It’s Saturday morning, five days after my book launch. I’m at a GP conference in a provincial town. I hadn’t considered seeing my book in an actual book shop. That was only an ethereal idea. But I make myself duck uneasily into Whitcoulls and PaperPlus, self-conscious that every shop assistant knows I am an author looking for their own book, and I pick up a Chelsea Winter, then Become Unstoppable, then Lessons on Living, then Habits of High Performers, flicking through them like I’m legit. I edge around shelves and finally at floor level, in the health and wellbeing section I find one copy of my book Everything but the Medicine: A doctor’s tale between Befriending Your Gut Biome and Menopause Conquered. WTF. I run out the door.
On Google maps I find the Indie bookshop. That will be better. The door sticks and clatters. I avoid eye contact, pretending to browse the Māori and literary sections, my eyes flicking around for my book cover but I can’t see it anywhere. I pause, consider running again, but bravely go to the desk, introduce myself and my book. She looks blank, consults her computer and the computer says, “No.” I desperately wish I’d stayed at the conference and learned more about heart failure.
Publishing your first book is a strange experience. There’s a lot I didn’t know. Here’s what I would tell my pre-book self now that I’ve done it.
You will feel like you are about to give birth to your first baby after an eight-year gestation, but actually you are giving birth to a grownup who leaves home straight away and goes off into the world meeting a whole lot of people you don’t even know.
You will diligently prepare for this birth by joining the New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA) and going to seminars where a published author will have said, “You need to call into bookshops, introduce yourself and sign the books they have.” She won’t have said, “Don’t be deterred by a first excruciating book shop visit, because mostly bookshop owners love meeting authors.” And it is true; booksellers are lovely and bookshops are places of community; supporting ideas, events, conversations and one-woman shows. You will work out how to call in, be warm, acknowledge their work, build relationships and talk books.
You’ll have to have a book launch and that’ll feel a bit awkward. Asking people to come along and clap and buy a book they might not want or like? So, you’ll tell yourself, “I can make this book launch fun. I know, I’ll do a wee skit about being a GP, just five or 10 minutes.” And you’ll start writing it and the stories will pour out of you and soon there will be a 45-minute one-woman show, with 32 characters.
You will spend two years trying to find a publisher. Where do publishers hide? How do you get to meet one? What makes them read a manuscript? How do I choose who to send it to? And you will press ‘send’ to multiple publisher emails and each submission will require a slightly different pitch, bio, CV and manuscript style, so each submission will be a big piece of work, like pushing a bit of your soul into an unknown inbox, and each time you will get an auto reply saying, “If you haven’t heard from us in three months we are not interested”. Really? They won’t even say if they read it? No. they won’t. Your soul, met by silence.
A couple of the smaller publishing houses will send a nice email saying they want to read it but they’re busy, so six months later they won’t have got to it and you will have heard on another NZSA webinar that publishers don’t like you to submit to more than one publisher at a time, but you will soon exclaim, “Bugger that, if I have to wait three-six months for each one then I could be 80 before someone even reads the first sentence.”
You will learn about social media, tweak your website and make a marketing plan because someone at an NZSA meeting said that was important. And in all those months of waiting and autoreplies you will go about your life feeling ordinary, wondering if you just wasted eight years of your life writing a book which doesn’t matter to anyone but you. And you will be faced with the answer, “Maybe not.”
And then one day out of the blue you will get a call from Nicola Legat, publisher at Massey University Press. She has read your manuscript and loves it. She is calm and considered like we are having the most normal Zoom chat ever, although you will be nearly passing out with relief and anticipation but sounding a bit coy and hard to get while knowing there is not a shit show you will say “No” to her. It’s only later, after blathering for an hour, that you will realise she was probably interviewing you.
And then you will be in a book publishing process, and you will do everything Nicola says. When Nicola says, “I don’t think this story quite fits, Lucy,” you will reply, “Okay Nicola, let’s take it out.” When Nicola writes something for the back cover that compares you to Atul Gawande, you will baulk and cringe in embarrassment, but you’ll say, “Great, Nicola.” When Nicola says, “Today is a day to celebrate, Lucy! Have a glass of wine!”, you will say, “Yes Nicola I will!” Part of you will be watching this going, I never do anything I’m told, where is this weird, strange obedience coming from? And you will realise it’s a bit like a patient seeing a doctor. In the end you just have to trust.
You will be sent into six weeks of sentence bootcamp with editor Tracey Lowndes, who will start by telling you she loves your book but she isn’t going to say that again, and she will proceed to systematically identify every lazy sentence, every unclear word, every unreferenced thought and every Oxford comma. She may also find some split infinitives and just fix them knowing you wouldn’t know what that was. It will be incredible. You will love the editing and what it does to the book: lightness and flow.
You will have to set up Humanitix and venues and books shops and social media and email invites because your NZSA-esque marketing plan, which you won’t have shown anyone, says you will do four launches (why just one?) so you will head off with your one-woman show to Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Wānaka.
You will learn that after each performance you need to dash straight to the book table and sign books because people love signed books (I thought this was a bit weird but I think I get it now; the ink is some personal connection between writer and reader) and each book event will feel like an episode of This Is Your Life as all sorts of people you know, or knew long ago, will appear at the signing table, beautiful people you haven’t seen for years will be there in front of you and you will do a lot of hugging and two-sentence chats, and then they will be gone.
You will do social media posts because that was on the marketing plan and you will have to dance that fine line, promoting your book without sounding like an arrogant tosser and you will thank your friends who will like every post for months on end (boy they must be sick of this book) and you will convince yourself all these posts are OK because there are people out there who will enjoy the book, who want a book that makes them cry, laugh and act, and you are using social media to get it into their hands, so that’s not really arrogant. But not that humble either.
You will find Nicola has entered you in the national book awards and you will be long-listed for the nonfiction prize which is incredible except that you and another mere mortal are up against Jacinda Ardern for the best nonfiction book by a first-time author. And you will go, “Bugger.” And, “Oh well. It doesn’t matter. But it does matter. No, it’s just a prize, it doesn’t matter, it’s great to get on the long list because your book has been read by literary people who aren’t doctors or anything to do with health and they rated it, that’s great.” You can’t talk about it with anyone because you’ll sound precious and precocious and undignified. And you will realise that in your whole adult life you’ve never been in a judged competition and you don’t have the psychological apparatus for it, so you decide if you think of the book prize like a random lottery, then you will feel OK when you don’t get on the shortlist. (Actually, you won’t feel OK, but you can’t admit that.)
And then gradually you will have this strange experience of getting attention, people want to interview you, are interested in what you to have to say, they will Follow you, Like you, comment with love emojis and score you on a thing called Goodreads and then Auckland libraries will have 129 holds on your book which feels like a ridiculous number and you will wonder, “Who are all these people reading my book?”
Complete strangers will come up to you like they know you, which they kind of do, because they have read your book which has way too much self-disclosure about your life and you will be looking at these people desperately trying to work out if you have met them before or not, and how to respond in a way that is warm and friendly whilst covering the possibility you are talking to a long-lost friend that you don’t recognise because, well, you both look a bit older.
There will be this strange feeling of getting too much oxygen, like you can’t catch your breath to think, but you are actually vaguely hyperventilating, and dizzily trying to be yourself while also inhabiting some new public persona.
You will make friends at book festivals and tour the country performing your rollercoaster show about the realities of GP life and you will be on bestseller lists and your book will be in its third print run but after 25 performances and 25 other events and numerous book shop visits and way too many FB reels (and in between you will have sold a house and moved back to the South Island), you will feel slightly unhinged, a bit of flotsam in a current you can’t swim against, and you will realise you have lost touch with all your friends and family, and about then someone on FB will comment “You’re living the dream” but you won’t know what emoji to reply with.
About then you’ll realise that your pukapuka will soon drop off the bestseller chart (it does) and at some point, not far off, you will be old news and you won’t know whether to be relieved or deflated, that you can finally return home and work out who you are now and wonder what that experience was all about.
And you will say to yourself, I wrote a book about being a GP to make sense of the stories I had heard, to give voice to the voiceless, to reconsider the culture of medicine, to democratise complex ideas into a form that anyone could read and be moved by. And the greatest gift is that little book has been read by medical school deans and academics and truck drivers and teenagers and farmers and health care workers and mothers-in-law and teachers and lawyers and yesterday my digger driver went off listening to it in his ute. Ka pai.
Everything But the Medicine: A doctor’s tale by Lucy O’Hagan (Massey University Press, $39.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
