Hello!
Let's talk about me. You must know it’s what I’ve secretly been wanting to do, ever since starting this newsletter all those long years ago, back when we were all younger, the sun still shone gold…
Anyway. Back to me. Me! I’ve just handed in a book to my agent (it’s a non-fiction love letter to HG Wells - thanks for asking) and oof. Writing is wonderful. But it’s hard too. It makes your brain ache. It makes your typing hands ache. And it makes you ache inside; terrible, gnawing, empty aching. Oh my insides! When you’re working on a book, especially in the final stages, you feel like you're racing to the top of a mountain… But once you’re all done, it feels a bit more like you’ve actually just jumped off a cliff, the ground has just risen up to meet you and if someone doesn’t catch you quick you’re going to go and spread out your entrails all over the shop…
… I know, I know. Poor old o-me-miserum me. And really, it’s an exciting, optimistic moment too. I'm quite chuffed, in all honesty. But I say all this about the hard-splat of finishing a book and handing it over to other readers because I want to say something about the bravery of writers. Not me personally. My book is non-fiction, and while I feel very close to it, I have more distance and less at stake, I think, than most novelists. I have HG Wells to bounce off if things go wrong. Novelists have no filter and no protection. If they’re incredibly lucky, they might get caught, and readers will bear them off into the future, all the more elated because they’ve had such a near-miss. But chances are they’ll feel the interface of cold hard ground with their internal organs. They've laid everything out for everyone (or worse still, hardly anyone) to see and that's a hard thing to do.
Every novelist who has submitted their book to anyone deserves some measure of respect in other words. What's more, it doesn't get easier for those who are lucky enough to get a deal. That’s only really the start of the trauma. Because then you've got *people* (insert your own swearword) like me and Elly scrawling all over your precious manuscript. Then you have to go through the agonies of waiting on reviews, then, maybe, if you’re lucky and someone notices you, reading the damn things. There’s also the agony of going into bookshops and seeing if your book is there. Then the agony of finding out about sales…
I could go on. And I know fiction writers (with a
few notable exceptions) don’t do such hard jobs as plenty of people. But because I've just been in a similar position, I'm reminded again of just how much they lay on the line and how much I respect them. Anyone who has the guts not only to sit down and write a novel, but to finish it and try to send it off into the world has got stones.
Naturally, I’m particularly biased towards Galley Beggar authors, but - just to single out this year’s writers -
Anthony Trevelyan,
DJ Taylor and
Alex Pheby have all carried themselves with a professional dignity that impresses me all the more now that I’m in a vaguely similar position. Hell, I’ve become so self-absorbed that I’ve taken up four fat paragraphs of this newsletter talking essentially about myself. Let's move it on...
It’s actually fairly quiet month at Galley Beggar Towers, because - as all sensible people must - we are battening down the hatches, chaining down the furniture, putting all small animals in the vicinity out of their misery, covering our ears, tearing out our eyes and mashing the poor bloody jellies into the carpet with our shoes in preparation for the arrival of Alex Pheby’s Playthings. I know I’ve mentioned this already; but oh boy. This novel is going to let of an H-bomb in your brain.
Please consider ordering a signed first edition. So you have something special to show your grandchildren.
You can also see Alex in action tomorrow, at Waterstones Piccadilly along with other literary stars (all of them superb: May-Lan Tan, Mahesh Rao and Meike Ziervogel. And cocktails. I’ve loved every event I’ve been to at Waterstones Piccadilly, and I’m sure that this one will be excellent too.
Details here .
On October 7, meanwhile, DJ Taylor will be in action at the
Cheltenham Literary Festival talking about short stories with Stuart Evers, Rodge Glass and the excellent literary editor Andrew Holgate.
Just a few days after that Francis Plug (aka Paul Ewen) will be in conversation with Andy Miller (the splendid author of the Year Of Reading Dangerously and all round literary good guy) at Blackwells Oxford on October 8.
Details here.
That’s what our splendid authors are doing in the near future. Meanwhile, back in the near past, this happened. This actually happened. It was at the Booker Prize shortlist party. A silence had fallen:
Someone was emerging out of the shadows:
He saluted the waiting audience:
He called for quiet, and began to speak.
And how he spoke! What burning eloquence. What fantastic, gorgeous eloquence. What words. Words. Alas, I can't tell you what he said, because we want to keep it under wraps until the big reveal in his next novel. All I can tell you is that it was glorious.
Talking of glorious, we’ve got this hard cold stab of darkness in the Singles Club this month.
While you’re in our store,
please also think about becoming a Galley Buddy. We’ve got a good roster of friends on board now and it helps us more than I can say, financially and emotionally. It feels like we’ve got a good team behind every book we do. And that every book has a guaranteed sympathetic readership. It’s a fine thing to be able to offer our writers and the more people that can help them in this way, the finer it will be.
Okay now. Here’s a fun thing. On a whim, don’t ask me why I was thinking this, I just put “Jeff Bezos is evil” into google. The first few results were New York Times articles and similar about the terrible working conditions and psychological torture his employees undergo. But then I found this article on Business Insider giving “14 quotes that show why Jeff Bezos is a genius.”
Here’s a sample of these uplifting quotes:
"Part of company culture is path-dependent — it's the lessons you learn along the way."
"A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last."
"Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful."
"I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out."
I’ll leave those with you... But the real reason I share this article on the Bezos genius is because of its one genuinely funny line. At the end of this article about the steel-melting awesomeness of big bad Jeff, we are given the following bit of disclosure: "Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.”
That’s right.
I hope the author got a promotion! And didn't just go home and weep until blood came out of his red raw tear ducts.
What a world. But at least you’re in it. Thanks for reading!
Fondly, Sam
PS The Weightless World is still going strong. I really enjoyed this review on
Savidge Reads. Graham Greene, no less! Look out for a mention in the TLS soon too.
PPS As usual, I'm also going to use the end of the newsletter for a few more adverts, where you can safely ignore them, or kindly indulge me, depending on your fancy:
Firstly, please join The Singles Club so we can pay writers to write. Here's the blurb:
We have a fantastic new subscription system set up for our Singles Club so that you now only have to make one payment to get hold of 12 stories. But how to go through the ins and outs of paypal payment systems without boring the dirtbox off you, I don't know. Probably the best thing to do is to head over to the relevant page on our site, where I've tried to give a brief, but to the point explanation, and to take it from there. The important things to know are that:
(1) Subscribing saves you the trouble of going to the site every month to get your fix of superb ebook literature – we'll just email you the files every month.
(2) Subscribing (so long as enough people do it) will enable us to start giving our authors money up front on for each story. Yes! We are going to pay people to write short stories. It's like the golden days of the 1920s. Only they'll be in electronic book format instead of Strand magazine… Anyway! You get the idea. This is a mighty fine way to keep authors doing what they do best – entertaining you.
(3) It costs £12 a year, or £1 a month, or less than a meal in Pizza Express. (Unless you have a voucher.)
Secondly, please be our friend! Become a Galley Buddy. It's a good deal for us, and a great deal for you.
Thirdly, to donate to Galley Beggar Press and earn yet more of our gratitude, click here.
Fourthly, go on, buy a postcard set. They're lovely:
Fifthly, thanks for reading write down to the bottom. There's no prize, but I sure do like you. Like everyone else I've been listening to the Ryan Adams 1989 album. Meanwhile, writers! Kill noise and get into a mellow place with In-Between by Arovane and Hior Chronik. And the new Editors album has got Rachel from Slowdive on it. Of course it's great.
Add new comment