When you are an aspiring writer and you have ambition and you suddenly find that through a combination of desire, work, luck and trouble you have actually landed yourself a book deal, the first thing you dream about is what it’s going to feel like to be published.
A published author! Your name in lights! The book in the window of the bookshops you’ve been haunting; for me it was the Paperback Bookshop at the top of Bourke Street, Melbourne, where I’d discovered some of the books that made me want to write.
Signing my publishing agreement, I was not thinking about the hows and whys of finishing the manuscript I had promised to deliver, but giving myself over to fantasies about people I knew – people with whom I’d worked and gone to uni, people I’d slept with, people I had met but briefly – stopping to take a closer look after catching what I kept imagining would be a bold, arty cover from the corner of their eye.
Publishing your first book – quick links
Publishing your first book: proofing satisfaction
While proofing final versions of the manuscript, I underwent a period, if not of certainty then satisfaction; I felt that while the book might never be ‘complete’, its oddities and imperfections would perhaps make it more interesting. On the practical side of things, my publisher Aniko Press and I had pushed the deadline out for months and we were both eager to finish.
Finalising the edits was a relatively smooth process and one I think most first-time writers can look forward to, the time when everything falls into place, the manuscript is typeset, the cover designs come through and you get to see what it will look like. There really is a sense of all your hard work coming to fruition. There is also one of relief. You have done all you can – the rest is out of your hands.
During final proofing, I had been avoiding reading other people’s prose and was instead consuming lots of poetry, including that of Edna St Vincent Millay. Millay was an American poet, playwright, feminist and socialite who, in her own words, ‘burned the candle at both ends’. Rising to fame in the lead-up to the 1920s, in that decade she was known for her lyrical poetry, feminist plays and affairs with both men and women. She knew what it was like to live in the limelight and was even photographed by Man Ray.
One day I stumbled upon another of Millay’s little quips: ‘[A] person who publishes a book wilfully appears before the populus with his pants down,’ it went. ‘If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.’
I had heard and certainly dreamed approximations of this thought before – it’s the classic anxiety dream where you appear onstage and realise all too late that you are naked – but now, with publication looming, it took on new significance.
As a first-time author with an independent press, I had little idea how my book would be received and whether it would have any reach. But disregarding whether it did well or badly, I realised I would have to become comfortable with a certain level of exposure. I had, as it were, to walk out with my pants around my knees.
Publishing your first book: pre-release nerves
The reality of publication hit in ways that were surprising. A week before the release date, a box of copies arrived in the mail. I opened it with shaking hands and pulled one out. It was thicker and somehow more substantial than I had anticipated. There was my name on the cover, and the cover itself had that bold, arty look I’d always pictured. Flicking through the pages, I burst into rapt laughter which quickly turned to wracking sobs. I couldn’t understand what I was feeling – my response was strange to me.
That night, I found myself sitting up well into the small hours re-reading it obsessively, going over every story for faults and faux pas, potential slights and unkept secrets, idiotic notions, arrogant conceits and characters and events that I had based on life but only thinly veiled.
Despite the excitement of release, I was suddenly confronted with the reality that it would actually be read – my unruly project, the weird thing I’d been working on obsessively, privately, with little outside input for the last however-many years. I panicked and sent a silly email to my publisher. I am nervous about people hating it, I told her. What if I have written a vacuous, showy and morally bankrupt book?!
When I started writing this article about publishing your first book, my idea was that I’d come to an authoritative conclusion about how it feels and give some good advice on managing your expectations. But the conclusion I’m compelled to make is that it must be different for us all.
There are things we can agree on: the ecstasy, the anxiety, the vulnerability, the contradictory sense of being overlooked and painfully exposed. There is the fun stuff, like the book launch, and then the inevitable post-launch slump. But, because The Slip is my first book as well as the first title for Aniko Press, my experience leads me to insist that being with an independent press makes all the difference.
Besides holding the publishing industry to account, independent presses offer first-time authors the chance to participate in the entire process of making a book. This is not about creative control but rather about collaboration, conversation and support.
Publishing your first book: post-release reflections
Post-publication, I have been both frustrated and pleased by how many copies have sold. I have grappled with an entire spectrum of feedback and from time to time a little bit of guilt. I have swung between a kind of feral, unprecedented excitement, abiding ambivalence and sudden troughs of worry and self-doubt. I have been required to quickly get my head around self-promotion and divide my time in hectic ways. I have also been surprised and moved by how the book affects different readers, the commendations it’s received, the relationships I’ve formed and the unlikely places it’s turned up.
Through it all, I’ve known that my publisher Emily Riches is right there on the other end of all my silly texts and emails, patiently assuring me it’s going fine. Writing can be a lonely occupation. So when it comes to publishing your book, there is something enlivening in doing it together.
