I’m 30 percent of the way through Stephen Markley’s PUBLISH THIS BOOK: The Unbelievable, True Story of how I Wrote, Sold, and Published This Very Book. So far, it’s the most self-indulgent, self-absorbed, self-congratulatory memoir I’ve ever read… and I’m loving every minute of it.
Actually, I didn’t love the first ten pages. But I just went back and reread them, and now I really like them, too. So what the hell happened on my first read?
I think I figured it out.
Writers are predisposed to dislike books they feel they could have written themselves. They’re pissed at themselves for letting somebody else beat them to the punch, and rather than admitting this to themselves, they take it out on the author/book they’re reading.
That’s what I was doing.
Yeah, I’m jealous of Markley. But if you wrote (and weren’t able to sell) a book called, DON’T READ THIS BOOK, just last year, you’d be jealous, too.[1] (But as Markley’s lit prof says, “Writing a good book and getting a book published are two separate activities that don’t have anything much in common, as you’ve already noticed.”)
Favorite quotes from PUBLISH THIS BOOK include:
“I am a singular genius with an idea so unique it may very well melt readers’ faces the way the Ark of the Covenant did to the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
“If you’re young and in a loud bar, you can get away with telling people what you do in nonsense words. They’ll just assume you’re talking about finance or PR or something.”
[1]I know it sounds like I’m being cute here, but I assure you that I really did write this book, and really was unable to sell it.
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