The Heartbreaking Loneliness of Long Distance Running (With Scissors)

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The Heartbreaking Loneliness of Long Distance Running (With Scissors)

Yesterday morning I finished formatting The Lives and Loves of Hana Lee for Smashwords, so it is now available to download there, and if it passes formatting muster will soon be available for sale in the Apple store and various other places.

Last night I managed to get it on to Goodreads.

This morning I woke up thinking the whole thing was pointless and that I was wasting my time and almost certainly heading for disappointment, disillusionment and clinical depression.

I don’t like mornings like this, but they are par for the course.

It’s got me thinking.

One of the good things about being published by a traditional publishing house – such as HarperCollins, who published the Bête de Jour book – is that you have occasional conversations with publishing professionals – either editor or agent in my experience – and they say things like, ‘We’re going to make a lot of money!’ or ‘I see this book sitting alongside A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Running With Scissors‘ or ‘You really have written a brilliant book’ – and you, on hearing these things, despite yourself, you think, ‘Wow! These are publishing professionals! These people know what they’re talking about. Surely, finally, I cannot fail.’ And that feels good. More than the flannel (which you’re cynical and world-weary enough not to fully believe anyway), you feel like you’re not alone.

One of the horrible things about being published by a traditional publishing house is that, when the book doesn’t immediately start flying out of bookshop doors, you realise pretty quickly that you are in fact completely alone.

One of the good things about self-publishing is that it’s all up to you. Everything is up to you. So you can do what you want. No one’s going to be pissed off with you if you say something inappropriate on your blog. No one’s going to promise to do a million things for you, then let you down and do none of them.

One of the horrible things about self-publishing is that you are in fact completely alone.

And some days, when you wake up on your ailing mother’s living room floor and your back is aching and you realise you haven’t properly kissed a woman for well over a year – I mean, properly – and you know that your book’s chances of getting even a tiny percentage of the attention you feel it deserves are infinitesimal, well … I don’t know. It’s tough. And then when you realise – whilst in a static unsmiling queue at the doctor’s surgery – that you’ve been doing this for very close to 30 years….

It’s upsetting.

But you have to keep going. Obviously. And you have to accentuate the positive. Apparently.

Speaking of which, here are the reviews the book has picked up so far.

They’re all good, which is nice, and even nicer is that I’m not sure I actually know everyone who’s written them, although let’s face it, at this very early stage, I probably do.