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I’ve spent the last few days wondering what I should decide to do next year. I don’t make resolutions. It’s pointless. I never stick to them. Two years ago I resolved to have finished writing my book by the end of the year and I’m still no further on with it now than I was back then.

I’ve been working at organising all of my thoughts and story ideas into a logical format, but it’s hard going. I have three stories running around in my head, and lots of little ideas that don’t fit into any of them, so it’s frustrating knowing what to do first. Then there are the bits and pieces that aren’t book ideas at all.

Anyway, I’d pretty much decided that although it would not be a resolution I would at least try and get one of the books done in 2002. Even if it was just a first draft. As long as I had the whole thing down, no matter how much work still needed doing on it, if it included all of the chapters and the major storylines I would be happy.

This morning, though, I woke up late after last night’s late night and sat in bed sipping tea and reading the Weekend section from yesterday’s Guardian and had a sudden faith crisis.

It published a list of the top 100 books of the year (well, actually, the top 101 because it had put Harry Potter in spot 0 - the very top spot, above the number one position, because the figures were estimates).

The 100th best-selling book was Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, with 163,017 copies (domestic and export combined). John Simpson, incredibly well known BBC news reporter, mustered only 209,595 for the second volume of his autobiography (66th position) and even Terry Pratchett, who has to be one of the most successful British authors of all time got to number 29, with 349,483 sales of The Truth.

Now to beat Terry Pratchett you’d have to come up with something VERY good. Really good. He already has a very loyal band of followers. A bit like Tolkein. 349,483 just isn’t enough, though. More people than that read me every three months in PCW, which shows just how difficult it is to get a good audience for a novel, especially if it is your first one.

Then I read the blurb commenting on the state of the market and it seems that some publishing houses will print as little as 1,000 books in a second run.

Now, if I’m going to put months and possibly years of work into a book, do I really want it to have such a small outlet?

No. Not really.

It would be nice to see it on the shelf alongside all the other books in a shop, but I would rather people read it than looked at its spine and passed it by, which started me wondering if book publishing is worth all the effort. So, I started to think of the alternatives. The best one I could come up with was to write a book and then give it away for free. Kind of public-domain publishing. I’d write it and then whoever wanted to read it could grab a copy for free from the net and share it with as many of their friends as they want (and so on and so on and so on).

Hmmm…

Then I watched a video of the Omnibus programme on JK Rowling that was on last night and got all caught up in the glamour and the fame of international publishing and being translated into dozens of languages and suddenly I wanted to be a published author again.

Oh dear.

More thinking required, I reckon.

Did a load of end-of-the-year jobs the rest of the day. Not specifically things with a 31st December deadline, but things I don’t still want to have on the To Do list going into 2002.

Met up with Paul late afternoon, and we went around to Trevor and Jon’s to exchange the last of the Christmas presents. The final act of Christmas, it marks the end of the festive season, I guess. Still, it’s New Year’s Eve tomorrow, so there’s still fun in store.

Perhaps I’ll take the decorations down tomorrow morning. The cards can stay up until next week.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2001 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.