Publishing diary
Part one: what is books?
This is how my novel travelled from my brain to the page.
It’s my fiction debut and it won’t hit the shelves until February 2025, but here’s the story so far, part one. (This is very much like I’m a mother telling you my birth story - I feel the need to get it down before it all goes and then I just end up telling a version of the story which, while sort of accurate, is really just the one I most like the sound of in my mouth.)
It began in 2019, before everything went weird.
It was the first weekend in July and my husband, Joel, was speaking on a comedy panel at the Also Festival in Warwickshire. If you don’t know it, please look it up. It’s a lovely, small gathering in pretty green surroundings where people talk about ideas and eat gorgeous food and there’s a lake you can swim in.
Also on Joel’s panel was an academic called Dr Sophie Quirk. She is particularly interested in the social and political impact of stand-up comedy. This was a happy coincidence as I had just started work on a novel about exactly this subject. Or at least about how there was a problem with predatory men in the comedy industry and how it was sort of accepted as just part of the deal by most people who worked there.
I wondered whether that ability to control a room full of people was a factor in their controlling behaviour off-stage. I’d played with a few chapters and started to get an idea of the characters I wanted.
As the panel ended, the chair mentioned that Sophie’s book was on sale in the bookshop. Why Stand-up Matters: How Comedians Manipulate and Influence is an academic work but incredibly accessible for it. In it Sophie talks at length about the methods used by comedians to influence their audiences, working the social dynamic of a room using tried and tested techniques, how it is socially beneficial but also how it involves a lot of manipulation.
She interviews working comedians and analyses live performances. It’s absolutely fascinating. While reading it, the idea for the novel solidified. Her use of the word “manipulate” in the title was particularly important for me.
Obviously, not all stand-ups are secret bastards, playing us like puppets for their dark purposes. But it was a really interesting idea to play with in the context of a novel. The potential for gothic melodrama also particularly appealed.
As you may have spotted, that was FIVE YEARS AGO and a lot has happened since then. I became more interested in this subject and started to help out with real investigations into men in the entertainment industry who use their celebrity status to manipulate and control their female fans and co-workers.
I met a small, but growing, group of female journalists who were trying to pursue these types of stories. I heard, anecdotally, from female friends who work in comedy about how there are pockets of knowledge, groups of women, on stage and off, who stay in touch with each other, warning about the men you need to be cautious around. The ones never to be left alone with.
Stories started to appear more frequently in the news about comedians, actors, singers and writers who were accused of doing very similar things. If you haven’t heard the recent Tortoise Media podcast about the allegations against Neil Gaiman, it’s a really good exploration of that allegedly abusive dynamic between a famous man and his young female fans. The word manipulation comes up again and again.
So, public awareness continued to increase about these covert behaviours, usually exhibited by men, which their friends and the people around them are often not aware of. Or they turn a blind eye. Every new story seemed to describe very similar alleged patterns of behaviour.
While the climate slowly changed around this subject, my book continued to take shape. That sounds very passive. What I mean is, I used the bursts of anger whenever I heard another story of a shitty famous man, as fuel to write a bit more of the book. The day Harvey Weinstein was finally convicted was a really good writing day.
I got it to the point where I thought it was vaguely book-shaped and sent it out to a bunch of literary agencies, looking for representation. I needed an agent to sell the book for me. If you’re unsure of how to do this, the website for every lit agency has a “submissions” page which walks you through the process. Most ask for the first three chapters (if it’s fiction) and an outline of the rest.
From that first round, the responses were very nice “no thank you”s or just no reply at all. I think this is pretty common.
I put the book away for a few months and got on with other things. Then, at the end of last year, I got my mojo back (thanks to prescribed testosterone, I’m pretty sure) and gave it another thorough edit, changed the title and went back to my spreadsheet.
I did a bit of research and found a handful of agents I hadn’t yet tried who I thought might be interested. One agent I sent the first three chapters to said he knew of an agent at his place who would love the book.
Sure enough, she read the chapters within hours and got back to me asking to see the whole thing. Suddenly faced with the prospect of a total stranger reading the entire book for the first time, I ask for a week to give it one more going over.
In that week I was full of cold and for some of it, kept to my bed, working away, brutally slicing chunks off the book and, in the last couple of hours before I sent it, I changed the ending. A new idea had just come to me and worked so much better than the ending I’d originally used. That week felt a bit like magic. I had a real focus for my work and did the best edit of my life. It’s amazing what you can do when someone actually asks for it.
My agent got the full manuscript on a Friday afternoon and emailed me by Saturday afternoon to say she’d stayed up late reading it and to tell me how much she loved it. That was pretty cool. Because I genuinely had no idea, beyond the encouragement of a few friends, whether it was “a thing” or just a good first try that belonged in the bottom drawer.
I met the agent and her colleagues on Zoom a few days later and loved them.I mean of course I did, they were all saying lovely, encouraging things about my book. I pretended to play it cool for about an hour and then emailed them saying I’d love to work with them. That was a really good day.
I know brilliant writers who have spent a lot longer in the querying trenches (this is what I now see the above stage is called ). Bonnie Garmus was on (I think) Hattie Crissell’s brilliant podcast and said, after getting her first work published at the age of 64, that she’d received something like 94 agent rejections before she finally found one. And now look at her.
Stories like that are the only thing that keeps you going while you’re watching the rejections stack up. It only takes one. Like falling in love.
Next time: the book deal.