Spinning from nowhere to everywhere (almost)

It’s February 2007 and Sarah’s annoyed with me. We’re walking down the main street and with every bookshop we pass – Waterstone’s, Blackwell’s, WHSmiths, Hardy’s Bookshop, Cover to Cover and on and on - I insist we go inside, be they a standard bookseller, a remainder-er or second hand proprietor (it matters not). Sarah knows in her heart that there’s a good chance my book won’t be stocked there, and my head agrees, but still my soul is willing the shop to have a hardback copy of The Secret War on their shelves. She knows I’ll be disappointed, but she puts up with it (Sarah suffers a lot of things when it comes to my writing – I think all partners/spouses of writers do).
My first book has just been published and I’m a little too naïve to realise that a hardback release of a debut novelist means I won’t be everywhere. In fact I’ll be lucky to have my novel stocked by 1 in 10 bookshops – yet still I cling to the hope that there’ll be a copy sitting on the shelf in the fantasy or general fiction section in every bookshop I enter.
When there isn’t, I deflate a little, but Sarah consoles me: “They could have sold out already…”


…That was then.
In 2007 I had a habit of torturing myself by looking for my book much in the same way a football fan tortures his or herself by following a team that never consistently wins. The average football fan suffers much disappointment, but you know it’s good for the soul. It’s good because you become the stubborn optimist (when you follow Crewe Alexandra FC you can be nothing but); like Sarah a couple of years ago, you learn to put a positive spin on anything. (In the case of C.A.F.C., you simply resign yourself to the fact the division you’re being relegated into will offer you a more realistic opposition – an opposition that you can finally beat!).

In the case of the hardback of The Secret War, I personally didn’t even try to put a spin on it because the facts were stark. The hardback print run for The Secret War was less than 2,000. That sounds low, but actually that’s quite usual for a print run from a debut in hardback. With Goldsboro Books and Waterstone’s Sheffield accounting for more than 200 copies sold within the first month, most bookshops wouldn’t be stocking it other than on-line. There just weren’t enough copies to go round, and more importantly, no one had heard of me – so how were they going to sell it?
Obviously there were exceptions, such as the booksellers my family and friends pimped me to, the local sellers in Sheffield like Waterstone’s Orchard Square, Borders as well (who stocked quite a few copies, including Leeds Borders who were very helpful); and indie bookshops such as Goldsboro and the Bakewell Bookshop. But the sparse coverage meant I received e-mails from people asking how they could get their hands on a copy – and I could only point them to Amazon.

Things change.
Two years later and something has happened. I’m in paperback. It’s very much a larger print-run than the hardback of The Secret War, and all of a sudden it feels like I’m everywhere. Well, almost.
During the trip to London a couple of weeks back, 6 out of 7 bookshops I looked in not only had copies of the Secret War in paperback – they had lots of copies. And they had “lots of copies” (in the case of Waterstone’s and Borders) in the 3 for 2. Stacks. Some on the tables, some on the shelves; some on the display stands. All of a sudden I was face-outwards, looking across the bookshop, and moreover, I was selling.
I was even selling in WHSmiths, a bookseller that pretty much straddles the middle-ground between traditional bookshops and supermarkets (they don’t appear to take risks on the unknowns or mid-list hardbacks, usually only selling bestsellers by heavily discounting). But there I was – in WHSmiths’ sci-fi/fantasy section – a copy of The Secret War, its malevolent blue eyes staring back at me from the front cover.

I’ve had people e-mail and phone me from Bournemouth to Scotland to say the novel sits proudly in their local bookshops - and not just The Secret War paperback either, but The Hoard of Mhorrer is more widespread than the first book in hardback. Copies have shifted before their very eyes, and slowly stocks are reducing.
It’s fantastic news, but also unnerving. I guess I no longer have that anonymity of a small print run. It’s there to be criticised by the many, and all the good and the bad will land on my doorstep for me to be pragmatic about and/or revel in. Am I bothered about that? Well, actually not too much. Of the two major reviews I’ve had for The Hoard of Mhorrer, one was good, one was not so good, but thankfully the good review was from a magazine I have a lot of time for (and the bad review was from a chip-wrapper magazine I haven’t bought for almost two years). There’ll be some bad reviews on the internet, I have no doubt (aren’t there for every book?), but that’s okay, as there are some great reviews already on the web.

And besides… The fact the book is finally out there, on the march in numbers and selling, matters more to me. Yep, from nowhere to everywhere (almost). There will be exceptions. There will be places where The Secret War won’t be stocked, where the bookshelves will be devoid of those menacing blue eyes, or the red eyes of The Hoard of Mhorrer.
Sure there will.
But as Sarah kept telling me back then, “Hey, you know, they might have sold out already…”