Envy, ego, pride and pain: what I learned from publishing my first book | Hamilton Nolan
Years torturing yourself before a blank page are followed by months of scrambling for publicity, followed by oblivion
There are only two types of people who make the mistake of writing a book: non-writers, who don’t know any better; and writers, who can never be happy and therefore must always seek out pain in order to feel alive. Either way, every book is the product of suffering. The best thing a new author can hope for is to discover that he is a masochist.
After two decades as a journalist, I published my first book in 2024. This does not make me special. In the same way that people in relationships often wake up one day married with kids due purely to peer pressure, all professional writers bear the burden of the expectation that they will write a book. With each passing year, those who haven’t done so are regarded with increasing suspicion. Typing all those words, but not a single book? Why, don’t you have anything to say?
Hamilton Nolan is the author of The Hammer: Power, Inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor
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