STOP PATTING YOURSELF ON THE BACK

 

You’ve got your deal. You’ve arrived. All the years of hard work have paid off. You are a writer. Pour a glass. Take a break. You can do it, you’ve proved it. You know how to write.

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Park that. Don’t turn your second book into “the difficult second album”.

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What got you that deal was the hard focus, the hours spent fretting, editing, re-shaping. It wasn’t by sitting in your chair and reflecting on your own greatness.

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And this is the brutal truth: your editors won’t care how pleased you are with yourself. You have signed a contract that demands the delivery of a book by a certain deadline, and they expect you to do exactly that. And it will be harder second time around, because you’ll have less time to write it.

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That doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy the fact of publication. I have numerous photographs of my books in bookshops, taken when no one was looking, and you do get strange looks in Tesco when you loiter in the book aisles, waiting for it to clear.

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I haven’t done the “I wrote that” in a shop yet, when I've seen one of my books. I was tempted in Krakow, but the surly look of the salesperson made me think I would get nothing more than a snarl. The nearest I got was in Toowoomba, in Queensland, because of the thrill of seeing one of my books so far from home, but the staff were locking up, minds on other things, so I didn’t want a shrug and the “so what?”.

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Having a debut novel is a weird thing though.

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For the writer, it’s the culmination of a long-held ambition.​ For the publisher, the launch of an exciting new debut writer is the best opportunity to attract a press and media profile, as well as interest from shops. For the reader, it’s the chance to enjoy someone new. We all like to discover a new writer, knowing that we’ll have many pleasurable years ahead, and the reader will forgive some rookie errors.

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None of that matters when you’re on to your second book. The publisher won’t get the same press interest if your debut doesn’t go very well. The reader will expect the second book to be better. If you’ve only signed a two-book deal, the most common offer for new writers, a flop of a second book will see your writing career come to a halt.

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So, get on with your second book. Put down the glass of wine. Stop patting yourself on the back, because time will become your enemy. In most cases, the book that gets the deal will have been a few years in the making, after rewrites and publisher knock-backs. This time, you’ll have a year, and even then it’ll be less, because of the editing required on your debut.

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This is how it works.

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You’ll get going with your second book, and you’ll find yourself back at the beginning, not sure you’re good enough, because the book bought by the publisher has been polished and redrafted to perfection. Now, you’re back to the rough first drafts.

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But you’ll work hard, fitting it around the rest of your life, because the size of the advance means that you have to keep on doing on your day-job, and you’ll be pleased with how you are going. Then, the first edits will land on the book you thought you had finished.

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These will be the structural edits, the overview, a long report on what works and what doesn’t work. And it’ll come with something else: a time limit, that they need you to return the rewritten version within a month, because editors have their own schedule. They can’t just fit you in when you feel like it. Everything is diarised.

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So, you’ve got nine months left for your deadline, you’re only a few thousand words in, and all that you’ve done feels scratchy, and now they expect you to drop everything for a month, to work on what you thought you had finished?

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Yes, that’s exactly how it works, which is why the next page is all about editors.

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