Can’t be bothered to read? Let me read for you!
Note: Some dialogue has been exaggerated for creative purposes.
Where were we? Ah, yes! An agent had taken a shine to my manuscript, Lab Rat. The following week, I was on my way to their office for a face-to-face meeting. I carried the same nerves as if I were heading to a job interview. What if she doesn’t like me? What if they made a mistake and had emailed me instead of the actual author they wanted?
Oh, sorry, there has been a mistake we meant Marie Numan.
I arrived at the agency, and something was wrong. The reception area was an empty white room with dust sheets.
“Hello?” I called out. I began to panic, thinking I had fallen for an internet con and was about to be chopped up. But then the door in the far corner opened, and a woman appeared. I recognised her from the ‘Meet the Team’ page.
“Is it Mary? Thought so. Sorry about the mess, we’re having some work done. Come in! She won’t be long…” Lovely. I wasn’t going to be chopped up after all.
I waited for the agent in the meeting room. There was a whiteboard, some glasses, and an empty jug. I could hear muffled phone conversations from the next room. The second door of the day flew open.
“Josh is a dick! Linda Butters is a dick! And I fucking love Amy!” The agent put her coffee mug and folders on the table. Bang! She sat down.
“Thank you very much,” I muttered. The next forty minutes, I sat in a daze as Lab Rat was praised. It was terribly bizarre. I, an adult, had made some characters in my head, and now I’m in a boardroom, having a professional discussion with another adult about them. She offered representation on the spot. It reminded me of when I passed my driving test for the first time.
“Well, you passed,” the examiner said.
“Really?” I said back in surprise. (I could have sworn I bumped the curb on my three-point turn).
I left the agency and walked around central London in my own world; things were happening around me, but I wasn’t taking any notice, like the guy in the Bitter Sweet Symphony music video. A bus driver and a van driver had gotten out of their vehicles and were having a proper fist fight in the middle of Regents Street. I was in such a cloud that I could have walked right over to them.
“Fellas, it’s a beautiful summer day. I’ve just been offered representation. Let’s just love, hey?”
I had a date that night. It ended on the balcony of the Punch & Judy pub in Covent Garden. The moon was out, I had my favorite shoes on, and for the first time since starting the ‘Let’s write a novel!’ malarkey, I felt truly happy with myself.
Later that week, I signed the contract under the bridge at the BFI. There’s a chapter in the book where Amy has a moment on the South Bank, so it felt poetic for us both to have a good turning point there. I know that’s weird, but I had been writing as Amy for so long, she had become almost real. (I was moments away from madness).
As soon as my name was on the dotted line, I was like Leo in The Wolf of Wall Street. “LET’S GET THIS BOOK ON THE SHELF!” But this wasn’t Wall Street. This was the publishing industry – the slowest thing known to man. It was like boarding a doped-up snail. It turns out, making a book takes time. From June to November, I did two rounds of edits with the agent, which included: adding a lobster dinner, killing off a child, and creating a Liverpudlian stripper. (To read about this Liverpudlian stripper, preorder Amy Elman Doesn’t Feel Sexy today!)
Once my agent and I were happy with the manuscript, we sent it off to publishers under a sparkling new title: Stalemate. This was a terrifying stage. Not life-threatening-terrifying, but the book could receive no offers from publishers, so Amy Elman would be buried in my fiction folder along with Can of Worms forever.
My agent advised me to forget about Amy and concentrate on Book 2. I had been deeply single for a few years, so I had plenty of material to start a book with. However, I still found myself distracted by the fear that it would all disappear. The uncertainty of it all was turning me into a prickly bitch. I thought I’d give therapy a go. Everyone else was. I turned up for session one, and another patient let me into the practice. This was a mistake. I was supposed to have waited for the therapist to collect me. The therapist got angry and told me off. I cried like a kid who was in trouble at school. Therapy wasn’t for me.
Fortunately, there was movement with the book. A very cool German publisher wanted it. Blimey. I hadn’t even thought about other languages. Amy was, unexpectedly, going international. A few weeks later, I opened an email while walking down St. Giles in Oxford. It was my agent telling me I had a UK offer from one of the Big 5. I burst into happy tears in the middle of the street. I received two further offers, so it went into an auction. After some emails, two phone calls, and one ‘clear-my-head walk,’ I decided to go with Hodder.
I was officially signed and was ready to ‘GET THAT BOOK ON THE SHELF,’ but then I was sharply reminded about the doped-up snail I was riding. It often takes about a year for a manuscript to become a book. It was going to be a long wait.
I met my editor at the Hachette headquarters. I was awkwardly overdressed in a blue suit. The title was going to be changed for the 4th time – Amy Elman Doesn’t Feel Sexy. The manuscript was handed back to me, covered in red comments from my editor. I saw each comment as a tangle that I needed to brush out. It was rather satisfying. As I muddled my way through the words, the sales and marketing team got on with the cover, the blurb, and all the other things that make a book a book. Slowly but surely, Amy Elman was brought to life.
In the meantime, I was back and forth with Germany on edits and translation queries like, “Sylvanian families are not popular in Germany; could we say he dresses like Bilbo Baggins instead?” Super highbrow stuff. They retitled the book as ‘This isn’t happiness’ and gave it a sexy cover.
Even though the publishing industry is slow (not sure if I mentioned that), the year somehow whizzed by. It’s 8 weeks now until the UK launch, and this week, ‘This isn’t happiness’ will be on the shelves in Germany. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a tad nervous. Books have a life of their own, so who knows what will happen next.
I had a biology teacher who once said our GCSE grades would follow us around like a bad smell for the rest of our lives. I sometimes worry that this book will be just that – a bad smell. Hopefully not. Hopefully, people will pick it up, enjoy it, maybe chuckle a little, put it down, and move on to the next book… that’s the dream.
THE QUACK 