Clip
for those who didn't get the reference
(Hooray!
A joke I have to explain)
To clarify, I don't
mean in terms of the response I have had – which has been
overwhelmingly lovely, thank you all. But having randomly picked a
day and decided to use it as my publishing date, I then discovered
that it was in the midst of one of the busiest weeks I have had in
absolutely ages. The plan was to do a massive build up (on my new
website www.daveholwill.com
– which finally went live yesterday after a myriad of technical
problems) with a whole load of blog posts like this one – on the
subject of publishing, writing, and how utterly fucking exhausting
the whole process is – culminating in a massive 'Hooray! I am proud
to announce that you can now buy my book!' blog post.
Which should have
been ready to go last Thursday (August the 11th , in case
this takes me even longer to write than I am anticipating) when I
officially published it.
But what with
rehearsing with three different bands, doing a quick reunion gig with
my old acoustic duo, getting
a new dog, remembering that I like spending time with my wife,
almost forgetting a dep gig I agreed to do months ago and still
having to go to work for most of the day – absolutely none of this
has happened. Sorry. Also, I have no idea how to do a delayed
publication thing, and it was technically available last Sunday
night, but these days you're meant to do a big build up thing, so I
lied to try and make it look like I knew what I was doing (I do not
know what I am doing).
Here's
one of those gigs, where we finally managed to be Rob, Dave and Eddie
(Rubbish
joke courtesy of Rob Love and 70s kids TV)
(photo
courtesy of hatherleigh.net by
Geoff Hodgkinson)
So it was in the
final throes of exhaustion that I completed the final leg of this
journey (please shoot me, I told you I was tired, I had no idea I was
tired enough to call something a journey like I was on the X-Factor
or something – what a twat) with nothing more than a quick link
thrown up on Facebook as I stood – bleary eyed and knackered in my
studio at quarter to seven in the morning before I went to work –
desperately learning songs for that dep gig I'd forgotten about;
because I had no free evenings to learn stuff in.
To return to the
beginning, those of you with very long memories will recall that 2
and a half years ago I started this blog in order to shame myself
into finishing the book I was writing. Some of you may even have
been reading when I
posted this a
year and a bit ago – thinking I had finished. I had no idea of
just how much work was going to go into editing, rewriting and just
formatting the bloody thing to get it out there. My Auntie Jenny has
been completely invaluable as she helped me through the whole thing,
scribbling all over my first draft and answering all my very boring
whiny emails, I am not sure how I am going to repay her kindness,
nothing could match it.
Every time I have
thought it is ready to go, something else has happened: first I
re-read it at Christmas, with a view to January publication, but
realised that the opening was duller than a pile of very dull stones
that have had all the shine taken off of them with a special
de-shiner (just like my friend Deb had told me after she didn't
manage to read past chapter one – though being a stubborn twat it
took me months to realise she was right), and had to rewrite and hack
up a huge chunk of it. Then I decided to do a course in proof-reading
and grammar that meant I spent the next three months dicking about
with punctuation and stuff. In fact, every time I thought I was
finally finished, I did another Unit on the course and discovered
another, better way of doing things – or I thought of another thing
I wanted to change, and then had to check all the way through for
continuity again.
But finally, it was
ready, I had no more excuses and so I went for it, and put it out
there for the world – which brought out a whole new load of
problems. For one thing, I will admit to not being entirely
comfortable with self-publishing (not just because it feels like
failure) I know next to nothing about marketing, and have never been
very good at putting myself forward. I occasionally claim that I have
chosen to self-publish in order to own all my own rights, retain
control of my work, and all the usual flannelly bullshit, but the
truth is that I got bored of getting my manuscript rejected left,
right and centre by agents and publishers alike (that really does
feel like failure, I don't recommend it). Self-publishing is no
longer the preserve of the wealthy, gullible, vain and too stupid to
admit their book is horse-shit; thanks to having sold my soul to
Amazon – feel free to ask me how I justify that choice in the pub
sometime – anyone (that's where the problem with it all lies of
course) can get a book out there without having a garage filled with
unsellable, poorly typeset,
folded-in-half-and-stapled-together-in-the-wrong-place A4 printouts,
masquerading as books.
Mark
Corrigan – enjoying the good work of a traditional vanity press
I will admit to
being wildly impressed by how good the proof copy I was sent looked.
I have not seen the version that they are sending to customers, but
nobody has laughed at it yet, so I am assuming that thanks to
Createspace, I have published a book, with no outlay, and over which
I have absolute creative control. True, I don't have the sense of
validation that a genuine publishing deal would have given me, but as
time moves on, I am caring less and less about that – and feeling
less of a failure; my subject matter is a bit niche, and traditional
publishers don't like uncertainties anymore.
Of course, in the
days leading up to my release date, I discovered the problem with not
having that sense of validation – crippling self-doubt in the face
of overwhelming support. The curse of self-publishing appears to be
that I only have the opinion of myself, and a few close friends, that
what I have written is any good (and they may have been lying). I'm
not sure which prospect was the most terrifying to me on the day
people started buying it:
- People I know reading it – what if they think it's shit and don't know how to tell me?
- People I have never met reading it – what if they think it's shit and have endlessly inventive and hurtful ways of telling me?
- Or people I used to know and haven't seen in decades reading it – what if I based something in the book on them and they can spot it a mile off and are highly upset about it, and then attack me over social media about it?
Welcome to 21st century anxieties.
Everybody had told
me they expected it to be great, I was terrified their expectations
were too high and they would all be disappointed – after all, even
I acknowledge that the whole thing was just to see if I could write
my way through a whole book. It was a huge learning curve that turned
out better than expected (in my opinion, I've been too close to
George and the band for the last few years to view them objectively
anymore). But, like Malcolm says in Chapter 15, 'bear
in mind, this is a little piece of your soul that you've probably
spent months, maybe even years struggling with until it's the best it
can possibly be' what does happen if it's shit? I've spent years
putting music on the internet that nobody listens to, and that takes
minutes to
listen to and
costs nothing, this takes time to read and costs money, why on earth
should anyone bother?
And
then it happened, as I sat, trying not to continuously refresh the
statistics page (I am limiting myself to checking it once a day, it
is surprisingly difficult and I understand how people get addicted to
'likes' and retweets now), people started buying it, people I had
never met told me they really enjoyed it, so far I have sold 10 times
more than I ever expected to sell in its whole lifetime (I did have
incredibly low expectations, so I am not retiring any time soon, but
I might actually get my round in for once). The support I have had
from both friends and strangers in the last week has had me wildly
over emotional on too many occasions to remember. Did
I mention I spend a lot of time crying these days? Well I do, and
mostly because all you guys out there are just so bloomin' lovely.
Thank you all so much, and if you haven't yet, then buy
my fucking book – it is good, I have been validated without the
corporate monoliths (alright, maybe one helped a bit) needing to step
in – god bless you modern technology.
