On waiting for the first review

There is, at present, no review of the book.

This is a sentence I have written and deleted twice this week, on the grounds that it is mildly embarrassing to admit. The book has been available, in the relevant places, for some weeks now. People have, presumably, bought it. Whether they have read it is between them and the bedside table. Whether they have liked it is, at this point, between them and themselves. None of them have yet had the decency, or the spare quarter of an hour, to put it down anywhere I can see it.

I have learned, in the course of these weeks, that there is a particular kind of refreshing one does. It involves a page on a large American website, another on a smaller and more literary one, and a third that is largely populated by people with very strong feelings about endings. I open these pages in the morning. I open them, on a less disciplined day, again at lunch. The number does not change, and I close the laptop with the air of a person who has not been doing what they were doing.

The thing that is, oddly, working, is the social side of all this. Bluesky, where I started a fortnight ago, has gathered just a little traction: a small handful of readers who appear to be genuinely there for the books and not for some less wholesome internet purpose. Threads, which I joined a few days later and which I had frankly dreaded, has turned out to be the most supportive of the lot. People reply with sentences. They are, on the evidence, reading other books in the same neighbourhood. I am told, by people who claim to know about these things, that this is what marketing is. I had assumed it was something glossier and more expensive. It appears to be, in the end, mostly a matter of turning up.

What I had not understood, until the book was actually out, is that a novel without reviews is, to the relevant systems, indistinguishable from a novel that nobody has read. The algorithms have not been informed of its existence. The shelves it would, in another decade, have leaned against are now made of code, and the code wants stars before it will look at you. This is the cheerful logic I am presently inside.

I am, in spite of all of this, working, and working well. The second book has made proper progress this week. The pile of prework I had been quietly accumulating, all of it digital and filed where I can find it, has, all at once, begun to pay back its keep, and the writing portion is moving more quickly than I had any right to expect. Iris has done a small thing on page forty that surprised me, which is the only proper sign that one is in fact writing a book and not arranging one. The social account is being kept up. The page on the large American website is being refreshed slightly less often than it was last week, which I am counting as progress.

If you have read the book, and have something to say about it, the place to say it is wherever you keep your reading life on the internet. A star is useful. A sentence is better. Both, in public, are best of all. The post box is, as I say, currently very quiet.

— V.