The Rest is Silence

My novel was published! Then it was on the New Arrivals table. Now it's gone to the Fiction section, with all the other novels. It's not coming back

Gudetama, a lazy egg yolk

Unless your novel is immediately shortlisted for the National Book Award or the Booker Prize there will be, sooner or later, a feeling of let-down following its publication.

You’ve been reviewed, if you’re lucky/privileged enough. You’ve given interviews. Maybe you’ve done some events, at bookstores or libraries or festivals or conventions. It’s exciting. It’s thrilling! After so long on the dark side of the moon, you’re basking in the hot sun of attention! Your brain has released all kinds of wonderful, unaccustomed neurochemicals. Weave a circle round him thrice.

And then it tails off again. It comes for everyone—no matter how well it’s selling, or how well it was received, time passes. Other people have the temerity to publish their own books. And what’s worse, some of them are actually good! People start reviewing them! And not you! The unmitigated gall of it. The sun has turned its warm face to others. A familiar quiet descends.

You re-enter civilian life. Discharged back into the general population

Of course you don’t go gently. You sneak looks at your book in bookstores. Sometimes you even awkwardly introduce yourself to the booksellers and offer to sign some copies. The sun comes back for a second! You’re an author again! You look for sad little excuses to email your editors and/or publicists, who have already moved on to launching other books, because that is their actual job. I was on the Kindle Store on my phone the other day and I couldn’t help but notice that The Bright Sword doesn’t appear in the “Arthurian Fantasy” category. Yes, sure, it’s there when you go in through the website, but not on mobile devices. We’ve got a metadata problem here people! Sound the Octo-alert! (Yes, I did actually write more or less this email.)

But the time has come. I’ve basically lost the ability to talk about myself on social media anyway, not that that news will be met by widespread disappointment. Whatever muscle I use for that is currently exhausted. Even writing this post took about five days.

What have I been doing instead? I’ve played a lot of tennis. I’ve made croissants with my younger son (they took the whole weekend and were completely inedible; I think it was the yeast). I went to Byron Bay. I read other people’s books: The Devils by Joe Abercrombie, The Haunting of Room 904 by Erika Wurth, Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway, the Morning Star books by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (for a non-secret but not-yet-officially-announced project my wife is doing; it’s amazing).

It’s really the silence that does your head in, even though it shouldn’t. I know my book is out in the world, doing something. I hear from it occasionally. For years I had total control of it—my book was only seen by myself and people I actively gave it to, in a one-to-one interaction that I could personally supervise—but that’s not the natural state of a book. Books are wild creatures, they’re supposed to wander the world and open themselves promiscuously to whoever encounters them.

But those encounters are generally silent—it’s like when something falls into a black hole, no information about the collision escapes. Except maybe for some stray Hawking radiation. You don’t know about them, that’s not part of the deal. Reading is something that happens elsewhere.