in Stockbridge, Edinburgh. (A short informative sentence that encapsulates pretty much everything I've been working towards for about 25 years.)

In the afternoon my editor Alison took me around various bookshops to sign stock (which made me feel like a proper writer) and then in the early evening we headed to Golden Hare.

Mary Paulson-Ellis was the best chair I could have hoped for, an incredibly astute reader who steered the conversation into very interesting terrain. It's a strange thing to discuss your work like this, because it forces you to examine much of what is either inchoate or intuitive in your writing, teasing out themes or correspondences of which you might not have been consciously aware. I also did a short reading and fielded questions from the audience, and the hour was over much faster than I thought it would be. It was great to catch up with old friends and to see the novel firmly launched into the uncertain seas of literature. And then to start drinking heavily afterwards.

I have heard other writers speak of a strange sense of anti-climax once a book has finally been published, but it definitely feels like a point of culmination for me, having spent so long trying to get here. Reviews and sales and so on are all out of my hands now, and not really worth worrying about (although obviously I hope for colossal critical and commercial success...) The reviews so far have been great and hopefully there are more to come, but the book is the thing. It's out there now, for people to spot on a table or a shelf in the bookshops, to read if they choose, or to pass over in favour of something else. I certainly hope people take a chance on it.

Stage Two, and a trip to London

 On Wednesday (30th October) I was down in London at the Raven Books showcase event, in the suitably evocative surroundings of the Gothic Bar in the St Pancras Hotel. I was there to pitch The Unrecovered to an audience of booksellers and books media, alongside the writers Nicola Whyte, Holly Watt, Rosie Andrews and Stuart Turton, who were all there to pitch their books too. There was a brief Q&A with my editor Alison, and then there was plenty of time afterwards to chat to people and sample the free booze. More importantly, it was a chance to meet people from the Raven Books and wider Bloomsbury team who I've been emailing for months now, but hadn't actually seen in person yet. Thanks in particular to Alison, Emily, Abi and Therese for making everything far more enjoyable than I'd hoped, and less stressful than I'd feared!

This kind of thing very much doesn't come naturally to me, and it was a step up from the proof drop experience a couple of months ago. I truly hate the cliche of the closeted neurotic writer, but when you spend a lot of your time on your own, it can be quite a strain to force yourself outwards again and dig deep into an atrophied fund of small talk. It's important to do so though; publishing is a business built on the relationships developed between writers, agents, editors, marketing professionals, booksellers and reviewers, and they're relationships that need to be cultivated. Plus, when a publisher offers to put you up in a nice hotel and buy you dinner, any writer worth their salt will automatically say yes, or I don't really know what they're doing in this business.

I had a meeting with my editor beforehand as well, to go over the next round of edits on my second novel. Everything here is on track, so I'll be getting back to work on it over November/December. This was the first time I've been to Bloomsbury's beautiful, labyrinthine offices, an opportunity worth the trip in itself. 

Next up, I've got 1000 sheets of endpapers for the independent bookshop edition of The Unrecovered to sign, which I'm hoping to get done over the next couple of weeks. I haven't quite figured out my approach to this yet, and I've no idea what my signature's going to look like after 999 previous attempts, but I'm hoping to get about 200 signed a day. Perhaps that's optimisitic, but we'll see ... 

Stage One, and a lot of shoe leather

 For the last couple of days I've been going around various bookshops in Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders, escorted by the incredibly hard-working David (the Bloomsbury sales manager (or as we used to know them in the bookselling trade, the 'rep')), handing over proof copies of my novel The Unrecovered. Day One saw us taking a long drive to St Boswalls and the wonderful Mainstreet Trading, then on to Biggar and Atkinson Pryce, then up to St Andrews and Toppings & Co., then to Linlithgow and Far From the Madding Crowd. Day Two was all the Edinburgh shops, including Argonaut, the Edinburgh Bookshop, Toppings, Waterstones, the Portobello Bookshop, Lighthouse and Blackwells. I was disappointed however to see only one quality bookshop dog (at Lighthouse Books). [Note: the only reason Edinburgh's greatest bookshop, Golden Hare, was left out of the list is because I live with the manager and it seemed a redundant stop on the itinery. I add this only because I wouldn't want the casual reader to think I had an obscure grudge against them.]

The 'proof drop' is something that's developed over the years since I last worked in a bookshop, but the idea is to personally introduce both yourself and your novel to the people who are actually going to be putting it on their shelves and (hopefully) selling the thing. It tends to be more for debut writers, and it's a strange business that doesn't quite come naturally to me. Once I'd eased into it after the first couple of visits I found it strangely enjoyable though. It's actually quite pleasant meeting the booksellers, drinking their tea and eating their biscuits (and bribing them with biscuits of your own), and getting a chance to talk about your book. I quickly developed a short pitch to explain what the novel was about, although by the end of the second day I was fairly sure I never wanted to hear about another 'gothic-historical novel set towards the end of the First World War' again, so who knows what the booksellers thought. David also took what felt like hundeds of photographs of me awkwardly posing outside these bookshops, wielding the proof like a shield, and I've promised myself not to look at them if/when they go up on Instagram.

Apart from providing a little glimpse behind the curtain of how all this works, which wasn't unexpected given how long I worked in bookselling and publishing myself, it seriously underlined for me how much basic pavement-pounding and shoe leather goes into getting a book into a reader's hand. Writing the novel began to seem like the easy part; the hard part starts when sales and marketing roll up their sleeves and get cracking.

So, Stage One is complete: the proofs have gone out, and supportive quotes are being gathered (which deserves a blog post of its own). Next up is the Raven Books showcase in London at the end of October, when I'll have to talk about the novel at scale...