I Published a Book and Now I Don't Want Anyone to Read It

I love writing.

I love thinking. I love disappearing down rabbit holes, pulling ideas apart, changing my mind, finding another perspective and realising that the thing I thought I understood six months ago has grown another twenty branches.

Which makes what has happened since publishing a book very inconvenient.

I am absolutely terrified of people reading it.

My book arrived yesterday.

My actual book. With a cover. And pages. And my name printed across the front in a manner that suggests I have willingly participated in all of this.

I have barely touched it.

I’ve looked at it, obviously. I’m not completely unhinged. I’ve held it just long enough to establish that it does, in fact, exist.

But opening it?

Reading it?

Absolutely not.

There seems to be an enormous psychological difference between writing tens of thousands of words because you desperately want people to read them and discovering that those words have been bound together and people might actually read them.

I hadn’t prepared for that part.

The person who wrote much of this book doesn’t exist anymore.

Not entirely.

These essays were written around a year ago, and a year doesn’t sound particularly significant until you’re somebody who is constantly questioning, learning, pulling yourself apart and putting yourself back together differently.

A year of growth can be enormous.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the woman who wrote those words. Most of the thoughts are still mine. Some have changed but mostly they’ve evolved. There is more now.

More context. More nuance. More questions. More things I’ve learned that have made me realise how much I don’t know.

I read something I wrote a year ago and immediately want to sit beside my former self and say:

Yes. But have you considered this?

Oh, and wait until you discover this completely unrelated thing that somehow changes the way you understand the first thing.

Basically, I want to heckle my own book.

The editing process hasn’t helped.

Reading your own words repeatedly is uniquely effective if your goal is to become convinced that you have the intellectual sophistication of a turnip.

Something I once wrote and thought was insightful begins as "Yes, Rhianna. Very profound. Well done"

By the end of the editing process, some of it felt almost infantile to me.

It's not that I stopped believing what I’d written, I’d stared at it for so long and travelled so much further since writing it that I could no longer see it from the perspective of somebody encountering it for the first time.

I can see everything I would add.

Everything I would question.

Every door I’ve opened since.

And now those earlier thoughts are printed.

I can’t edit them tomorrow because I’ve learned something new tonight. They’re sitting there in ink saying: "This is what I thought when I wrote this."

There is another complication, though.

The book I’m currently avoiding isn’t technically the finished book. My publishing journey required one final practical joke.

The cover was changed at the last minute. The title was changed. The blurb was changed. Amazon was still catching up when the first copies went to print, which means the copy currently sitting beside me has the old title and the old blurb.

There are three of them, as far as I know.

Mine, my mum’s and my cousin's.

So technically we own a tiny, extremely exclusive first-edition club commemorating my inability to make a final decision.

One day I’ll probably find this hilarious.

Actually, I already find it hilarious.

But I don’t think my Virgo stellium does.

Because after months of editing, tweaking, correcting, rereading, changing titles, changing covers and eventually reaching the glorious point of THIS IS FINISHED, I finally got to hold my book...

and it isn’t the finished one.

It’s nearly my book.

An accidental little publishing artefact from the few days between one version and another.

And I hadn’t realised until now how much that has taken the momentum out of the moment.

I’d imagined opening the package and having some enormous emotional reaction.

I thought I’d hold it and feel proud.

Maybe cry.

Maybe stare at my name on the cover for an unreasonable amount of time.

Instead I’ve spent nearly two days behaving as though it might bite me.

And while I could blame that entirely on the wrong title and blurb, I’m starting to wonder whether I’ve gratefully accepted those imperfections as evidence for the prosecution.

Because if this copy isn’t really the finished book, I don’t have to fully confront the finished book yet.

Interesting.

What if I’m rejecting my own book before anybody else gets the opportunity?

Because that’s clever, isn’t it?

If I decide I don’t particularly like it anymore and then somebody else doesn’t like it either, we’re in agreement.

No wound necessary.

Oh, you thought that bit was shit?

Thank God.

Me too.

Can’t reject something I’ve already rejected myself.

And the truly ridiculous part is that I’m fairly certain I wrote about this exact kind of thing in the bloody book.

Which feels unnecessarily smug of Past Rhianna.

Soul versus ego comes to mind.

My ego is having an absolutely dreadful launch week. It wants people to tell me the writing is good and the ideas are interesting and publishing it wasn’t an enormously elaborate act of public humiliation. Simultaneously, it wants to protect me from discovering that somebody doesn’t think those things.

So it has devised an ingenious solution:

Convince me I don’t like it first.

My soul, meanwhile, appears to be sitting somewhere in the back with its feet up saying:

Well, I enjoyed writing it.

And that’s it.

Infuriatingly serene.

I enjoyed writing it.

I meant what I wrote when I wrote it.

I learned things.

I expressed things.

I made something.

Other people can do whatever they like with it now.

The ego absolutely fucking hates this arrangement.

Because the soul doesn’t appear particularly interested in Amazon rankings.

It doesn’t care whether somebody gives it five stars or two.

It doesn’t seem especially concerned that I could now add another six paragraphs to an essay I wrote last year.

It wanted to create. So we created.

And that’s what I’m having to learn now.

Writing the book belonged to me.

Reading it belongs to them.

I don’t get to control both sides of that exchange.

And perhaps promoting it isn’t standing on a box shouting:

LOOK HOW IMPORTANT MY THOUGHTS ARE.

Perhaps it’s simply allowing the thing I enjoyed creating to find the people who might enjoy receiving it.

Which sounds beautifully straightforward when Soul Rhianna says it.

Ego Rhianna would still quite like everybody to sign a legally binding agreement promising to enjoy the book before purchasing it.

We’re negotiating.

And there's another part of this that I'm realising.

I’ve accidentally been treating a book as though it’s supposed to be a conclusion.

A final statement.

Here are my thoughts. I have completed thinking now. Thank you for attending.

Except that isn’t how my brain works (this may be evident within this blog)

I don’t think I’ll ever reach a point where crown an idea and declare it finished.

The entire reason I write is because I’m fascinated by what happens when we keep going.

What if I’m wrong?

What am I missing?

What happens if I look at this from over there?

What does this connect to?

What happens when the internal experience meets the external world?

What happens when something I believed wholeheartedly gets dismantled by something I learn five years later?

I want to wander. Which creates an obvious problem when you decide to publish books, because books have a last page.

My thoughts don’t.

And I think I’ve been searching for some way to explain that to prospective readers. A little disclaimer I can shove between myself and the book:

"Please be advised that the author has continued thinking since publication."

I want people to know that this isn’t everything I think. It isn’t everything I know. It isn’t everything I’ve experienced. It certainly isn’t everything I’m going to think in the future.

It’s simply where I was when I wrote it.

And that’s the visceral reality of publishing that I hadn’t understood until I physically held the thing.

A book freezes you in time.

It takes something fluid and gives it edges.

Here. This was you. And once I realised that, something else clicked into place. If I write another book, perhaps you’ll be able to see the distance travelled between them.

I’ll probably contradict myself. Something I gave two paragraphs to in this one will consume twenty pages in the next.

Maybe I’ll look back in another year and think, Christ, she had no idea what was coming.

Maybe that’s the point.

Of course, this revelation immediately introduces another, considerably less philosophical problem:

Who the fuck do I think I am writing multiple books about the way I think?

There she is.

Because promoting your own writing requires a truly peculiar level of confidence.

You have to announce to other human beings that you have arranged your thoughts into a book and that, for the modest sum of £13.99, they may purchase access to them.

One appears to be blowing a tremendous amount of smoke up one’s own arse.

And I don’t know how to reconcile that with the fact that I genuinely do want people to read it.

I want someone to find a thought in there that makes them stop.

I want somebody to disagree with me and spend an afternoon thinking about why.

I want someone to recognise themselves.

I want someone to read something I wrestled with and think, Oh thank God. Someone else has wondered that too.

I want conversation.

Connection.

Expansion.

That’s partly why I write publicly in the first place.

But somewhere between I want people to read my writing and please buy my book, my brain has decided I must first prove that my thoughts are important enough to deserve an audience.

And I can’t.

Nobody can.

The only way to discover whether something resonates with another person is to let them encounter it.

Which is irritating because it means the solution to being frightened of people reading my book appears to be...

letting people read my book.

A published author who is currently reluctant to open her own book.

A woman who spent an extraordinary amount of time getting something into print and then, upon successfully doing so decided the safest course of action would be to hide it from everybody.

I probably don’t need to defend the woman who wrote it or explain everything she hadn’t learned yet.

I can let her have her book.

She got me here.

The thoughts haven’t necessarily changed. They’ve evolved.

And if there are things I would say differently now, I'm not sure they belong scribbled apologetically into the margins of this one. They might belong in the next.

Which delights me and petrifies me at the same time...because now I might have to write another book.