On Selling a Dream

In a month’s time...

On 2 July, my new novel Super 8 Dream will be published.

This means that, according to the rules of contemporary authorship, I should probably be talking about it all the time.

I should be posting extracts and photographs and anecdotes about the writing process. I should be reminding people to pre-order. I should be creating anticipation, maintaining visibility, staying present in the algorithm. I should, ideally, be everywhere at once.

The trouble is, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with any of that.

This isn’t because I don’t want people to read the book. Quite the opposite. I spent years putting it together. I would be delighted if it found readers. I would be delighted if those readers pressed it into the hands of friends and said, “You should read this.”

But there is a strange tension between writing a novel and promoting one.

Writing, for me at least, has always involved retreating from the noise. It requires a certain degree of disappearance. You spend months, sometimes years, following voices that nobody else can hear, trying to build something out of memory, intuition and imagination. The work happens in private. Often it happens in silence.

Then, when the book is finished, the expectation is that you reverse the process entirely. Suddenly you must become visible. You must explain yourself. You must talk about the thing you spent years making. Repeatedly.

Perhaps this comes naturally to some writers. I admire those for whom it does.

I often find myself wondering whether it comes naturally to readers.

Books have always seemed to reach me through recommendation rather than repetition. A friend mentions a novel they can’t stop thinking about. A bookseller presses a copy into my hand. I read a review. I hear an author speak for ten minutes and become curious about their work. The books that stay with me tend to arrive quietly.

I’ve never once bought a novel because the author told me, for the twentieth time, that it existed.

Maybe I’m wrong. Publishing is a difficult business and visibility matters. There are more books being published than ever before, all competing for attention in an increasingly crowded world. I understand why writers are encouraged to keep talking.

Yet there is another complication.

Super 8 Dream is not an easy book for me to discuss.

Every novel contains elements of its author, but some sit closer to the bone than others. This one emerged from a period of my life that I still don’t entirely understand. In some ways, writing it was my attempt to understand it. The process felt less like constructing a story than following a trail through memory and trying to make sense of what I found there.

As a result, I’ve discovered that I feel more comfortable writing about the book than explaining it.

Perhaps that’s fitting.

After all, novels are not instruction manuals. They don’t exist to be summarised by their authors. The best conversations happen between a book and a reader, long after the writer has left the room.

So this is unlikely to become a month-long marketing campaign.

I won’t be appearing on every platform every day. I won’t be counting down the hours until publication. I won’t be trying to convince anyone that this is the most important book ever written.

What I will say is this.

I care deeply about Super 8 Dream. I worked on it for a long time. I am proud of it. And I hope that, once it is out in the world, it finds the readers it is meant to find.

If you would like to pre-order a copy, I would be grateful.

And if you do read it, and it speaks to you in some way, tell someone else.

Word of mouth may be unfashionable. It may be impossible to measure. It may not satisfy the demands of the algorithm.

But I still suspect it’s how most books find their way home.