The Post-Book Crash Is Real And Don't Let Anybody Tell You Otherwise

Plus An Exclusive Excerpt From Next Year's Novel

I have now published 14 books and if I’m completely honest with myself there’s probably not been a single one of those that hasn’t been accompanied by a sizeable emotional crash somewhere along the line, typically in the weeks directly after publication. Sometimes the crash is based more rationally on factual evidence, sometimes less so. Do other authors manage to avoid it? Perhaps some do. But I know the pattern is not unique to me, and I have learned that it’s pretty much inevitable and there’s not much to do except ride it out until you begin to feel robust enough to regroup.

Something else I have noticed about the emotional crash: the more of yourself you put into a book, the bigger it gets.

Is that a reason to put less in, to work less hard, to protectively hold some elements of your heart and soul back? I don’t think so. And here is why:

I got out of bed yesterday morning and, after roughly three minutes of being sentient, it became apparent that what I was about to experience was Crash Day for book fourteen. I had reached a point on the far unreasonable side of exhaustion from weeks of long drives to events (and no less from the seemingly endless admin and promotion surrounding those events) and worrying about technicalities related to my novel’s birth, and suddenly all I could see was what the novel hadn’t done in the 16 days it had been out in the world: the friends I’d sent it to many weeks ago and heard nothing from, a couple of pretentiously pissy reader reviews, its lack of prominence in most bookshops, its lowly position on Amazon’s sales rankings, my deletion of my social media and the potential damage I’d done to the book’s health with that, combined with the mental image of all those other authors I always used to see on Instagram living it up in shops that were window-displaying seventeen billion copies of their multi award-winning novels. In the sleep-deprived state of mind that I was in, I managed to blot out every bit of early enthusiastic feedback I’d got about 1983 and the astute things few bright reviewers had already said about it. I didn’t think about the many supportive and passionate booksellers I’d met; I thought about the lone condescending one I’d met on a singularly bad day during publication week. I didn’t think about the final time I’d proofread the book through and known, in my bones, that my obsessive hard work on it had made it everything I had wanted it to be. I did think about that obsessive hard work, however, and about every sign I’d seen that it was being ignored or misunderstood or despised, and what I wondered was, “My god, is it fucking worth it?”

I slept better last night and today I see everything from another angle. I made my decision about the way I was going to tell stories and publish them a long time ago. I’m committed to it, and I know how it works: the parts that frustrate the fuck out of you, again and again, and the rewarding parts that make up for those other parts. I am fully aware of what it’s like to write worse books that have a greater chance of shifting units because, until around 12 years ago, when I started to become less diffident and well-behaved, I used to do exactly that. I could still do it, but I stubbornly choose not to. I refuse to prioritise surface of things, despite being repeatedly told that prioritising the surface of things is the way to function and survive in the arts in 2024. My books are not designed for immediate explosive success; they tend to find their readers gradually and quietly, by word of mouth. It’s the way I write them, but it’s also inevitably what happens when you don’t have a big marketing budget behind you.

There is a curious relief in getting confirmation that 1983 is not considered an important or exciting book by the world beyond the one reading this Substack newsletter. With that relief comes acceptance, and with acceptance usually, for me, comes the prospect of distraction-free creative absorption, and distraction-free creative absorption is my happy place. In the end, 1983 is just another book by me, and has the hallmarks of a book by me, one of which is that it’s quite a bit different to my other books, and another of which is that it will receive no hype but result in a small number of people loving it and having quite an intense relationship with it. The people who it’s written for get it. I already have heard from them and trust they haven’t been lying when they’ve told me they felt bereft when the book ended. The people who it isn’t written for, meanwhile, will call it “weird” or belch out a shitty review of it online based on the 30 pages of it they read.

That’s the state of things. Publishing is a brutal industry, trying to find ways to survive in an era with a ruptured attention span. It becomes more brutal still when you’ve chosen to write stories that ask for, and seek to reward, a little more attention than most. When your work is connected to your financial survival, you get pulled further in and the setbacks and injustices press harder against the tender spots of your ego, even when you have intentionally moved away from as many ego-driven aspects of publishing as possible, and your general outlook is “Get lost, ego - I just want to sit somewhere under the coverage of heavy foliage and write!” You can be evil-hypnotised into thinking it is your job to correct those setbacks and injustices. In truth, all you can do is make sure that each book is something you gave everything to, and something you didn’t compromise on in a way that will make you annoyed with yourself later.

The rest is out of your control, probably not even your business.

And while it’s all going on, your only job is to write the next one, and try with all you can muster to make that one a bit better.

If you’d like to order 1983, you can do so via Blackwells, with free international delivery.

In the time between 1983’s completion and its publication, I wrote another, bigger novel (yes, I know: that probably didn’t help as far as the emotional crash was concerned, and I might pace things a bit differently in future). It’s called Everything Will Swallow You and I’m currently doing the final edits to it, ready for publication in March 2025. As a thank you to my paid subscribers, I’ve decided to post an excerpt from it below.

If you’d like to pre-order Everything Will Swallow You, you can do so directly through my publishers, and contribute to the book’s funding in the process.

EVERYONE WAS CALLED KEN BACK THEN…