The Cruel Privilege of Being Published

I can remember the feeling of holding my book for the first time fresh from the printer. Fanning through the pages the smell of ink and paper bleach. Half a decade of striving, of fate left in the capricious hands of editors, publishers and publishing houses, was now over. Here, right here, in my hands was something that justified sacrificing career progression, time, enough cash for a house deposit, even a relationship.

The worst thing that could happen now would be that one day I would pass Bargain Basement Bookshop in the central station tunnel, on my way to work and see my book there in a stack of identical siblings - a pink flouro sticker that would leave traces of white that would turn to mouldy black over time - $34 down to $3. That I could handle.

I wasn’t going to have a launch party. It seemed self-indulgent. But friends coaxed me into it. You have achieved something - you should take some time to celebrate - one said. The publisher came, my family, my agent sent a bottle of vodka (the book was about the Soviet Union). In front of all my friends I read out a portion of one chapter where I had seen a rocket launch from the Kazakhstan Steppe.

A modest PR tour followed. I did radio appearances about my book - some radio presenters had understood the book, some hadn’t. I didn’t mind because everything was on course.

This was the time of the Rio Olympics. There was a Russian doping scandal. I wrote an article about how this was a continuation of the Soviet legacy of the doping of their Olympic team. It was published and I got paid. It seemed like a natural continuation from the book I wrote and the beginning of a writing career.

I can remember when things began to turn. A radio appearance never went to air - I studiously thanked every radio host and asked when my mother could tune in to the show. The host said I was being bumped to a later show. Then repeated subsequent requests were never answered. It was fine. This was how the media worked.

I had ideas for further book promotion. I received a response from the publisher - saying very very gently that the PR cycle had run its course - in other words - I was now on my own. I rang up my agent and asked “So what do I do now?” “Now you get a job!” she replied.

“So what do I do now?” “Now you get a job!” she replied.

For so long I had fixated on the idea of being publishing that I had blown it out of all proportion. To me, being published was the line that separated the legit writer from the pretender. Becoming a legit writer meant entry into a world where you could make a living out of writing. Out there in Moscow or on the Steppe I could always find something to write about - but here - in sunny Australia - I struggled.

I moved interstate to Melbourne. I was done with Sydney - the overcrowded, soulless sprawl of the pre-published me. Melbourne was Australia’s cultural centre, a literary city. I had bills to pay - so I returned to my old workhorse of a job - programming and sucked at it as much as it sucked the life out of me. I had been traveling around the former Soviet Union, operating with the supremely grand purpose of writing a book - coding now seemed so prosaic. What’s more I had been neglecting my engineering skills and not keeping abreast of the latest technologies. I was miserable at that job and lasted 3 months. I went to a small startup with developers all younger and better at their jobs than me. They cracked jokes about my age. I hated them for it. It seemed like I was struggling to even retain a job I hated, much less respect and accolades with publishing.

I continued to write but nothing flowed like it had. For a solid 3 months I barely wrote a word. When I finally returned to my desk - sentences came out lumpy and vague. My writing muscles had atrophied and my strength had waned. Even the way that I thought had slackened - solid ideas for articles came apart in the execution. Any argument fell to pieces in the detail.

What was even more galling was that Trump had just become president and a turbulent and pregnant era for any writer of big politics and big history. The Russia scandal was perfect writing fodder. I had to make this work but I just could not.

I proposed a new book to my agent. It didn’t even get to a publisher and was knocked back. I got a gig as a volunteer journalist a few days a year on a community radio station about climate change. The station ran on the smell of an oily rag, the control panel in the studio looked like something from Das Boot. It seemed so far away from what I wanted to do.

Looking back on the book - I began to hate it. Sales were moderate but not enough to pay off the advance - at least in the immediate future. I began to question how it was promoted. In the same way you can’t really tell how others see you by looking in the mirror - I could not tell if the cover of the book was cool or just cliched and kitsch.

I also began to question the editing process. There is the famous story about Raymond Carver and his editor Gordon Lish. They were twin artists Gordon slashing huge swathes of text from Raymond’s original draft - fashioning the final exquisitely balanced copy from Carver’s raw material. I thought this was how editing worked and so I had written in a maximalist style and ended up with something bloated that had made itself into the final version.

All this fed a paranoia - that the book was actually pretty bad - I had published it on a fluke with a publisher that had taken a chance. I developed imposter syndrome. The paranoia began to eat away at me. To this day I have never reread it. I don’t think I ever will. How often do you read something that you thought was brilliant yesterday but is crap today? At my book club I shift nervously in my chair when they say “Hey we should read Kurt’s book.”

The way back to normality came with some honest appraisal about what publishing a book meant. I had to look at a the specifics of what I had written and how I had written it.

The book I wrote was travel writing with journalism put in. The thing about travel writing is that most of the hard construction required in any other mode of writing is done for you. Unless you’re a complete masochist or a pedant - when you travel you have your plot which is the stuff that happens while you’re traveling, you have your setting - the foreign country and you have your characters - you and the people you meet. It’s the perfect form for a first book because you get so much for free.

I also had to look at how I collected my material. What had worked overseas would not necessarily work here back in Australia. I had interviewed subjects in some of the most repressive countries in the world - Russia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan. Much of the mystique of my book relied on the fact I had gained access. I didn’t realise that that worked in reverse - many people had spoken candidly to me because I was a foreigner from far away Australia. I was as strange and exotic to them as they were to me.

Eventually I had to admit all this to myself. This meant acknowledging that publishing was not the top of the mountain but merely a plateau. I began to learn how to report and from that develop ideas, thanks to the radio station gig. I experimented with different forms of writing. And slowly things began to flow again. The breakthrough happened once I gave up trying desperately to land a journalism job and capitalise on my published book. Strangely I returned to the original reason why I write - because it’s an amazing privilege to go out into the world, seek to understand it, and record your impressions through a craft. It’s eerily similar to the position I took to writing before I had a book deal - you write only because it’s worth it in itself.