Even after writing something like 6000 blogs in the last nine years – yes, I know it feels like many more, thank you very much – I am still extremely flattered by praise. My glass almost totally empty mindset has not exactly assisted my journey through life, but I plough on in the remotest possible hope that one day someone will pay me for this stuff (as you can, dear reader, by buying me a coffee). Having allowed myself the merest hint of optimism, the door soon slams shut, safe in the knowledge that being paid to write for a living is hard enough for the best and most established writers – they are not always the same people, by the way – let alone a small-time blogger like me. And when I think to myself, where did it all go wrong, I always come up with a number of answers.
The first is that there is no major market for what I do. I churn out mountains of opinion pieces which have a potential reach of world’s entire population, but sadly for me, only a handful of kind folk choose to read it, preferring instead to do other things like cleaning the toilet and vacuuming the living room.
Another issue is probably the quality of what I write. If it really was any good, I’d soon be snapped up by a major newspaper or magazine, you might think, but even then I lack the fame of the competition. I’m not an old Etonian and multimillionaire former prime minister like Boris Johnson so the Daily Mail is unlikely to come a-knocking. But there is a much bigger issue at play here. If I had married someone different and fathered alternative children, my writing life could have been so much more lucrative.
Take Paris Fury, wife of heavyweight boxer Tyson. She has now published two best-selling books called respectively ‘Love and Fury’ and ‘How Does She Do It?’ I suppose I should be all bitter and twisted and take the piss out of Mrs Fury, pointing out that she would never have had a book published if she wasn’t married to Tyson Fury and, in all likelihood, she didn’t write a word of it herself. But what’s the point? The very reason people buy Mrs Fury’s book is in all probability because she IS married to Tyson and, for reasons I kind of understand, want to know what he’s really like. In terms of business, it’s a matter of fact that Mrs Fury’s story is of more interest to the Great British Public than anything I might come up with. I don’t begrudge her a penny. I only wish I had something to offer a potential publisher, Waterstones and your average book buyer.
Even more astonishing, to me at least, is a book called ‘The Last Word’ by Amy Price, which is billed catchily by Amazon as ‘The true and honest story of Katie Price told from a mother’s perspective revealing untold and new facts’. Excuse me as I take a deep breath after having written that, but hang on a minute: “untold and new facts”? What could they be? Katie has already ‘written’ no less than six autobiographies, not to mention 11 novels and two children’s books. What did she forget to mention? Yet, who’s the fool? Not our Amy, who I read is terminally ill and that’s very sad, whose literary effort is currently ranked at number two in Amazon’s ‘Biographies of the Rich and Famous’ category. Yes, it might be a matter not of what you know but who you know, but still, the publication of yet another book about the incredibly sad and distressing life (my opinion) of Katie Price confirms that people love reading this sort of thing.
But here’s the thing. Unlike Katy Price in particular, I have never chased fame. I’ve just wanted to write and, if I got lucky, write for a living, or failing that for a few bob here and there. In an ideal world, I’d be tapping away at the keyboard, being recognised for my work, because I definitely see it as my work, but remaining in a quiet, relatively anonymous existence. The likes of Price and Fury, the latter to a lesser extent, enjoy a type of fame I find repulsive. It’s one thing to become rich and famous on the back of talent but quite another to become rich and famous on the back of a weird and dysfunctional lifestyle.
The very best writers, I suspect, will always ‘make it’, as will those with some kind of story to tell, even if they need to ghostwriter to put it all on paper. For the rest of us, it’s the love of writing that sustains us and the hope that someone, somewhere, enjoys the end product. In the end, I can’t ask for more than that.
