What Nobody Tells You About Getting a Book Ready for the World

I’ve published ten novels now, but every time I am never quite prepared for the post-writing busyness.

My next book, Where Stories Lie Buried, launches on 25 September, and the closer it gets, the more I’m doing things that have nothing to do with writing at all. Nobody warns you about this part. You imagine launching a book involves, well, the book — and maybe a nice cup of tea while you wait for reviews to come in. What it actually involves, this week alone, includes a paper cutter, a very confused half hour with my banking app, and a phone call I didn’t expect to be having in August.

A conversation with my editor turned me around. Until now all my historical fiction books have been a standard size. Early in the process, she suggested a slightly larger size for this book – meant to be used, not just read – but I didn’t think it through carefully enough and said no. She insisted I reconsider, even after she’d finished the layout. Then a bookseller I’d talked to reinforced her opinion, mentioning in passing that my usual book size wasn’t quite what he was used to seeing on the shelves. Three weeks before launch, that’s a big decision and a big change. But my editor had already started resizing it, and within hours I had a new file and a new cover, while I sat wondering whether “trade size” was something I should already have known about. Apparently there’s always more to learn.

Then there was Stripe. I’ll admit I have never in my life wanted to understand what NFC stands for, and I still don’t entirely, but at least I now know how to take a contactless card payment on my own phone. I spent an afternoon with a very patient support team, deleting the wrong app and setting up the new one. Then came that one moment of pure relief when a test payment of $1 actually went through. I may have said “yay” out loud, alone, in my kitchen.

And this week I’ve been sitting at my table of an evening, cutting handouts into neat little stacks with a lightweight paper cutter — one page at a time, slower than I’d like, but there’s something satisfying about it. A small, physical task after a day of screens and emails.

None of this is what I thought “launching a memoir” would feel like. But then, I suppose that’s rather the point of the book itself — the parts nobody sees are usually where the real story is. Ten novels’ worth of research and writing sit behind Where Stories Lie Buried – A Memoir of a Genealogist Turned Author, but so does a fair amount of exactly this: unglamorous, occasionally baffling, entirely necessary groundwork.

I’ll be at the We Read Indie Writer’s Festival at Te Manawa in Westgate this Saturday, 29 August, from 11am to 3pm — table set up, handouts cut, Stripe (finally) working. Come and say hello. I’d love to tell you the rest of the story in person.