PUBLISHING AND THE DAMNED

I've had to sit on the Publish & Be Damned event for a day or so to make some kind of sense out of it. Lots of interesting things came from it, but here's the crucial one for anybody doing anything art related in the public eye: expectation.

When you decide to put your head over the wall and see what's going on, I guarantee your biggest expectation will be for the world to surprise you, buy all of your books and lots of people to show their face. Meanwhile, your biggest fear will be that nobody will show - and it won't go away no matter how hard you push it, but here's the truth: you're guessing. Call it what you will, it's nothing but guesswork and worse still, it's guesswork with no facts behind it (unless it's a paying event I guess and you can count ticket sales - in which case you're even further in the hole). It's a horrible thing and in the name of staying sane, I nailed my expectation to the floor and brought two scenarios into the equation:

1. The worst case scenario would be that I would find myself drinking coffee with Juliet (Waterstones manager of excellence - she has a blog here) after hours. I like drinking coffee in bookshops. There's not a bad ending when I write the story like this - it simply depends how you choose to look at it.

2. At the other end of the scale, I was not ready for dozens of people to show. It would have gone ahead but I think I would also have stood there and wondered what the hell was going on. Like it was some kind of set-up. We all have our own safety valves and if we don't, we soon find them.

Mostly though, a week or so ago, Neil Gaiman had posted a picture of his first book signing at which twelve people showed... and Sandman was on the shelf by then too. I think he was signing with the artist Mike Dringenberg. Anyway, that was my flag in the sand. Twelve people I would most definitely view as a major comparative success. 

As it turned out, there were nine of us (plus me) and I was more than happy with that. You can get a thousand likes on Facebook in a few minutes with a picture of a cat and some peanut butter but this was nine actual real-live breathing people who got out of their chair and made an effort to either a) help themselves fix holes in their knowledge b) not to feel so alone or c), d) and e) lots of other reasons... and I thank you all for coming regardless of what those reasons were.

Even if you just wanted to get out of the house and avoid walking the dog. It's all valid.

Typically, I didn't think I would learn anything (I wasn't there to learn dammit) but I did, so I hope everybody else took at least a few gems of wisdom away with which to beat their own careers over the head with.

If you want to know what happened during the event and the things we talked about, maybe you should have been there, but the point is, you can't let the fear of nobody showing up at 'your thing' stop you from putting yourself out in the world.

That's the worst crime of all.

WRITE YOUR HEART OUT

This week I've been making a road map of where it is I'm going right now. It's good to take stock of what you've got going on whatever it is you're doing - sometimes the results of such a meeting with yourself are pretty good and sometimes they can be shitty as hell. Either way, a meeting with yourself is usually pretty short and constructive unless you're careless and can't help but distract yourself with umm... a distraction.

If you're about to enter such a meeting with yourself, don't forget - not every day can be an all-time high. All that matters in the end is the work because one day you'll be dust in the wind and you don't want to leave behind a memory of being a miserable bastard your whole life just because things didn't go your way.

Anyway, to begin, I got grilled last week (or was it the week before?) by the guys at Infected Books for the release of The Family Of Noise and you can find the results of that right here. It's tempting for me to ramble on about what I actually talk about there but I'm learning to simply shut the hell up sometimes. Thanks for your time guys. It was emotional.

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Also before I forget, on my travels, I unearthed this gem from Emil at Old London Road tattoo studio. I've seen a few Bukowski nuggets over the last few years but this is great:

•••

While I was sticking pins in a map, (it's not a real map obviously, but now I think about it, there might something quite neat about hanging one on the wall. It's almost as cool as having one of those glass walls they use on crime shows for pinning up evidence), I came across some great images of St. Mark's Bookshop from when they moved premises last year. Take a look at these because all bookshops should damn well be like this (or at least variations thereof):

That's a thing of beauty right there. The whole shop was worked on by Clouds Architecture Office - if you hit that link, you'll also find some explanations behind the images along with some other great work - even if architecture is not your bag, you've got to hand it to them, that's one happening store.

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It just dawned on me that it's only a week until we do Publish & Be Damned at Waterstones. I actually have my shit together - or at least enough of it that I'm not concerned it will fall around my ankles like a pair of pants with no belt. I'm sad to say, there will be no pyro. I did ask but health and safety in the coffee shop absolutely forbids pyro of any kind. There are a whole bunch of flyers that look like this in store:

Help yourself to a handful and distribute them amongst your friends and neighbours - probably best if they are planning on writing a book but then again, I'll drink coffee with anybody so it's not a prerequisite.

•••

Currently reading:

...and it's really damn good.

PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED: AN EVENT

A few 'pressing items' (read: taxi driver for small person and cohort on a cat hunt) out of the way and this afternoon I finally carved out some time to wrap this: 

Much like designing book covers before I've hardly got a few hundred words down on a page, now the poster/flyer is finished for this, it seems very real and I spent the remainder of the afternoon stuffing The Notebook with some serious information on things to talk about. Turns out I might know a fair amount of stuff... or at least, I think I do. Hopefully, there will be enough people singing from the same songbook to test me out.

If you live in some kind of reasonable radius, come along. If you don't live in some kind of reasonable radius, come along anyway. It will be fun. There will be coffee, revelations and more coffee. It's a Wednesday. There's not even anything good on TV.