Feel the Fear and Self-Publish Anyway

I have just self-published my first novel, Unspeakable Things. It's a psychological suspense mystery about motherhood and madness – thank you for asking. 

Now I am like a hermit with a megaphone – I have to shout about it – all the self-marketing check-lists say so – but with every shout/post/tweet I want to apologise for being so noisy and go back to hiding in my cave.

Everything about self-publishing means breaking out of your comfort zone and doing something frightening.

Show someone

First you have to show your writing to someone. In my day job, I’m a book editor. I recently received the first chapter and synopsis of an 800-page novel. The writer has also written an 800-page sequel, but had never before dared to show the works to anyone. Imagine having that dedication to writing, but being afraid to reveal it to the world – and I think you’ve had a glimpse into the mind of most writers.

Showing you work makes you deeply vulnerable, like tearing out a lump of your soul and letting someone judge it. They might crush your dreams. Your outpourings might be unworthy of the world’s attention.

Being an aspiring writer is like being an out-of-work actor or a bathroom singer: you have an urge to express yourself, but no one is listening. What if you’re the hapless singer in those early auditions for the X Factor – talentless and deluded?

But if you don’t show anyone your writing, you’ll write your way into a dead end. You’re so familiar with your work that you can’t see it as a reader  – you have no idea what’s good or bad about it.

I remember my fear and trembling as I sat waiting to meet my literary consultant, Lorna Fergusson. Everything I cared about might be shot down in flames.

But afterwards, I knew I’d done the right thing. I had a project with real potential. I had a clear way forward and hope again.

Show someone professional

Friends and family are too kind or too hurtful. Editors and literary consultants are encouraging, honest, unbiased and clear.

Lorna showed me what was working and what I needed to change. This, and my relentless re-editing in the light of her comments helped me make Unspeakable Things good enough to publish.

The beast at the gate

The next hurdle was my phobia of online forms. They fill me with self-loathing, because I shouldn’t be frightened – but every glitch, time-out or error message panics me so much that I can’t remember a sensible thing.

Even paper forms do this to me if they relate to finance, and don’t even say ‘tax’ to me – it’s a horrible swearword.

Yet I was going to self-publish through Createspace and Kindle Direct Publishing. I had to upload my files and fill in my details on two huge online forms which are notoriously difficult to conquer.

I had wanted to publish a novel since I was five years old. Now my lifelong dream was like a beautiful garden guarded by a monster.

When two fears fight

I put it off and put it off. The files weren’t ready. It wasn’t the right time of year. I’d do it when someone was there to help me. In the end, my fear of never getting published was as powerful as my fear of the forms. I was riven by anxiety. I had to do something.

And so one day I just did it. I sat down and tackled Createspace. It took a couple of hours, a lot of research, a foray into forums about US tax exemption and a lot of keeping calm under pressure. But I did it.

You know why they say ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’? Because that’s how we overcome phobias. After Createspace, I felt invincible. I had learned that mistakes and glitches are not the end of the world, and once you’ve worked through a few error messages, you get skilled at overcoming them. Panic subsides, your brain restarts, and everything is easier with it working.

I was barely even anxious about Kindle Direct Publishing. It took a while and there were glitches, but I got through it, and at the end there was a button that said, ‘PUBLISH’.

Reader, I published it.

I suspect that most things worth achieving are guarded by monsters of our own making. We are brilliant at finding reasons to stay within our comfort zones. But with every beast we slay, we grow and thrive.

Do you have a lifelong dream you haven’t achieved yet? Are you afraid you’ll never make it, but also afraid to try? I’ve been there and would love to hear from you!

Words Matter; Meaning Matters – An Editor and Writer’s Rant

There is some hilarious material out there about how much punctuation matters  – it gets bandied around by book editors like me, who recognise our own obsessions and have a good laugh at ourselves, without ever doubting for a second that we are right – punctuation does matter!

I am now standing up to make the same bold claim for the choice of words, and for consideration of their meaning. Words matter. Meaning matters – and not just to editors and other pedants.

My husband is back at work as a teacher, having had some of last term off through work-related stress. On the first day of the new term, the teachers gathered to set targets for the school. One of the targets they set was this:

All children should make outstanding progress.

Sorry – all children have to be outstanding? How is this possible? How is each and every child supposed to stand out from the rest with its stunning progress? Even if you give the target a slightly different meaning, how is each child supposed to achieve a continuous level of progress which at all times stands out from its usual level of progress?

The problem is the misuse of the word ‘outstanding’, but it runs deeper than an imprecise use of English that only a nit-picking editor would worry about. It cuts to the heart of what is wrong with our education system. The word reveals how much Offsted haunts the teaching profession; it says, ‘We want Offsted to say we are outstanding.’ Yet in choosing this word, in this context, the school have set a target that is, by definition, impossible to reach. In this use of the word ‘outstanding’, the meaning of something that stands out from the rest has been elided into another meaning, that of a standard that gains the highest seal of approval from a regulator.

This slippage of meaning reminds me of the slogan from George Orwell’s Animal Farm: ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’. Here the original biblical meaning of equality is mismanaged into a new sense, which looks in a sentence like the same usage, but is disastrously changed: now ‘equal’ implies a privilege that not everyone is allowed. As with the school’s target, the misuse of the word, so brilliantly satirised by Orwell, points to a much deeper problem that is cultural and political.

I hold my hands up and admit that all editors are control freaks. I confess that I recently corrected a poster advertising ‘plastic’s, because I could not bear to walk past it every day and see the pointless apostrophe that wasn’t even the right way round. 

How it looked...

How it looks after my guerilla editing job...

But I make no apology for my nit-picking about the misuse of a word in this context. The teachers at my husband’s school have started the term by deciding to aim for something that cannot be achieved. I wonder how many of them left the meeting already feeling demoralised – before even setting foot in a classroom to meet the thirty little individuals whose progress all has to be outstanding this year? I wonder how many of them will succumb to stress this term?

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