Simon Whaley's Business of Writing Newsletter: September 2023
Welcome to my September 2023 newsletter.
I was visiting my local independent bookstore recently. Although I never need an excuse to pop in there, especially as the owner, Ros, knows me so well and always makes me a cup of tea, I went because it was a special day. It was the bookshop’s 49th birthday. (Yes, Ros has already said she needs to start thinking about next year’s big birthday bash.)
Despite the torrential rain (sorry for dripping all over your carpet, Ros), there was a gathering of bookshop devotees, and Ros picked up a copy of my book, One Hundred Ways For A Dog To Train Its Human, and handed it around.
“Is this new?” asked one partygoer?
I shook my head. “No, it came out in . . .”
And then it hit me. It was twenty years ago, this month, when this, my first book, was published.
Little did I know in September 2003 what would happen to my little book. I was just gobsmacked that the publishers, Hodder & Stoughton, were doing a 10,000-copy print run.
But in October, they had to print another 10,000 copies, then another, and another . . . and so it went on, until December when my publisher emailed me to say, “Buy the weekend newspapers.”
It took me a while to find it, but I found it.
Eventually.
Gulp.
There I was.
Number 7 on the bestseller lists.
And it stayed on the bestseller lists throughout December, reaching number 2 in the run-up to Christmas.
When I chat about this to writers’ groups, I’m often asked, How do you go about writing a bestselling book? And I know I disappoint many when I reply with, “You don’t.”
Nobody sits down to write a bestselling book. If it were possible to do that, everybody would be doing it.
All You Can Do Is Write
No, as writers, all we can do is what I did all those years ago, which was to sit down and write. You can’t write a bestselling book, but you can sit down and write a book that could become a bestseller.
In other words, if you want to write a bestselling book, the first thing you have to do is write a book in the first place. You can’t have one without the other. You have full control over getting the book written. If you want to write a book, then it’s down to you to make that happen.
For some writers, that means sitting down at the same time every day and adding a few hundred, or thousand, words to the work-in-progress. For others, it may mean blocking out four days on their calendar this month and blitzing several thousand words. There’s no right or wrong way, just your way.
Turning a book into a bestseller is completely out of your control (in my opinion). Yes, you can influence sales. If you’re great on social media (not me, then!) you might be able to get your book in front of lots of people in a way that doesn’t come across as ‘pushy’. But doing so won’t guarantee bestsellerdom.
You can create lots of lovely TikTok videos. But that doesn’t guarantee bestsellerdom.
You can make yourself available for TV and radio interviews. But that doesn’t guarantee bestsellerdom.
You can go around all the bookshops in your area, or even organise your nationwide book tour. But that won’t guarantee bestsellerdom. There are no guarantees.
Which is why I say that nobody sits down to write a bestseller. You might hope to produce a bestseller, but that’s out of your control. But what you can do is write the book in the first place.
And, dare I say it, just because a book is a bestseller doesn’t mean it’s a good book. (Except mine, obviously 🤣). A bestselling label simply means the marketing worked well. It’s not always a quality indicator. It can be, particularly if a book has been on the lists for some time. (Bad books soon start getting bad reviews, and news spreads.) Likewise, there are hundreds of thousands of brilliant books out there that deserve to be on the bestseller lists, but it never happens.
What I’ve learned about writing bestselling books is that it’s a game of two halves. The first half is writing the book in the first place. And that’s down to you. The second half is down to a mixture of damn good marketing, sometimes word-of-mouth, and usually a lot of luck. And those are something we, as authors, may have little, or no control over at all.
So focus on what you CAN do. If you want to write a book, then sit down and write it. After that, anything else is the icing on the cake.
Medium Surprise
At the end of August, I grabbed a few days away in Cumbria, staying, not in the Lake District like I usually do, but just to the east of Carlisle, not far from Hadrian’s Wall.
I’ve never visited Hadrian’s Wall, and, perhaps rather ironically, the best weather over the Bank Holiday Weekend was Bank Holiday Monday (which in the UK is usually a washout with rain), so that’s where I was - traipsing all over Hadrian’s Wall.
As you may have seen from my previous newsletters, I write articles for the Medium platform (and as newsletter subscribers, I give you ‘free’ links to the stories I mention in my newsletter).
For those of you who don’t know, you can sign up for Medium’s Partner Programme, which entitles you to be paid for the articles you write that are read by Medium subscribers. Of course, there’s an algorithm involved, and there are many articles on Medium that attempt to work out just how that algorithm works.
But there’s part of me that feels this is all back to writing bestselling books again. If we really understood exactly how to write a big-money paying article, then everybody would be doing it. Some of my articles generate monthly incomes of $0.02 (Woohoo!), some much more than that.
For some reason, my article exploring Hadrian’s Wall was extremely popular (here’s your free link to read it) and has become my highest-earning article to date. And you never know, it might inspire you to visit if you haven’t already been.
Until next time, keeeeeeeeeep writing!
Simon