Happy Publication Day to me!

A Thoroughly Modern Marriage is out in the world. This stage of publishing a book is super exciting because after months or years of the book being something that only really existed on my laptop it is suddenly an independent entity that other people can engage with.

It is also quite a tricky stage.

These days writers have to do an awful lot of their own publicity. I feel I might have preferred the time when an author could publish under a pseudonym and then hide out in their remote Yorkshire rectory (although I will take a hard pass on the consumption, please).

In 2021, instead of pacing the wild moors in poetic abandon I have to take to Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and Whatsapp and Gmail and WordPress in order to try and get news of my book out there and ensure that people actually buy it.

I find this fairly excruciating.

Imposter Syndrome kicks in good and hard (why would anyone want to hear about my books?), as does good old British reticence (talking too much about yourself isn’t the done thing), as does my own shyness (please nobody pay me too much attention). When he ran his own start-up, my husband did some marketing training, and one of the things they were taught was something like ‘at the point when you are utterly sick to the back teeth of writing/talking/posting about your product and can barely stand the name of it, you might have reached the point where the rest of the world has actually noticed it’.

Definitely easier said than lived through!

What I really want to do now is sit back down behind my laptop where I feel most comfortable and start writing Book 4. I have the idea bubbling away in my brain, the characters are coming to life and I am desperate to start getting their story onto the page.

But what I actually need to do is spend some time focussing on marketing A Thoroughly Modern Marriage, because if people don’t buy this book, then there is not much point writing another one.

What draws you to a new book or author? Is it browsing online? Or in a real bookshop? Do you have particular book review sites you use, or do you prefer word-of-mouth recommendations from friends? Is social media an influence on your choices? I would love to hear from you!