PRO COLUMN
Publishing a book is very rewarding – the problem is, you have to write it first!
Mark Bauer discusses the stresses of meeting publishing deadlines
So it’s coming up to my end-of-year exams and I have a sudden, sickening realisation: I’m completely unprepared. I’ve attended no lectures, have done no coursework and have no notes. I have a rising sense of panic as I wonder what I’m going to do about this…
When I wake up, there are a few moments of disorientation as I try to disentangle my stress dream from the real world around me, followed by relief as I remember that these exams were actually thirty-odd years ago and I passed them. The dream is usually triggered by the same event – an impending deadline. Most recently, it was the deadline for my latest book – or to be more accurate, I should say ‘my late book’, as I bust the deadline more times than I care to remember until given an absolute, final deadline by my publisher.
As a professional photographer, I still get a kick out of seeing my work in print and publishing a book is the ultimate goal for many of us. But in order to get a book published, you have to write it first – and that is, without beating about the bush, a real slog. I know quite a few people who write for at least part of their living and not one of them would describe themselves as a ‘natural’ writer. We all find it very hard work.
So it’s partly because of this that there is a tendency to procrastinate and miss deadlines. But there are practical reasons, too. The main one is quite simply, that there is only so much time you can devote to a book project whilst also having to make enough money to pay the bills. Unless you’re a multi-million selling author and have producers bidding for the film rights of your next book, you’re never going to get enough of an advance to allow you to focus on it and nothing else. As a writer of photography technique books, I’m happy to get a big enough advance to pay for a night out.
Book publishers won’t like to hear this, but it’s therefore the case that book-writing tends to take second place to activities that will generate more immediate revenue and is usually shoe-horned in between running workshops, carrying out commissioned work and writing magazine articles. As a result, deadlines get missed or pushed back, life gets a bit stressful and I start dreaming about my university finals all those years ago. Science fiction writer and humorist Douglas Adams’ words seem particularly appropriate here: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”