Having a moment

I had a moment last week. I was in the city and I thought I’d nip into one of the most popular book shops there, The Book Hive. A friend had mentioned that she’d been in recently to get The River Days of Rosie Crow and there were some problems with ordering it in, so I wanted to check it had been resolved.

I told the girl working there about the issue and she asked me what the name of the book was so she could look it up. When I told her, her face broke out into a smile and she said Oh! The River Days of Rosie Crow! Yes, that’s all been sorted now. It’s been selling really well. There’s some copies out on the front table. Actually, maybe you could sign those copies now and we can put a card in them letting people know they’re signed?

It truly took longer than it should have done for this to compute. My book? On the front table? Selling well? You may be wondering why this is a big deal. After all, this is my fifth published book. Let me explain.

For anyone who writes, there are different measures of when we think we have ‘made it’ as a writer. For some, it could be for when they hold their first book in their hands (undeniably hugely satisfying). For others, it could be writing ten poems. Or winning an award. Or securing a literary agent. Or being invited to a literary festival. And of course, this is so personal and we are writers whenever we say we are. I’ve never believed in a hierarchy and that one person is more of a writer because, for example, they have a literary agent.

And still, don’t ask me why, but for as long as I can remember, for me it’s been seeing my book in a bookshop. The truth that many readers aren’t particularly familiar with is that it can be monumentally hard to have your book in a bookshop. They are bound by the market and what is selling and popular, as well as the classics. Of course there are many exceptions to this but broadly speaking, this is the way it works. The model of my first publisher was to sell online unless sales exceeded a certain (very high) number – most copies were sold digitally and so while it was possible to order my first two novels in from bookshops, not once did The Poet’s Wife or The Girl and the Sunbird appear in one. As for my third novel, The Secret Life of Alfred Nightingale, well, bookshops can be notoriously snobby about stocking self-published books, even if they’re written by local authors. Again, I am speaking broadly here as of course there are bookshops around that are more open to this. But this has been my experience and it’s replicated in libraries, where they are happy to lend out traditionally published novels, but definitely not self-published ones.

For my fourth book, The Sky Within (a memoir), this was published by a small indie-press which, again, is very hard to get into shops unless they are selling large amounts of copies and the demand is there. All this being said, I absolutely presumed it would be the same story with The River Days of Rosie Crow as it’s published by Stairwell Books, another small indie press. Honestly, I didn’t even bother going to ask The Book Hive to stock them there because beyond buying one or two as a token, I was pretty sure the answer wouldn’t be in the affirmative. Which is why I was pretty gobsmacked last week to see a pile of them on the front desk and to be asked to sign them. This only happens if people have been asking for the bookf or it’s been selling well which, evidently, it has been.

It’s hard to express how happy this made me to see them there; to connect a childhood dream with a current reality, sitting there on the table with my signature in them.

When I left The Book Hive, the girl working there said Congratulations on your book and grinned at me again.

I definitely left with a spring in my step and a smile stretching out my face.

I am a writer.

Thank you for reading this blog post. Compliment it with listening to a spoken excerpt of me reading from my novel for New Writing Out Loud and an article written about the book for the Eastern Daily Press.