For a long time, I would always get sick on the first day of a holiday. Having remained functional through the final weeks of a long school term or period at work, it was only when my time was at last my own that my body would make its problems known. This effect was especially pronounced towards the end of senior school when every exam carried that "the results could affect the rest of your life" heft. The first few days of every break were spent in bed, clutching my stomach and/or mopping up snot. It was just the way I was made, I thought.

Funnily enough, this is actually how I came to be diagnosed with cancer when I was 17 (readers of A Body Made of Glass will know more about that), because I finished a very long and arduous school term, took to my bed with my customary malaise once the Christmas holidays began, and then didn't get better on my usual timetable. Three weeks later, I was still laid low, which is why my mother took me to a doctor who ultimately referred me to an X-ray clinic and then a haemato-oncologist, who then saw me through the next five years of treatment and recovery.

I don't experience this pattern of illness anymore. I am lucky that my life is no longer structured so rigidly into terms and holidays or periods of hellish office labour interspersed with much-needed moments of paid time off. It doesn't feel anymore like I am running on a treadmill that I cannot adjust until it stops at an appointed date far in the future when I will be able to safely collapse.

But I do still experience a sort of long-range time blindness when it comes to big life events. I become so focused on a highly anticipated moment in the future — the day of the house move, the start of a new job, the arrival of a guest — that I cannot visualise what might happen once that event has occurred. There is only a void, a cliff edge off which I will have fallen. Will I even still exist? Will anything? My brain cannot conceive of it.

This is how my mind approached the publication date of both my books: 6th June 2019 and then 11th April 2024. Years of work went into preparing for each of these days. Work on a book doesn't finish when you finish writing it. That's just when you switch into a different mode, preparing how to frame it for marketing and review. You toil for months on trying to generate as much interest as possible, all focused on that one day of release. And then, if you are part of the 90+ per cent of authors who do not make their full-time living from writing books, you are supposed to get up the next day and carry on with your life unchanged, almost as if all that effort and preparation had meant nothing.

Both times, this has given me something akin to emotional whiplash. It was less severe in 2019, I think, because the comedown from publication day was more gradual. I had lots of literary festival events booked for the summer that I travelled for, so there was more of a transition period from "book life" into real life. This time, it has happened more dramatically. I spent a few weeks doing nothing but book work, with sometimes five or six interviews and online events in a day. And then it dropped to none at all. I have a couple more in-person gigs in the calendar, one in July and one in August, but that's it. The contrast is jarring, to say the least.

The last few weeks have been blue. It's difficult for me to articulate why, when I have been so fortunate. In terms of real-world benchmarks, the book has surpassed all my expectations. It was serialised on BBC Radio 4 and reviewed in the New York Times! I can't name a single piece of publicity that I would have wished for but didn't get. That is not something I will likely ever be able to say again. I have been incredibly lucky. I feel guilty about feeling anything less than ecstatic.

Why do I feel so down? Why am I struggling to concentrate on anything and feel might cry every time I catch a glimpse of my book either online or in person? Why, having mostly avoided the comparison trap for months, am I now upset by literary festival listings and social media posts? I have been wrestling with this question and still don't know the answer.

A clue arrived, though, in this newsletter:

"Post-publication depression is a real thing. Writing a book requires a gut-gouging quantity of emotional vulnerability, isolation, and uncertainty. Most people are exhausted by the time they cross the finish line. Most people are not even positive when they can stop running."

It's not just me, then. It's the system. The writer, Anna Sproul-Latimer of the Neon Literary agency, goes on to describe the post-publication period as being characterised by "the dissolution of a survival fantasy". Authors get through the tough years of writing alone by thinking that all the exciting communal fun they will have once their book is on sale will make the misery worthwhile, only to get to that magical moment and find that it falls short.

Perhaps a beloved bookshop isn't stocking any copies, maybe the reviews aren't what you hoped, or there aren't as many readers or events or interviews as in your dreams. Then comes the disappointment, amplified by the fact that it represents the dashing of long-held hopes. There is no quick fix, either. The only way to "do better next time" is to climb the mountain from the bottom again and spend another several years writing alone.

For myself, I think a lot of this feeling comes from being unsure about what comes next. Should I even write another book, if I'm going to feel like this once it comes out? Part of my brain has been thinking about how I should be "working on my book" every day for the past eight years. I am curious to know what it would be like to be released from that mental load, but I also have ideas I would like to work on and ultimately share with others. Which is it to be?

When I find out, you'll be the first to know.

Thank you for reading. Any (kind) feedback or requests for future subjects are welcome via reply to this email.

This was a personal essay, but there will be other types of posts coming on this list. If you would like to adjust what you receive from me, you can do that in your account menu.

I became a freelance writer in July 2017. I think I can count on one hand the number of days since then on which I have done no work whatsoever. The wonderful flexibility of having a job where nobody holds you to particular hours or expects you to be in a certain location has a less wonderful side. Nobody from payroll polices how much I work or locks me out of the office when it has to close. There are no paid sick days or holiday days, either. I have filed pieces from hospital waiting rooms and uploaded podcasts on Christmas Day. If you are an anxious person with much of your self-worth tied up in your career (hi!), it can be hard to see any reason ever to stop.

Until recently, when I started noticing that although I was "working" as much as ever, all those hours spent sat in front of the computer weren't producing the same level of output as before. Nothing like. Whole chunks of time were spent staring into space and, when I tried to return to the task at hand my mind would perceptibly flinch away from it, bouncing me into a different browser tab to look at something easy and numbing, like Instagram or a news website. It was frustrating: I had just come through several busy months of cramming extra work into every available minute as my book came out; why was it so hard now to simply write an email?

Lots of reasons come to mind — tiredness, burnout, stress, a general feeling of being at a crossroads both professionally and personally. All of these problems felt too large and amorphous to even begin tackling, but I did have one more manageable idea that I could try. I could have a day off. I really could not work for a whole day. The world might not end.

I'm sure this seems incredibly obvious, even silly, to anyone with a healthy relationship to their work. Of course I can have a day off! I used to have a staff job at a magazine where I got 25 paid days off a year, not including public holidays, and I used to take them all! But that was a different person to the one I am today, and now there is no contract with an employer enforcing my right not to work. I am the boss of me and I am not inclined to grant myself such perks.

But I forced myself to do it. In a rare moment of self-knowledge, I realised that this could not be something spontaneous. I needed to make plans, to put in place guardrails so I could not slip easily back into old habits. First, I made a list of everything I would like to do on a day off, which read like this:

• take a long walk with my dog without needing to be back at a certain time for a meeting
• watch television, just because I want to and not because I have to review the show
• go out for a meal by myself
• explore a place I'm curious about with no agenda or timetable
• do an activity with some friends

I felt that this was simultaneously a very basic set of requirements and also quite an ambitious list for a single day off. I mulled it over for a few days. The next thing that happened was that the YouTube algorithm relentlessly targeted me with promotional videos for the new series of Bridgerton. I have read all of those books and I have watched the previous seasons, so I suppose that makes sense. From this publicity, I learned that for the first time the show was going to be released in two batches of four episodes a month apart (no doubt to keep people subscribed to Netflix for two months instead of one). On 16th May, the first four would drop.

For no good reason other than I find that show a fluffy, unchallenging diversion, I picked that as the date for my day off. I had no work obligations scheduled that would need to move. It also happened to be a day when my chamber choir was due to rehearse in the evening, and the weather forecast was decent. It all seemed to line up: I would watch some new Bridgerton, take my dog for a nice walk, go into Liverpool mid afternoon, wander around a bit, go out to eat, and then enjoy singing with my friends. A good plan.

I arranged with my colleagues at The Browser to swap duties that day and started looking forward to it. I even assigned blocks on my calendar to my different day off activities to make sure that I would have a timetable to follow and wouldn't waste the day doing household chores or scrolling on my phone. Again, absurd that this is necessary, but I knew how easily I could guilt myself into not doing what I wanted, and then I would berate myself for the failure. If there was already a schedule to follow and I didn't need to make any decisions, it seemed more likely that I would take the path of least resistance and stick to the plan.

My resolve was tested once in between making the arrangements and the day itself, when a podcast interviewee needed to reschedule and had a strong preference for this day. I even drafted a response to their email agreeing to it, appeasing my inner objections with the idea that "it'll only be 90 minutes out of your day off". But it wouldn't be, would it? I would have to prepare, set up the equipment, transfer the files afterwards, decompress from being "on" for a while before I could do anything else. I deleted the draft reply and proposed new dates a few weeks ahead, one of which worked. Nobody minded. The day off was saved.

The 16th May arrived. I followed my timetable and had a lovely time! I did feel a little foolish adhering to a detailed schedule that had things like "watch Bridgerton episode two" on it, it is true. I'm still very new to prioritising my mental wellbeing over my incessant compulsion to work all the time, I think, and like a small child I need structure to thrive.

After a pleasant morning involving some television and some dog walking, I took the train into Liverpool. I headed for a riverside area called the Baltic Triangle where, pre-pandemic, I had a little studio space. It has a post-industrial, slightly dilapidated feeling. As the name suggests, this is where timber and other imported goods from Scandinavia were warehoused in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that industry then declined and relocated. I haven't really been there much since 2020, and the gentrification/redevelopment process has come on apace. There are some really nice new innovations, like this community garden with a view of the Anglican cathedral:

I wandered around there for a while, then went to a coffee shop I used to frequent when I used to come here to work. It has a pleasingly large dairy-free menu, which I used to full advantage:

Inevitably, there is something very "Shoreditch in 2007" to the aesthetic choices here, all plywood and string lights, but I'm old enough these days that this reads as nostalgic rather than annoying.

Next I went to take in some Baltic heritage, in the form of the Gustav Adolf Church, originally built in the late nineteenth century to serve the Scandinavian emigrants living in the area and still a cultural centre for the Nordic community.

I love the extremely pointy lead roof! At this point, I started really enjoying myself as a tourist in my own city as you can only do when you truly let yourself see a familiar place with new eyes. So, I went to the Chinese supermarket and bought the good snacks.

Liverpool's Chinatown is one of the oldest and best-established in Europe and it shares a boundary with the Baltic Triangle. Happily munching, I wandered around some more and took in the excellent graffiti palimpsest at the skatepark:

I don't even follow football and this mural made me tear up a bit. I guess that's what seven years of living here will do to you.

In between the shiny new buildings and warehouse conversions, there are still a few older businesses clinging on.

Very curious about this one:

Last thing before my choir rehearsal, I took myself for an early dinner at a street food market in an old brewery (I know, so hipster). It was a very good falafel wrap, though.

I ended the day singing medieval madrigals with my friends in an old church. And even though I had done nothing other than enjoy myself all day, I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. It was a very good day off. Perhaps I'll have another one some time. I might even make a habit of it.

Until next time,

Caroline

Thank you for reading this, the first instalment of my newly-relaunched newsletter! Any (kind) feedback or requests are welcome via reply to this email. Henceforth, I'm planning on doing broadly three kinds of posts, on no particular schedule: personal essays/updates like this one, lists of good links, and diary entries about my new book project. If you would like to manage which of these you receive, you can do that in your account menu here.

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I got to feel the most like an author I ever feel this week, when I went to London for a meeting with my UK publishers and agents to begin the publicity process for A Body Made of Glass. It comes out in just over six months’ time, which sounds like a long time away but is also not very long at all — time works differently in the book world, I have learned. The proof copies had coincidentally arrived at the office the day before, so I was able to snag one for myself to take home. This is the first time the book has physical form, albeit in this workaday, non-final design for advance readers like booksellers and reviewers. It’s both exciting and a bit nerve-wracking to realise that the book isn’t just mine any more: strangers can hold it and read it now, too.

This is my second book with the same publisher, so a lot of what was unknown to me back in 2019 is now somewhat familiar. I know the basics of how we go about trying to convince people to take a chance on what I’ve written, but there are always new things to try and to learn from. As someone who has been reading and enjoying books for her whole life, the behind-the-scenes process of how they get from ideas inside people’s heads on to my shelves fascinates me. When I talk shop with other writers I always like to compare and contrast my experiences with theirs. This is also helpful for me because there are few definitive or transparent sources out there on the publishing industry, either for those seeking to enter it or those already afloat on its choppy waters in some way. When I hear from readers who are also writers, either via email or on Instagram, this is the most common theme of our correspondence: how are you supposed to find out these things that everyone already seems to know?

I’m very far from being an expert in all this. This is just my second non-fiction book for adults with a UK/US publisher, so if you’re publishing a different kind of work elsewhere in the world, my experiences might not apply to you. But people were very generous in helping me when I was trying to work this stuff out and I’d like to put that same energy out into the world in case it helps somebody else. I’d also recommend the Agents and Books, Counter Craft and Craft Talk newsletters for good insights. What follows is my take on the most common questions I receive about writing a book and getting it published.

How do I get started?

This may sound extremely obvious, but you have to write something. Pitching books is not like pitching articles, where you send a brief summary and, if they like it, take it from there. For books, you need to do some really time-intensive writing first. To my mind, this is the hardest part of all, having to take myself and my ideas seriously enough to show up and write it day after day even though nobody asked me to and nobody is paying me yet. If you are writing the kind of non-fiction book I do (narrative/creative non-fiction), you need to write a proposal. This usually consists of an overview of the book, an outline of your structure and chapters, some information about what the market for the book will be (what successful books have similarities to yours?) and a sample chapter. This last bit is the hardest part, but to get publishers to part with cash you need to show them how brilliant your book will be. All told, my proposals tend to be about 20,000 words. It’s a lot. If you’re writing fiction, you typically have to write the whole thing, or at least a very substantial part of it, before anyone will consider it for publication.

Do you have to have an agent?

No, but it helps. Most major publishers rarely work with unagented writers. In exchange for their percentage of any money you make (15 per cent is normal), you get access to your agent’s industry expertise and contacts, as well as having someone in every meeting who is there solely to represent you. Most agents have an online presence where they advertise if/when they are looking for new writers, what kind of writing they are seeking to represent, and how you go about submitting to them. My agent is currently open for submissions, for instance. In general, when agents have guidelines about what you should submit for consideration, follow them to the letter. Most people won’t; you automatically get a leg up just by showing that you can read and abide by instructions. Make it easy for them to pick you. My best tip for finding an agent is to look at the acknowledgements of books you love that are similar to yours and build a list of possible names to research further that way. If they represent writers you aspire to emulate, there’s a decent chance what you’re doing will suit.

Why won’t they publish my book?

Many, many reasons, not all of them fair or rational. If you’ve queried and submitted and obeyed all the rules and it still isn’t working for you, I’m sorry. Publishing is a capricious and changeable industry, built on something that is fundamentally unknowable at scale: precisely what people want to read at any given moment. To illustrate what I mean, here’s something that happened when my first book was sent out to possible editors. My agent sent it to 14 of them; four responded positively and ten said no thank you. Of that ten, exactly half rejected it because they felt the idea had been too much done before and the other half said no because they felt there wasn’t sufficient market for the topic. It’s all subjective: to some, my idea was too niche, to others it was over-saturated. I tried to learn from that not to take anything anyone says as the final definitive word on anything, and I would advise you do the same.

How do you pay bills while you write a book?

For the vast majority of writers (including me!), you pay bills while you write a book by doing other work at the same time. In 2022, the median earnings for authors in the UK was £7,000 a year, down 60 per cent in real terms since 2006. For reference, an annual living wage is estimated at just under £20,000. Other than a few celebrities and very successful authors at the very top, almost nobody is making a full-time living just from writing books. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, or make you feel ashamed about this.

Even when you do get paid what looks, on paper, to be a decent amount for your book, the payment structure and fees can catch you out. Commonly, a publisher will “advance” you a sum against the future sales of your book to cover costs while you write it. They then recoup this out of your sales, so you don’t earn any royalties until your book has “earned out” the amount of its advance. Lots of books never earn out, so the advance is the only money you ever receive. Out of this initial advance payment, you have to take off tax and your agent’s percentage. Also, you will probably be paid the advance in thirds or quarters — one instalment upon signing the contract, one when you deliver the book manuscript, one when the hardback comes out, and one when the paperback is published. There might be three or even four years between the first payment and the last. And publishers, like many big companies, can be slow to pay. I’m sure you can see how quickly even a relatively generous sum starts to feel like something you can’t really rely on as “income”.

So, what can you do? I’m assuming you’re not personally wealthy or the spouse of a rich person, by the way, although that is how some people square this circle. For the rest of us, maybe you have a full-time job and you write books in your spare time. Perhaps writing books is one thing in a portfolio of freelance work that sustains you. If you’re lucky enough to get paid sabbatical time from doing something else, that can be a good time to do the bulk of the work on a book without ending up out of pocket. Some people prefer their day job to be something totally unrelated to writing so that part of their brain is always fresh for their own projects. Others (like me) use the same skills involved in writing books to do related, more lucrative, jobs, like freelance journalism (ha!), newsletter writing, podcasting and so on. Each to their own. There are no wrong ways to go about this.

How many heinous a-holes have you encountered?

I loved the wording of this particular question too much to do a polite paraphrase of it. Honestly, only one truly, truly bad person has crossed my path in my journey through publishing so far, which I feel is quite a good average compared to the general population. I have interacted with a few less-than-sensitive people (and some of those do get called out in my new book, actually!) but they had their redeeming qualities too. In general, the people I work with in publishing are very nice and very hardworking. Maybe I’m just lucky, but I don’t think too many genuine villains spend their time crafting books in exchange for a middling-at-best salary.

I’ll stop now before this email gets so long that it cuts off in your inboxes, but if there are other questions you have or more details you’d like on any of this, just hit reply and let me know.

There is a story about Oscar Wilde that I was told in my first week as an undergraduate that I am thinking about a lot at the moment. While he was a student at Oxford, Wilde became well known for the impossibility of his brilliance. All he seemed to do was socialise, spew forth witticisms and lounge around in beautiful outfits, yet he somehow also managed to deliver essays and poems of such astuteness and flair that after four years of such aesthetic idleness he graduated with a double first and won the Newdigate Prize for poetry.

How did he do it? By working tremendously hard in secret, so the tale went. When he finally said goodbye to his friends after a long night of elegant carousing, he did not head for bed as they thought. Instead, he studied and wrote furiously, often going without sleep so that in the morning he could once more give the appearance of effortless, even lazy, genius. And it worked: by the time he left university, Wilde was known internationally for his enormous intellect and supposedly extempore quips. A glittering career as a writer and public intellectual beckoned.

I don’t know if this story is true. I’ve never wanted to research it properly: it is too perfect to spoil with facts. It seems consistent with what I know of Wilde’s career post-university and his place at the vanguard of the burgeoning aesthetic movement, and that is good enough for me. When I heard it at the age of 18, it confirmed for me something that my insecurities had long suggested — that the worst thing in the world is to be caught in the act of trying.

Earnest and anxious from a very early age, I was by this time fairly familiar with being called a “try-hard”. I had also registered that these accusations only accompanied failure, not success. I was a try-hard on the sports field, where no matter how dogged my efforts my lack of talent always resulted in utter humiliation, but never in the classroom, where a freakishly sponge-like memory (now long gone) saw me regurgitating information I did not understand in exchange for good marks. Being told the Wilde story at such an impressionable moment merely confirmed what I thought I already knew: being truly good at something meant never letting anyone see the effort or the failures it had taken to attain success.

When I put the proposal for my first book out for sale, I found that the publishing industry worked on much the same basis. The whole process was very opaque, with little information about how it all worked accessible unless you had a friend or mentor further along who was willing to give you the benefit of their experiences. Seen from the outside, there were long silences punctuated only by dazzling announcements: a major deal, a place on a bestseller list, a film adaptation. The rest — the trying and the failing and the trying again — was kept out of sight, as if it never happened at all.

It was very rare, I found back in 2017, to encounter someone openly discussing that they had tried and failed to write or sell a book. Even once I had found a publisher for my idea and embarked on writing it, the Wildean impulse to make it appear effortless was overwhelming, even though I was a novice laboriously and chaotically doing it all for the first time. To be seen to try is to appear weak, perhaps undeserving. When so many people want to be writers and aren’t given the opportunity, it seems extremely churlish to dwell in public on the less-than-ideal aspects of the occupation. Much better to make the difficulties invisible and then emerge on publication day to bask in the good reviews, accepting any praise that comes with a knowing smile that says “thank you, I did all this without even trying”.

The eye of the storm of all this for me, these days, is social media. At a time when traditional arts coverage is stretched and dominated by the celebrities who keep writing books, for the ordinary author it is vital to have a way of connecting directly with readers. In the past I haven’t put the effort and thought into doing this that it merits. I used to use Twitter for work when I was in political journalism but let my account go dormant as soon as I had moved on professionally; I enjoy posting about my dog and my reading and my cooking on Instagram but I’ve never put in the consistent effort to make it a channel that potential readers might find useful or attractive. I consume TikToks in a lofi secondhand way (might write about this another day) and I don’t make them. Facebook, for me, is entirely about sourcing secondhand furniture.

When my first book came out, I popped up on social media a few days before publication and said “Tada! I wrote book. Please buy it,” and that was about it. The response was, naturally, kind but underwhelming. The rejections from traditional media are far less visible. On a social media platform, my post can sit there forever, visibly ignored. For a long time, the knowledge that this was an important part of my job that I was neglecting chafed against my desire never to be caught in the act of trying. Because what looks more like trying than repeatedly posting publicly about your work, asking people to pay attention to it, and being ignored? Much better to have success miraculously occur and then be able to modestly highlight it, like Oscar Wilde probably would have done if he’d had Instagram in the mid 1870s.

I do think that the architecture of the internet today encourages this hesitance to be seen to be putting in effort. Social media, as we all know but can never remember in those low moments, is just a highlight reel of the best days and the best news. Those who do post with the greatest success do tend to make it look very easy, as if setting up a camera for every shot so as to capture yourself “casually” going about your day and then editing it into a seamless, appealing package with a jaunty soundtrack isn’t a lot of work that once upon a time would have been done by a whole crew of specialists. I’ve mostly tried to cut too-perfect influencers out of my personal media diet, but I do keep those who periodically post their drafts and their outtakes; it is useful for me to be reminded that a polished end product went through a lot of iterations and attempts.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, because I’m entering a season of life and work in which I want to try, really hard, and I felt the need to set the scene for that. I am aware that writing about trying “too hard” is probably the definition of trying too hard. But: my next book comes out in spring 2024 and it took a lot of effort and soul-searching to bring it into being. I would like as many people as possible to read it. I don’t think I am someone who can be Very Online all the time any more, but I am keen on the idea that even people who aren’t in full-time education can benefit from thinking of their life in semester-length chunks. This coming term and next is going to be a time for me of looking out rather than in, and talking about ideas and work that I’m proud of. This mode doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m going to have to try hard at it.

This newsletter is a big part of that. I found that I couldn’t write to you like this while also writing a book that contained a lot of personal stories and big feelings, but now that’s done, I can be here again. If there are subjects you would like me to cover or questions you want answered, just reply and let me know. This is a space for things that I’m interested in and also what you’re interested in too. Suggestions so far have included: overcoming writer’s block, moving out of London, how to switch career into writing. It won’t be perfect, but then what is?

In the words of the literary giant of our age, Ms Taylor Alison Swift: this is me trying.