My greatest moments of failure as a writer.

Try again, fail again, hope for better quality biscuits.

The older I get, the more I think the most important quality to have as a writer is not necessarily talent (lots of people have talent) but resilience. I’m well aware that from the outside my professional story is one of nauseating success. I’ve achieved much more not just than I expected, but that I could have dreamt of.

I’m also conscious that every decade I’ve survived in publishing, agents, editors, authors and others in the industry have said that they’ve never known it so tough. The deals are harder to get, the advances lower, the fight to make the charts more difficult. Publishing people complaining about the publishing climate is a little like farmers complaining about the weather; it’s … a constant.

I read a piece in the Guardian this week about how impossible it is to survive as a “midlist” writer (one that is regarded as publishable but doesn’t sell in huge numbers) There are many interesting ripostes to it floating around too. Some of the writers featured won prizes and then didn’t, sold huge numbers of books and then didn’t. Most seemed to have lost faith with the industry, or their ability to succeed within it. I know how they felt. I have been in that place (except I hadn’t even had the initial success). I have friends who have been in the same place.

So for those of you who are unpublished, or for those who have been published, and feel daunted by articles like that one, I thought I’d detail 12 of my greatest failures in publishing in case it helps you to keep going.

1.        The first three full-length novels I wrote that didn’t get published.

The first got nowhere near a publisher, but an agent who read it said I should keep going. This was all the encouragement I needed. (I wasn’t going to tell you that I also occasionally caught a bus down the Grays Inn Road JUST to get a glimpse of the agency in question, because I’m aware how pathetic that sounds, but I did. So there.) The second book got me an agent (yes, from the agency I stalked), and the third book actually went out on submission to six publishers … and received six rejections. The agent in question then emigrated to New Zealand, which I thought was a pretty extreme way of getting out of representing me.

I should add though, that now I think if any of those had been published, I wouldn’t be here. They were simply not good enough. I needed to write them to work out what I was doing. To some extent, I’m still doing that.

2.        The eight novels it took me to finally hit the Bestseller Charts.

This brief, slightly glib sentence encompasses more than a decade of hopes raised and dashed, of the efforts to think up, and then actually write a novel. The careful editing, the curation of title and cover design and finally the fight involved in getting each book out onto the shelves of bookshops and supermarkets. The growing excitement, the good early reviews, the conviction that this one, finally, was going to be different. At which point, in varying degrees, they sold enough to just about keep me in contracts, but not enough to trouble even the Top Twenty. My friend Matt Whyman once said that publishing was basically the business of being disappointed once a year, and for more than a decade I had to agree with him.

3.        The US publisher who signed me up for a two-book deal and bombarded me with protestations of friendship and expensive gifts… until they didn’t.

I had been slightly overwhelmed at the beautiful coffee table books that arrived from New York, the gushing emails about our future relationship. And then, after the second contracted book was published in the US, they just … stopped. If it happened today I’d describe it as having been ghosted. And my agent finally told me that after disappointing sales, the same publishers had decided not to renew my contract. Nope, not even a one line email came my way to say we were over. It was a useful lesson in business. Don’t take it personally, because they certainly won’t.

4.        The downgrading of the biscuits.

UK publishers this time. When you go in to discuss your book, whether it be ideas, or editing, or what you might be prepared to do for publicity, you are likely to sit down in a meeting room with tea and biscuits. I realized the gig was up with my rather chequered history in book sales when the biscuits stopped being the expensive chocolate covered oaty crunchy kind and became Londis custard creams (or similar). It’s a surprisingly accurate barometer.