Why I don’t always like publication day

I am truly excited for Head Over Wheels to be out in the world today. This book was a joy to write and it’s a privilege to have people reading my words (and actually paying for them!)

So why the title of this post?

Publishing is one of the most competitive environments that exist. Not that authors compete actively with each other. Authors are bookish people too, so we love other people’s books. But there are SO MANY books, an author is competing not only for a readers’ hard-earned and scarce money, but also for their time (given there are a lot of free or cheap books out there).

Sometimes I think it’s a miracle that anyone buys my books at all.

For those wonderful people who have bought a copy (you mean the world to me), they won’t necessarily get a chance to read it immediately. If I savour a book, it takes me about a week to read it. Publication day, therefore, is a day where most readers haven’t read the book yet.

People often need to see a book at least five times before they’ll consider buying it. Getting this amount of exposure on social media is difficult for smaller publishers and authors and traditional advertising basically doesn’t exist for all but the biggest titles (which are rarely romance in the UK).

These lessons I didn’t learn immediately and as my first few books came out, it took me a long time to realise why there was this post-publication-day effect, where the silence about my book was almost traumatic. Now I know to keep my expectations moderate to preserve my mental state post-publication day.

Ultimately, I don’t want to become a multi-million selling author, doing interviews and with everyone talking about me. I’d just like a small, dedicated readership that makes all of my efforts to bring out books worthwhile and delivers some level of stability to my royalties. I’m nearly there, actually, which makes me really happy.

This time, I’ll be able to see my book on the bookshelves for the first time. I know this doesn’t mean more sales (it might even mean fewer sales, as the ebook is priced higher to ensure it competes against the paperback), but I’ve NEVER had a book available under ‘normal’ retail conditions and I’ve experienced over and over again being ignored in the publishing world and retailers refusing to stock my books because they’re primarily available only digitally or with a ‘firm sale’ print-on-demand option. I’ll finally have some Nielsen Bookscan statistics (although I might regret this if they’re bad!)

Publishing is such a complex environment and not all books are born equal, unfortunately. I’m not sure how widely Head Over Wheels will be stocked or how aggressively it will be marketed digitally. But I can say I’m incredibly proud of this book. With the editorial team at Bedford Square, we created a really exciting, swoony book. The cover is digitally drawn by a real artist who created something very special. We’ve invested time and money into this book and I’m incredibly grateful that not all of the time and money was my own, that a publisher took a chance on my writing and will be trying hard to get it into shops.

Publication day is the day I have to let go. My own marketing efforts don’t do a huge amount for sales (I need to shift more than the handful of copies I can manage myself with my small following and my geographical location a long way from my readership). Now it’s up to my publisher – and it’s up to the goodness of readers to share their opinions of the book, to get the cover seen those five critical times and maybe convince others to read it, if they loved it.