Nine tips for a launch party
Like a ship being committed to the water, my second novel, Fortunate, has just been launched and to celebrate the occasion we had a launch party. When my first novel was published, I searched the internet to find ‘How to run a book launch’. This netted a heart-breaking and worrying piece from an author whose launch was attended by just two others. Lesson: get firm commitments and offer cake. Apart from that sorry tale there was not much else out there, so here are a few tips for any other about-to-be-launched authors or for readers who are curious about this aspect of a writer’s world.
1. Here you are, at last, mingling with those who are going to be the most important people to you in the world over the next few months: your readers. Up until now the imaginative landscape that you have been living in whilst writing your novel has been unpopulated by anyone except you and your characters. But now your readers are going to live in the same world as you and feel the same emotions as they make their journey in the landscape that you’ve created. C.S. Lewis wrote, ‘We read to know that we are not alone.’ But we also write to know that we are no alone. The launch is the moment when you open the door to your imaginative realm and invite your readers in. But what is going to surprise you is this: your readers will make their own, unique, path through your landscape, enriching your own vision with theirs. Their comments and insights become a conversation. That’s when you know that you are truly not alone. Thank them.
2. A launch is also the occasion to publicly thank those who have helped smooth the way to publication for you. Whilst fingers on keyboard was you alone, a little thought will unveil to you an army of family, friends and industry professionals, without whom you would either be an emaciated or skeletal figure by now or be messily binding your book yourself with glue and tape.
3. Make sure your signature is presentable. I write my signature in my medical work well over one hundred times a day and each takes me half a millisecond as is just a brief spasm of my fingers - which the pharmacist recognizes as so cryptic that it could only be a doctor’s signature. However this is not good enough for your book which should be signed with the artistry of a calligrapher. I’m working on it.
4. Rehearse the names of the people you know. In the extreme excitement and pressure of the evening it’s possible, particularly if you are closer to fifty than thirty, to be seized by a sudden mental paralysis so that the name escapes you when you are asked you to write: To my dearest friend … . If they won’t help you as your pen hovers rather too long over the page perhaps you can ask, ‘Do you spell your name with a Q?’ This may be sufficiently puzzling for them to mouth their name to themselves to check. If you’re good at lip reading, your problem is solved.
5. Your publisher or agent may wax lyrical about you even if you are at that stage of your novel-writing career where your name appears on the cover of the book in the point size that loan companies use for their small print. The praise will severely embarrass you. You will just have to live with it.
6. You will be expected to give an entertaining speech. If you are like me, although you’re happy to spread 100,000 words over the pages of your novel, you would rather eat your manuscript than speak in public. But just like learning the techniques of writing, it is possible to learn the skill of speaking. The alternative is to tell your publisher that you are a reclusive genius and your silence is part of your mystique. Be prepared to have to find another publisher.
7. When you read out a short passage from your novel you don’t have to follow what is printed on the page. Choose a passage where the tension builds (but stop on the cliff-hanger) and skip passages that are not essential to the build up. The moment of climax in your reading does not have to be one that’s a high point in the book - that might require an impractical reading of the preceding three chapters.
8. Prepare for the commonest question that you will be asked: ‘Is this autobiographical?’
Maybe your novel is. In which case you are likely to prove the saying that the greatest catastrophe to befall a family is to have a writer in its midst. I answer by quoting the Czech writer Milan Kundera who put rather well the relationship between the characters in a book and the author. He said that the characters in his novels were his own unrealized possibilities … Each character had crossed a border that he himself had circumvented.
Despite your novel not being your ill-disguised life history, or a searing and amusing (to you) depiction of your friends, you will find having a novel published an exposing experience. Libby Purves, writing in The Times, points out that the characters and scenarios in a novel have emerged from somewhere not normally exposed to public view; a hidden place in the depths of the writer’s head. Hence a feeling of nakedness as the book is finally open to public dissection.
9. Enjoy it. You have no idea whether the ship that you are launching is going to disappear on a downward trajectory when it hits the water or float across the globe in glory, but the launch marks the culmination of years of work and so let the champagne fizz. Your nearest and dearest will also be enjoying the occasion when they can finally draw a line under it all. Until the next one.
1. Here you are, at last, mingling with those who are going to be the most important people to you in the world over the next few months: your readers. Up until now the imaginative landscape that you have been living in whilst writing your novel has been unpopulated by anyone except you and your characters. But now your readers are going to live in the same world as you and feel the same emotions as they make their journey in the landscape that you’ve created. C.S. Lewis wrote, ‘We read to know that we are not alone.’ But we also write to know that we are no alone. The launch is the moment when you open the door to your imaginative realm and invite your readers in. But what is going to surprise you is this: your readers will make their own, unique, path through your landscape, enriching your own vision with theirs. Their comments and insights become a conversation. That’s when you know that you are truly not alone. Thank them.
2. A launch is also the occasion to publicly thank those who have helped smooth the way to publication for you. Whilst fingers on keyboard was you alone, a little thought will unveil to you an army of family, friends and industry professionals, without whom you would either be an emaciated or skeletal figure by now or be messily binding your book yourself with glue and tape.
3. Make sure your signature is presentable. I write my signature in my medical work well over one hundred times a day and each takes me half a millisecond as is just a brief spasm of my fingers - which the pharmacist recognizes as so cryptic that it could only be a doctor’s signature. However this is not good enough for your book which should be signed with the artistry of a calligrapher. I’m working on it.
4. Rehearse the names of the people you know. In the extreme excitement and pressure of the evening it’s possible, particularly if you are closer to fifty than thirty, to be seized by a sudden mental paralysis so that the name escapes you when you are asked you to write: To my dearest friend … . If they won’t help you as your pen hovers rather too long over the page perhaps you can ask, ‘Do you spell your name with a Q?’ This may be sufficiently puzzling for them to mouth their name to themselves to check. If you’re good at lip reading, your problem is solved.
5. Your publisher or agent may wax lyrical about you even if you are at that stage of your novel-writing career where your name appears on the cover of the book in the point size that loan companies use for their small print. The praise will severely embarrass you. You will just have to live with it.
6. You will be expected to give an entertaining speech. If you are like me, although you’re happy to spread 100,000 words over the pages of your novel, you would rather eat your manuscript than speak in public. But just like learning the techniques of writing, it is possible to learn the skill of speaking. The alternative is to tell your publisher that you are a reclusive genius and your silence is part of your mystique. Be prepared to have to find another publisher.
7. When you read out a short passage from your novel you don’t have to follow what is printed on the page. Choose a passage where the tension builds (but stop on the cliff-hanger) and skip passages that are not essential to the build up. The moment of climax in your reading does not have to be one that’s a high point in the book - that might require an impractical reading of the preceding three chapters.
8. Prepare for the commonest question that you will be asked: ‘Is this autobiographical?’
Maybe your novel is. In which case you are likely to prove the saying that the greatest catastrophe to befall a family is to have a writer in its midst. I answer by quoting the Czech writer Milan Kundera who put rather well the relationship between the characters in a book and the author. He said that the characters in his novels were his own unrealized possibilities … Each character had crossed a border that he himself had circumvented.
Despite your novel not being your ill-disguised life history, or a searing and amusing (to you) depiction of your friends, you will find having a novel published an exposing experience. Libby Purves, writing in The Times, points out that the characters and scenarios in a novel have emerged from somewhere not normally exposed to public view; a hidden place in the depths of the writer’s head. Hence a feeling of nakedness as the book is finally open to public dissection.
9. Enjoy it. You have no idea whether the ship that you are launching is going to disappear on a downward trajectory when it hits the water or float across the globe in glory, but the launch marks the culmination of years of work and so let the champagne fizz. Your nearest and dearest will also be enjoying the occasion when they can finally draw a line under it all. Until the next one.
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