Book Signings

Most people assume that book signings are a standard fixture of authorial life. You write a book, it gets published and whoosh, there you are behind a table in Waterstones. There are a number of problems with this, the least of which is getting published in the first place.

In fact there are three phases of an author's life during which they do signings. These are, in dramatic order:

PHASE TWO

FAME AT LAST

In this phase you have made it to the big time. Your publishers have had posters and standees made to promote your latest opus. You sit next to a cardboard cutout of yourself and look down the queue of expectant fans. You are pleased with its length although you're also slightly hungry. What happened to the promised catering? Still, you have come a long way and life is good. You cheerfully sign a hardback with the signature you spent an undisclosable length of time cultivating. Someone remarks that the cardboard cutout looks bigger than you actually do. You laugh nervously and think about this throughout the rest of the signing but daren't look at the standee in case it comes across as egotistical. Occasionally you sneak a glimpse. If anything it looks smaller. Your stomach rumbles. You wonder whether you really need to be doing this. The queue seems endless.

PHASE THREE

FICKLE FATE

I hope you enjoyed resting on your laurels because you're going to have to sell them and buy the following: 

• One card reader (cash boxes are so last century, just like you.)
• Two felt-tipped pens (the second is a spare which you will never use.)
• A box of returned stock given to you by your ex-publisher in lieu of payment (as per the small print you glossed over in your contract.)

Your stomach is rumbling again, but this time there was no suggestion of catering. If you can sell anything you can treat yourself to something from Tesco later. The relative size of the standee is like a fever dream of another life. The only material difference between yourself and the homeless person on the pavement outside is that the staff at the bookshop let you use the toilet.

PHASE ONE

GOOD LUCK

This is where most authors start out. It could well be your first and only book signing, so you may as well enjoy it. If you are lucky, friends and family may have attended out of a sense of loyalty, or perhaps because you have heavily hinted there will be free drinks. Thank each of them for coming because without them the only people in the room are likely to be staff and one rando who has walked into the scene and feels it would be indecent to leave hastily.

Do not drink more than one glass of the cheap wine you have supplied. Nerves may lead you to lose track of your consumption and before you know it you have ruined Dave's copy of your book with a drunkenly executed signature and compounded the disaster by tearing out the defaced page. Try instead to save any thoughts of drink for after all five copies have been signed, even if that does mean the boxed sauvignon blanc is mysteriously above room temperature by then. Do not dissolve into hysterical laughter and crawl under the table. By doing so you may inadvertently knock it over, sending  unsigned books and a plastic wine glass to ruin each other on the bookshop's horrible carpet.

You may, in a naïve pre-shadowing of phase two, be wondering why you are bothering with this absolute charade. There are two main reasons:

• Advertising the signing in the bookshop should garner some prominence for your book. There may be a display, or at least a poster. It increases the chances of people outside of your social circles seeing it. Even if they don't go to the signing, they may pick up the book and read the blurb. Then, if you're really lucky, they might buy it.
• The first week of sales of a book is usually the most important. This is when the biggest push can propel it into a chart. This is a numbers game and the more niche your genre the more chance there is of charting. But regardless of genre, the launch is the time you want to combine the forces of everyone within reach. Should you be lucky enough for this strategy to succeed, there is then the possibility of selling more because of the book's chart visibility. The dream is that this becomes a self-sustaining reaction, propelling your book into the orbit of phase 2.

The reality is that people will come, people will go, and the charts will remain untroubled by your name. In the meantime enjoy your moment. You have written an actual book that you can hold in your hands. More to the point, other people can hold it in their hands and read it. Friends can finally see that you weren't just doomscrolling Twitter all that time. They will ask you to sign it for them and you will jokingly ask who to make it out to but your timing will be off because of the awful wine and they will wonder whether you have genuinely forgotten their name. You will sign the book in awkward silence with an unpracticed spider scrawl because you so rarely sign anything anymore. Ninety-seven thousand words is apparently not enough, you think. They still want more. Your stomach rumbles, protesting the cheap plonk you've given it instead of food. This was probably not it. Chin up, you can always write another one.

If you do find yourself on the cusp of phase one, here are some tips for making the most of it:

• Sign Neil Gaiman's books. He does this all the time, especially in airports. There is a very real possibility of beating him to the punch, and if he can decipher your scribble he may post about it on social media.
• Sign on at the Job Centre instead. You can get money this way, and average more signings per year.
• Write a best-selling novel, thus guaranteeing a great turnout. It sounds so simple when put that way, but it's worth a shot.
• Suggest that you have a fatal illness. People will come out of sympathy and perhaps guilt that they've ignored your literary genius until now. The downside of this is that at some point you will have to unconvincingly recover or fake your own death. However the latter does have the further advantage of never again having to do another booking signing.

AI Training

I thought I should revisit the world of AI to see what the current state of the art is. I've heard it's been quite busy churning out terrible fiction to flood Amazon with and make agents nail their inboxes shut. There is also now much debate about the moral dimension of large language models given their tendency towards plagiarism due to their training data. I don't want to be accused of ripping anyone off, even if I did borrow that biscuit story from Douglas Adams or Jeffrey Archer, depending on who you believe.

Knowing a thing or two about programming, I decided the ethical way forward was to train a model of my own using my own writing. This went well enough at first, producing a series of pastiches of some of my short stories. They didn't make much sense though. Maybe the stories they were trained on didn't either, I wrote a lot of them a long time ago. One of them was about an electric pig trying to make it as a stand-up comedian. Fanciful stuff but ultimately meaningless.

I did some more reading around the subject and refined the language model with the hope that it would produce something more inspired than this Burroughs cut-up stuff. I must have screwed something up because it started churning out stories where I was the protagonist. Also, unlike its previous efforts, these were quite mundane. I skimmed through them. There was one where I forgot to set my alarm and was late for work. In another I bought a sandwich from Tesco and a pigeon shat on my head. It was late, and I had work in the morning, so I called it a night. A superstitious doubt made me double check I'd set my alarm.

The next morning, despite taking such care over the alarm, I overslept and was late for work. I spent the morning trying to ignore a growing dread and walked past Tesco to get a sandwich from Pret. The queue in Pret was enormous. There was apparently something wrong with the card readers and the staff were struggling for change. Deciding I was being stupid and not wanting to spend my entire lunchtime shuffling through a shop, I abandoned the queue and went to Tesco. I bought an egg and bacon sandwich. I eyed the sky suspiciously as I left. With a wry smile at my silliness I strode confidently up to my office building, whereupon a pigeon shat on my head.

That evening I read the language model's output more carefully. It hadn't said I'd forgotten to set the alarm, it said I had accidentally turned it off while double-checking it. I read the pigeon one again too and it included a brief aside inside a branch of Pret. Nervously I read on and found another that accurately described my commute home, including the tube station gate that makes a noise like Chewbacca when it opens.

This couldn't be right. Was I perhaps still dreaming, even if I don't usually recall my dreams in much detail? Or was the large language model imagining all of this, including what I'm now typing, on my behalf? It was an existential conundrum. With some trepidation, I asked the model for more stories.

This time I read them very carefully. They still featured me but this time they were a tad more exotic. In one, my regular morning commute will be interrupted by an escaped rhinoceros. Later that day, I will apparently go to the moon in a balloon shaped like a rabbit. With what is surely the most exciting day of my life ahead, I closed down the laptop and had an early night. Maybe AI isn't so terrible after all.

Unpacking

I recently went on a very big holiday. It was long, and it was expensive, a bit like one of those huge Toblerones you see in airports. I won't go into the details of where I went as I don't want anyone to form any undeserved suspicions of a jet-set lifestyle on my part. Suffice it to say that it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. It was something I'd often thought about, and something which required a lot of planning. It was booked nearly two years in advance, and during all that time the anticipation was very sweet indeed. I did research into what to expect and more crucially what I would need to pack. I bought and read books about the place, soaking myself in it. Then, as the actual event became a reality, I worried that my preparations were inadequate. I became anxious that plans within the holiday itself would go awry, but it was too late by then to do anything, so off I went, into what was certainly one of the most remarkable experiences of my life.

You may be asking yourself why I don't just get over myself and tell you where I went. Initially I didn't want to say because I felt it detracted from the point I was going to make, and that point is this: On returning from this truly epic trip, jetlagged and wearied by the Picadilly Line, I began the tiresome task of unpacking. It occurred to me that this unpleasant feature of the end of a holiday is in many respects like that of writing a book. You had the initial excitement of the original idea. This, you thought, has legs. At this moment it is all things. Like the holiday before it's booked (no pun intended) it can be anything and go anywhere. Then however, you have to make choices. Narrow down your options. Book the holiday. But there is still the fun of the anticipation. Doing the research, selecting further possibilities within the framework of what you have committed to. This is a great period because you can be creative with consequence. Ideas can flow freely without necessarily having to connect to one another.  But then comes the holiday itself, and in this analogy, the writing of the first draft. At this point you have to firm up your plans and get everything in a coherent order.

It is at this stage that my analogy breaks down somewhat. I am not comparing writing a first draft to going on a dream holiday in terms of the pleasure inherent in either. That would be ridiculous. The holiday was wonderful in every way. Hammering out a first draft is more like running a marathon. The finishing line is rewarding but getting there is a slog. What I'm comparing (and I'm keen to clear this up before I accidentally introduce any more analogies) is the one-way direction of narrative. Once undertaken, your holiday itinerary becomes fixed. And once written, so does your first draft.

So what of the unpacking? Well, this tedious post-event chore has to be done whether the event was going on a lovely holiday or finishing your first draft. Note I didn't say writing  your first draft. This can for some be an awful chore in itself, but I think everyone can agree that completing one is a thoroughly satisfying event.

The first draft is of course the first major step towards completing a novel, but it needs reviewing. You need to examine everything in it and ensure it is in the right place. It needs unpacking.

It doesn't have to be unpleasant. Think about what you've already achieved! This is a bit like looking at all the photographs of penguins you took on your expedition to an unspecified continent. Didn't you have a good time? Of course you did, but now it's time to get back to work, whether that be editing a second draft or removing a leaking bottle of sunscreen from the Ziploc bag you had the foresight to seal it in. This last part isn't a metaphor for anything, it's just advice. Seriously, always seal your sunscreen before packing it.

Squirrel War

Approximately a million years before the pandemic I worked in the beautifully turquoise and evocatively named Zetland House near Old Street. While there I got into the habit of having lunch in Bunhill Fields. For anyone unfamiliar with the place, its full name is Bunhill Fields Burial Ground and it's a cemetery of some significance. There aren't many places where you can hang out with Daniel Defoe while you eat your sandwich. In fact there's only one, and it's this one.

It is also an oasis of calm next to what was the very busy Old Street roundabout, a place so choked with traffic that at one point even the giant Google beach ball grew impatient and tried to escape its intensity. In Bunhill Fields however, it's just you, the trees, and the dead. You can barely hear the traffic, and the dead keep their own council. 

This isn't strictly true. There are the trees and the dead but there are also the animals. And it's the animals that I want to write about. I've had two strange encounters with them in this place. The first one involved crows. You of course know that the collective noun for crows is a murder, but on this occasion I witnessed a suggestion for the term's origin. There I was  eating my sandwich (There was a great sandwich bar near Zetland House which gave me increasingly large fillings. I've no idea whether it's still there) when said murder of crows ascended from a branch. The branch was weak, probably rotten, and the collective thrust of (I will say it again) a murder of crows was enough to snap it off and send it crashing into the autumnal detritus below. I have no doubt that if anyone had been standing there the consequences would have involved an ambulance at best.

My second animal encounter happened not while I was writing, but while I was on the phone. I had some quite complicated personal business to attend to and so wasn't really paying attention to anything happening around me, so it was quite a surprise when I began to realise that I had wandered into the middle of a war.

This war wasn't reported on the news. John Simpson was nowhere to be seen and Kate Adie was otherwise engaged. It took me a while to appreciate what was happening, but while I was dealing with my boring human business, the squirrels were going into battle with the pigeons. 

I first became aware of it when several pigeons swooped past me like feathery F1-11s. I thought it odd that they were flying so close, but then my eyes were drawn to the railings around the graves, where there were not one but two squirrels perched. They were actively watching the incoming pigeons, and as I took in the wider scene I could see that the pigeons were trying to scare off the squirrels, while the squirrels were very much standing their ground. Moreso, they were aggressively chasing away any pigeon that dared to land.

What had started this feud? Was there some super-stash of food within the graveyard that both sides coveted? Was it Daniel Defoe? Whatever it was, it was fiercely contested. As I began to appreciate the magnitude of what I'd walked into, a squirrel approached me. It advanced a little more and I froze. We looked each other in the eye and it advanced some more. Where the hell was I? Geographically I was still in Bunhill Fields but psychologically I was somewhere quite alien. I was being stared down by a squirrel and the squirrel was winning. This wasn't my fight and I didn't even understand the war I found myself in. And so I left, uncertain of my place in the order of nature. From then on I avoided that side of the cemetery, even though the other side included murderous crows.

How to Publish a Book - Rejection

 (Excerpt from How to Publish a Book by Timothy L. Marx, 1928)

I recently received a rejection from a notorious literary agent who I won't name because they are also very litigious. This is of course fine. Not everybody is going to love your book and there are many reasons for rejection beyond quality. It could be that they are about to publish something similar, or that they currently have as many clients as they can manage, or that they are a vindictive so-and-so who, unbeknownst to me, has been involved in a vicious feud with Cuthers' father since they were at Eton together.

Even so, it is important not to take rejection personally, even if it is entirely personal. I had intended to keep the news of this particular rejection from Cuthers, but somehow word reached him via the gossip vine that this tiresomely grudgeful agent has been going around saying the novel is the worst thing to happen to English literature since Thomas Chatterton visited the chemists. Cuthers became so enraged by this that Barrington had to advise him that such language was against club membership rules.

The rage has continued to burn all week, very literally in one instance which required me to form a one-man fire brigade. Dogger Davidson tipped me off that he had just seen Cuthers leave the club with a box of matches and arsonous intent. After quickly finding the intended victim's address from the telephone directory, I hailed a cab and made my way there post-haste. I had hoped to arrive before the dangerous fool, but on arrival I found Cuthers lighting strips of newspaper and attempting to push them through the letterbox. Fortunately he was as incompetent an arsonist as he was a writer, and he was doing more damage to himself than his critic's residence.

I gave him a royal dressing-down and sent him packing. He acquiesced with an indecent rapidity. I didn't want him to burn the house down, but if one feels that strongly about something one shouldn't just give up at the first obstacle. There was still a smell of burning in the air following his departure, possibly from the sheer amount of newspaper he had worked his way through. There was a nagging fear in the back of my mind that he may have been more successful before my arrival. That fear nagged its way to the front of my mind. I put my nose to the letterbox and smelled smoke. I couldn't risk walking away if there was a chance that something was burning within, so I rang the bell vigorously, but nobody came. It would have to be up to me to deal with the emergency.

The doorway was sheltered, and so with no ready alternative I unbuttoned my trousers and poked my chap through the letterbox. It was an unpleasant means of extinguishing a fire, but on the whole I thought it less of a problem than the whole house burning down. There were only two problems. The first was that nothing was immediately forthcoming. The second was that as soon as things had taken a turn for the productive, the butler answered the door. There we both stood, me with my chap hanging out like a Blackpool sunbather and him with wet trouser legs. 

"I can explain everything," I said, although I had no desire to explain any of it. He stared at me with the sort of benign malignance his class thrive on. I imagined how explaining everything would go, and so hoping that all my publicity work was as hopeless as my sales figures indicate, I turned and bolted away, with my tail literally between my legs.

Procrastination

Almost all writers spent an inordinate amount of time procrastinating. Any that don't are presumably too busy efficiently using their time by some magical process I cannot grasp. It can take the form of some mundane task that absolutely must be done right at that moment and is definitely more important than writing, like hoovering the flat, or cleaning the bathroom.

I'm no stranger to those options and my flat is never cleaner than when I'm supposed to be writing. However there's only so much time you can spend cleaning. My flat is tiny. For true commitment to avoiding serious time at the keyboard, you need a project. Ideally the project should be something just beyond your actual skillset. You could take this as an opportunity to learn something new. Alternatively it could become an endless source of despair as you repeatedly fail to complete it, adding deliciously to the guilt of having not written a single word during the process.

My latest project is fitting some blinds in my living room. I live in a new build flat with floor to ceiling windows that get the sun from dawn to dusk. It gets hot. Really, really hot. My previous solution was some thermal curtains and they were not up to the task. I have even resorted to attaching thermal insulation to the windows. The insulation is basically silver bubble wrap and applying it makes my flat look like a cannabis factory. Given how hot it gets, maybe I should just set up a cannabis factory.

In the interests of aesthetics I thought some blinds would be better. I have already bought some wooden blinds at some expense. They were hopelessly unsuited to the task and I sold them at a considerable loss. So far so good. The next plan is to try some cellular blinds. These concertina down to form a series of insulating cells of air. At least that is the theory. In practice I expect they will be rubbish. However before I can test them I need to make a wooden frame for them as I don't want to drill into the metal window frames. Who knows what would happen if I did that? In IT there's the notion of 'letting out the magic smoke.' I'm not sure what the architectural equivalent is, but I imagine it's horrifically expensive.

I am of course wondering what my plan is once I've wasted my time with the cellular blind. The nuclear option is to brick the fuckers up. In all seriousness I could perhaps block the lower sections. That would help perhaps? Or perhaps not. The worst of the heat is feeling it directly on my head while I'm trying to work, and that's not coming from below.

Ideally I would be able to apply a thermal film to the outside of the windows, but I've looked into that and it involves hiring a cherry picker and closing the road outside, so it's fair to say that's beyond my budget. Some sort of shutters would be good too, but the same applies there, with the added complication that the housing association probably won't allow them. There are safety implications, which I suppose is fair enough, but at this point I'm happy to sacrifice the occasional passer-by if it cools the place down a bit. I do have a portable air conditioner, and given the environmental consequences of its use I suppose I am already sacrificing strangers to keep the heat at bay.

How many strangers would I be willing to sacrifice for the sake of my own comfort? Is this a question the Pharaohs wrestled with as they considered their journey to the next world? Was a pyramid effectively the ancient equivalent of an Uber XL with the AC on full blast? I should reconsider bricking up my windows. I could be living in a modern pyramid. If location is everything, imagine the property prices in the next world.

How to Publish a Book - Self-Promotion

  (Excerpt from How to Publish a Book by Timothy L. Marx, 1928)

There are many despicable aspects of this grubby business and to my mind none are worse than the requirement to bare your existence to the world in the manner of a cockerel or post-prandial parliamentarian. Indeed it shares many aspects of the latter, and the hopeful author has to ingratiate themselves to their public like an eager candidate standing in an election. There are perhaps less babies to kiss, although that may depend on the age of your readership.

In my case the situation is made intolerably worse in that it isn't myself I am shouting from the treetops about, it is that infuriating dullard Cuthers. How on earth has he managed to write a book? I cannot wring any sense out of either the predicament or the book. It's quite extraordinary, and yet I find myself de-facto literary agent for this unliterary creature. He of course has no qualms about crowing his genius from whatever high perches present themselves. You might be tempted to ask what my problem is in this case? Why don't I just let the great clod get on with it while I salve my nerves with some French Rumbo's at Hubbard's? The problem is that too much confidence is off-putting. Also the more Cuthers voices his opinions, the greater the body of evidence against his wits amasses. My job has become that of a moderating presence, a notion that I'm sure would be greeted with much guffawing should I volunteer it at the club. Whenever he speaks, I must be ready to cut short any digressions into politics, race, or, God forbid, cricket with a furious wiggling of eyebrows or a well-timed fit of coughing. The confidence of the man is bafflingly boundless and I thank heavens that he is still a bachelor as the thought of him populating the world with similar offspring is enough to send me to my grave.

In order to sell your books you will need to sell yourself. I do not mean that in some vulgar Whitechapel way, but more that you should be prepared to be seen out and about and be entertaining while doing so. Public appearances are an essential chore. There is a good circuit of speaking arrangements at gentleman's clubs and societies that can put you on the right track, but be careful not to overdo it or your audience will tire and withdraw, or worse, throw over-ripened fruit at you. This has only happened once and jolly funny it was too, but professionally speaking it was something of a set-back.

One tactic that can be effective when used carefully is to align oneself with a controversial cause. This will garner much publicity, but caution should be applied lest you move from notable to notorious. I offered this advice to Cuthers, which was in retrospect a terrible blunder. Lacking any sound judgement, he immediately allied himself with a deeply unpleasant fascist brigade and at the time of writing is hiding in a bedsitting room in Waterloo while various interested parties from the police to rightfully incensed members of the public seek him out. If he were to be arrested or soundly beaten that might make my life easier. I wouldn't need to manage his public appearances and the scandal would be sure to shift a few copies. But alas that would then be the end of the matter and I have already run up considerable debts during this folly, particularly at the club. There is talk of my membership being revoked, and being associated with someone now believed to be a fascist really isn't helping my case, even if half the old duffers in that place would probably agree with some of the fascists' talking points given the claptrap they come out with before they slide out of their armchairs.

The only way I can see out of this mess is to announce that Cuthers was in fact infiltrating the fascist organisation in order to conduct research for a forthcoming book exposing their dastardly ways. Then I can get him to show support for Battersea Dogs Home or something similarly innocuous. With luck everyone will forget about the exposé because he certainly isn't capable of writing it and I'll be damned if I'm taking the task on.

In the meantime I am quite enjoying the brief period of peace that this episode has brought on. While Cuthers is in hiding I'm spared his constant wittering and whining. In fact in an effort to prolong this state of affairs I've taken to disguising myself with a hood and hammering on the door of his bedsit to dissuade him from any thoughts of leaving. So all in all perhaps things haven't worked out so badly.