You’ve decided to become an author, and you have your first dream of publishing. Friends, family and champagne celebrating in a local bookstore, a book signing session, some press attention, photographs, an article in a newspaper. From there, surely, the only way is up. I’ll burst your bubble now to spare you much pain and disillusionment later. This carefully cultivated vision you have about the life and times of a modern author doesn’t compare to reality for most. For a lucky few, yes, but be careful what you wish for.
Trust me, I’m a survivor. Indulge my analogy from another industry, in another time.
I was thirty-five when I decided to get on the management ladder. Becoming a CEO was my dream. I’d been a coder/analyst in the IT industry for fifteen years. I’d hit a glass ceiling, and if I wanted to break through, I had to let go of almost everything I knew. Learning new skills was paramount. Those were pre-Zoom days, pre-Covid days, normal days. My first step on the journey to the top floor was a five-day residential course in a Bournemouth hotel with twelve other CEO-hopefuls from the Company, run by the strangest guy I’d ever met.
The course began at 9.00 am on Monday. Eleven of us were seated and booted by 8.30. A copy of the Times hovered at the tutor end of the classroom. I could read the front and back pages of the newspaper, but, of the purchaser, there was no sign. At 9.00 precisely, the Times folded itself neatly and revealed the man who would teach us management theory for the next five days. At 9.05, the missing proto-CEO student swanned into the room, found a seat and noisily began to lay out his weapons of learning. In no uncertain terms, he was told that 9.00 was sacrosanct for prompt attendance, and he was expunged from the room until Tuesday. That set the tone for the week.
Each day, the Times was a feature of early mornings, lunches and tea-breaks, and Tutor didn’t socialise in the evenings either. Tutor was legendary in the Company – I don’t remember his name now, but I couldn’t forget it for years, no matter how hard I tried. He was a Senior Programme Director responsible for multi-million-pound software projects across the UK and Europe. I’m glad I never had to work with him, but he taught me many things that week, and one was how to manage stressful situations.
So – you’re an author now, and the demands of the Corporation are behind you. Maybe you too had a similar Tutor experience, culminating in a successful career in – something – but something is now a memory – your tilt at the CEO role has gone the way of all tilts. There is no shame in it, and you are at peace because you’re going to write and everybody will savour your words. You have gravitas, an independent income perhaps, or a fat pension, so there is no need to chase the monkey any longer. Life is good, and you dream of a typewriter waiting in a Caribbean villa, on the sun-kissed shore of a turquoise sea, on account of thumping royalties.
On this writing journey of yours, you will inevitably encounter the publishing industry in all its dysfunctional glory on your way to publishing – or an untroubled retirement beside that same turquoise sea. Traditional paper book publishing as practised in the UK is a confounding experience for new and experienced authors alike – I guarantee it. Literary agents, acquiring editors, rights managers, elite jobsworths with highly expensive educations calling themselves “something in publishing”, all eager to classify your excellent manuscript as “not what we’re looking for.”
Now, your ego has been well and truly punctured. But wait – the publishing Dragon hates to disappoint, so it will soothe your worried brow by predicting, “you have an amazing career in front of you, but not with any of us.”
Cynical? Absolutely.
The job of the publishing Dragon is to make you feel contented and at peace by the rejection. Suppose you ask for clarification about the rejection? In that case, the Dragon will revert to patronise mode to convince you that it was your own lack of care and skill that has caused this unfortunate social situation to arise. If other Dragons reject you, then all Dragons might reject you, and you must do better with your next attempt, next year. Your time, intellect and research deployed these last years to create your manuscript are of no consequence, and the Dragon has forgotten you already. You will be upset, angry, furious, maybe feeling ripped off, muddled, misunderstood and unwilling to go on. Or, more simply put – stressed to the nines.
Tutor’s words of wisdom spoken from a place and time called Bournemouth may come to mind in this situation. The most eagerly awaited session of that week for me and my cohorts was “Managing Stress”. Given the Times behaviour and his other off-the-wall teaching methods that appeared as the week progressed, we all should have realised that Managing Stress would be different. In his world, Tutor was a practitioner who believed in inevitability. He was not one who would seek dubious wisdom from the psychobabble community to soothe the tortured feelings of his students. Managing Stress lasted fifteen seconds, then he moved on. “Stress is your perception of believing in a different reality. To manage your emotions, you have two choices: change your perception or change reality.” If he’d tried to publish a book back then, I like to think he might have framed it like this:
“Once upon a time, there were two realities; Traditional Dragon publishing, or no publishing at all.” At dinner that night, he did explain more about inevitability, in terms that skiing downhill was inevitably easier than skiing uphill. Initially, I struggled to accept it, spending time searching around the edges for more. But no more there was and, as the years passed, I finally learned to ski. Much later, long after my tilt at the CEO role had gone the way of all tilts, I had finally accepted that skiing is why Amazon KPD is inevitable.
Did I hear an elite jobsworth just choke on the champagne?
Wilson Smillie
August 2021