Hello again,
I’m very happy to share my UK book cover with you. I think it captures the mood of Lazy City very well. I feel grateful to have two covers which I think convey a good sense of what my book is like, in terms of its tone and sensibility. I think these are qualities which can be hard to get across in an image, because they’re nebulous and translate slightly differently to different people.
But the right cover can do such a good job of setting the mood for what the book will be like, so that when someone opens it and starts to read they already have a sense of the energy they are being asked to spend time with. And they’ve chosen the book because they like the idea of its energy already, so they’re the kind of person who is most likely to click with the book and enjoy it. Which is so, so important for the book’s life.
Publishing a novel is quite a strange journey. You spend a long time working on something by yourself, and on perfecting certain things probably nobody else will notice and then you release it to the world (a small slice of the world anyway) and it’s not really just your project anymore. You have to slowly let go of all the control you had over it.
I know some people sit down to try and write a novel, looking for material that could fit that shape. But that isn’t how I wrote this book. I don’t have any early attempts at novels in a drawer or anything like that. I had the characters and story for Lazy City in my head for a long time and I was basically looking for the time and space to put them down on paper (I don’t think either way of being a novelist is better or worse, or more or less authentic, they’re just different).
In some ways writing this book was easy because I didn’t really have to think too much about what would happen in it, or what the various characters would do or how they would talk. I kind of just knew already. At the same time, these characters do feel like real people to me and the idea that I haven’t managed to get them down exactly as they truly are is something I struggle with.
I had this recently when I was proofreading Lazy City. I found a text sent by one of the characters that I just knew they would never send. The punctuation was wrong for a start (they wouldn’t use full stops in certain places) but the whole message simply wasn’t their voice. The vocabulary was slightly off, as was the question they asked. I felt slightly horrified when I discovered it. I couldn’t believe I had done it for a start, but then also that I hadn’t noticed it across various drafts.
I corrected it. But then I had the terrible thought that other mistakes like this one were probably lurking across the book and I would never find them all, no matter how many times I reread it. This gave me the willies big time. And I know it doesn’t matter and probably nobody else will notice or care, but still, it’s important to me, so I’m having to (gradually) make my peace with that. I take my work very seriously in general. I think I’m lucky to do it and I don’t want to waste any opportunities I get. But the amount of time you spend working on a novel elevates it to a different plane in terms of how seriously you take it.
This strange thing happened a little while back, which I think demonstrates how much control you lose when you publish a book. Someone I know sent me a goodreads page for my book saying like: “Ah didn’t know you had a cover yet :)!”. We hadn’t finalised one yet so I was confused as to what they were talking about. I opened the link and I had never seen the cover that was up on the page they sent me.
It was a classic “tortured woman” cover (of a woman appearing extremely vulnerable or in obvious distress) which there is a real trend for at the minute. I really hate this trend generally. I hate the box it squeezes women into, and it would make no sense as applied to my book because that isn’t what the protagonist I have written is like.
I was so confused about who had made the page. I still don’t actually know. But it seems that it was a person interested in the book, who decided to make a holding page and designed a cover themselves for this purpose.
I don’t think this was a bad thing to do, and it was probably well intentioned. Also I know the person who made it had no way of knowing how much I didn’t want “tortured woman” and had basically just designed a cover in a style which is popular at present.
But, still, there was my book rendered as one of the tortured woman books, by someone who hadn’t even read it. We got it taken down, and someone made me a birthday card with it (attached) which I did find funny. But there was something slightly eerie about the whole thing, about what your project becomes to other people, even before they have interacted with it properly.
Anyway, here is the pre-order link for various places in the UK and US. It’s out in August over here, so the release date is creeping up. I’m excited for you all to read it and meet my characters. Also here is the (now real) Goodreads if you are a journalist and have already read it in that capacity and want to say nice things about it.
I had a few pieces out recently. An interview with Jemima Kirke for GQ. An essay on psychoanalysis for the FT Magazine. And an essay on what it means to search for the best of things, for the New York Times, which was made up into this really beautiful cover spread.
I have had too many weddings to go to recently to read much so I have no recent likes to share, next week though!
Till next time xxxx