HOW TO PUBLISH A BOOK (the making of Make It Make Sense)
What the hell is it like writing a book? (with your bestie, over the internet, across timezones, amidst life and global crises etc etc)??
Hello crushes!
Worn Out Woman here coming to you from one of my regular coffee nooks in Lisbon, which is next to where all the famous poets and writers are buried, in an attempt to summon some magic this week.
What the hell is it like writing a book? (with your bestie, over the internet, across timezones, amidst life and global crises etc etc)??
The hardest bit?
The cover. Close seconds: Figuring out how the 70-something separate pieces in the book came together, writer’s block, managing work and life outside of the book, the constant need for continued self-confidence, the editing process.
The easiest bit?
Randomly, our initial work deciding what each chapter would be about and what would go in them.
Most surprising?
Heaps of parts of the publishing process were really strange to us. Like, how once you’re finished with a proposal, it goes out to a kind of house-style auction for publishers to bid on.
This sounds SO basic and obvious, but we were both surprised about how much time the writing part took. I think I was under a naive vision that once I had the time, it would all come gushing out at once. My experience was the total opposite.
Did you disagree on anything?
Honestly? Literally no. This is one of the true joys of working with someone you’re so aligned with, and at times when we both couldn’t be online to make big decisions, it was a very calming feeling knowing we trusted the other implicitly.
How much didn’t make the cut?
SO MUCH. My notes app is filled with thousands and thousands of words and ideas and memories and weird drunken thoughts and essays and thoughts that didn’t make the final manuscript. And I know Luce’s Google Drive is the same. Some days, you’d write the bones of a whole piece in a three-hour fury, and other parts of it would take weeks and months and a few Menty Bs…
How do you feel about it now?
Surreal. Like, as though we wrote it like 2 years ago, and I was a different person then. And sometimes really proud and excited. And sometimes deeply anxious.
Advice to young writers trying to get published?
Read as much as you can. Write as much as you can. Put it all in one place, like a blog or a website. Figure out what you like and why. Figure out what you hate and why. Pitch as much as you can. Expect constant disappointments and occasional successes. Do other work to pay your bills. Be cautious of over-romanticising it. If you don’t back yourself, it’s likely no one else will either.
LASTLY! Really excited to be back in NZ soon to meet some of you IRL, talk all things book, finally be around people who truly understand the genius behind Dave Dobbyn’s ‘Slice of Heaven’ and lather gluten free vegemite on my gluten free vogels like the celiac queen I am.
J’adore you! See you this weekend for Wait, But What? Where I tackle a personal existentialism…
xox
