Before your book comes out…

My first novel is published early next year, and I keep finding myself getting embarrassingly, self indulgently obsessed about things that are completely beyond my control. I wrote this to myself, a list of things to remember as an attempt to maintain sanity and equilibrium over the next few months. If you have a book coming out soon, I hope that you find this comforting — or that you’re not as vain, insecure or egotistical as me, and that you don’t need to read it!

1. The book is not you.

2. You have absolutely no control over its success. The people who can influence it — not control it — are working very, very hard. They care. It is in their interests to do what they can to make it successful. Trust them and thank them.

3. Unless something odd happens, you will write another book. This is not your only go.

4. This took a lot of hard work — work that no-one asked you to do. You sat down and worked on gloomy Sundays, when everything felt like doomed homework. You made this work a priority when you itched with fear and wanted to do absolutely anything else in order to distract yourself from it and escape it. If you can settle down and write about made up people when you’re sitting with the urge to rip off your skin, you can deal with one star Amazon reviews.

5. Don’t read anything into the fact that you have read and supported the work of a particular Twitter person and they appear to be ignoring yours. It doesn’t matter that you follow each other. They don’t…