My Burnout Year

To put it dramatically, last year I let the business of selling books almost destroy me. That I’m not a bookseller and do not work for a publisher is part of the problem. I’m a writer. It’s not my business to shift units and pore over spreadsheets of sales figures. But for the last year, while promoting my latest book, Broken Biscuits & Other Male Failures, this is the sort of thing that I found myself fretting about.

Signing with a major publisher in 2024, I expected something big to happen for my writing career when my book hit the shops. I had dreams of something that would elevate me. This is not to say that I had expectations that I would appear on Saturday Kitchen or see my books in supermarkets. I simply hoped that, by being part of a bigger machine, I’d develop ‘a profile’ and move closer to a life where I could make the thing I love, writing and teaching writing, into my job. The problem was that, outside of the book getting an admittedly glowing review in the Mail on Sunday (which inexplicably ran with a photo of Bruce Willis), it didn’t get a mention anywhere else and very few people, to this day, know that the book exists. A fact that I spent the last year struggling to cope with.

Unless you have huge, Osman-level resources behind you, a book’s success and visibility is not guaranteed and you’re left fighting for book shop table space and column inches just like everyone else. For the most part being part of a big publisher makes very little difference to that. But rather than accept this and remember that the job of shifting a book is largely something for marketing teams and booksellers to be concerned about, I put the burden on myself, determined to make sure people knew about Broken Biscuits even if I had to go door to door.

I made the most of every opportunity to get my book in front of readers, using huge chunks of my annual leave to attend book events all over the UK, travelling thousands (yes) of miles in the hope that I might shift a copy or two and help it become a word of mouth success. I broke a rule I’d put in place to protect my own sanity and began regularly checking Goodreads for a barometer of how the book was being received by those who did know it existed, my brain bypassing the piles of 5 and 4 star ratings and zoning in on the handful of wounding 2’s. Logging into the Amazon Author portal each day, I monitored the line on my sales graphs like a panicked banker watching his fluctuating stock portfolio. I focussed on everything that wasn’t happening for me, and sometimes let myself grow envious of opportunities that other writers were getting. In short, I let the business of publishing negatively affect me and stop me from enjoying life as an author. Over time, my preoccupations forged an association between stress and writing, an act that I had previously mostly only associated with pleasure. This association grew to the point where I stopped writing for pleasure entirely and worried that I might never restart.

For the last couple of decades, I have been unable to stop writing. I was always working on something new. Always saving ideas on my phone or desperately trying to hold them in my head while driving so I could write them down and polish them into finished pieces, excited to get up on stage and read them out or see them published. This year though, the energy I put into writing petered out and I only wrote when I was obliged to, having at an earlier, more eager point in the year agreed to write articles that might be used to sell books.

An article I wrote under obligation for a magazine that as far as I know is only available in gyms and is rarely read. Oddly enough, I accidentally ended up being quite proud of this piece, not least because it has an incredible headline.

The version of me from a decade ago, even the version of me from 2024, would have hated the 2025 version of me. This person who got most of what he’d always dreamed of and still couldn’t be happy about it, caught up instead by the negatives. Becoming a depressed whiner, having lost sight of all the good things happening for them. The fact is I have made more money from writing in the last couple of years than I ever imagined I would. Don’t get me wrong, I could not live off that income without my day job, it's more that I established a low starting point. I experienced years of 3hr round trips to appear at spoken word events in the middle of nowhere where I was paid in triangular buffet sandwiches and exposure. So earning any money at all could, for me, be deemed a success. More than the money though, writing has afforded me the chance to travel across the country speaking at book events and meeting people, which has become one of my great joys. I get to stand in rooms packed with people (and sometimes only dotted with them) and make those people laugh then hang out with them afterwards and hear their stories. That, to me, is real magic and it cannot be found in a set of sales figures.

Aware that 2025 had changed me and not for the better, I took a fortnight away from everything over Christmas in the hope that I could reset myself. I read from my teetering TBR pile, watched The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and the entirety of the 28 Days Later franchise, took long, chilly dog walks in the company of Stephen King audiobooks and spent quality time at my kitchen window watching a bullish robin fighting off the sparrows on my bird feeder. And slowly, distracted from everything that had been bothering me, I found that I wanted to write again. I started making notes, which became paragraphs, which became the bones of several new essays. The bones of another book. And when that book is finished, I am going to do things differently. I am going to do the things I enjoy.

When it is ready to go out into the world, I will cram my calendar with as many book events as I can. Do my bit on social media and write articles that might convert into sales in order to make my publisher happy, but only if writing them makes me happy too. I will protect myself because I cannot risk losing my love of writing for a business that is, for the most part, none of my business.

I’ll get a dry run at this on January 29th when the paperback of Broken Biscuits & Other Male Failures is being published, giving me the chance to start 2026 as I mean to go on. Enjoying book events, staying away from sales figures and reminding myself not only why I started writing in the first place but of all the things I’ve come to love about it.

Any other business:

• What I’ve been reading: Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery. I’m a huge Gorey fan and when you admire someone it’s always nice to find common ground between yourself and an idol. I found it in the introduction of this book, which revealed that Gorey, like me, was a fan of The Golden Girls.

• What I’ve been listening to: I ditched Spotify last year for being an evil company from top to bottom and finally got around to shifting my listening archive to a new platform over Christmas. This flooded my new app with music I’d forgotten I loved, so I’ve been spending quality time with TaxiWars’ TaxiWars, Lula Wiles’ Shame and Sedition and Caroline Rose’s beautiful and heartbreaking The Art of Forgetting.

• What I’ve been doing: As detailed above, writing a new book. Also, zoning out while thinking about that book when I should be listening to important things like “Mind that baking tray, it’s hot,” or “The bath is overrunning!”

• What I’ll be doing: The best bit of promoting books. I’ll be occupied with teaching gigs for most of February, but I’ve already confirmed a couple of Broken Biscuits dates. I’ll be doing a free event as part of the Health New Year Festival at Oldham Library on January 23rd and another at Urmston Books & Board Games on February 19th, which is free if you buy the paperback. Many more dates are to come. I’ll hopefully see you at one of them.