My brilliant career as a book writer

Launch of The Search for Edward Lewis in February 2019 at Parramatta Female Orphan School

“Twenty-four in ’24!” It’s almost a slogan.

It’s June 2024, and I am in the process of publishing my twenty-fourth book: The Sailor, the Baron and the Dressmaker, the story of a couple in my family tree (the lady was a cousin of my father). I thought it was a fascinating story, about a remarkable man and what looks like a genuine love story. I researched it mostly through documents from the National Archives of Australia. I think I have told the story well.

What will become of the book? I don’t know. I have uploaded it to my website, along with all the others. I may have an occasion where I talk about it in public. Not necessarily. But if you have occasion to find my website, you will be able to order the book from Lulu.com and they will print it and send it to you, through the modern magic of print-on-demand. Many of them are also available as ebooks. And sometimes my books find their way onto Amazon or Booktopia.

Next, I will move onto another book. The “Sailor” book started out as a short story, to be included in a book of short stories about a number of people in my family tree. After a while, I realised that the story was too big to be just one among many other stories in a book, so it became its own book. I still have the other stories sitting idle; there are four or five already written, and a few others waiting for me to get to them.

Launch of The Ten Thousand Things in November 2010

Saying that makes me look like a machine; the books are already planned and waiting for me to do the work. So it’s just a matter of work. Although it is not. There are layers and layers of ideas, some of which may never come to fruition. On the other hand, some books seem to come out of the air without any apparent forethought. Others change their direction immediately when I pick them up, like Siegfried and Ellen’s story (he was the sailor and the baron; she was the dressmaker). I had thought that this book would be done in a month, yet it has taken more than six months, and it has taken me to numerous libraries and museums, and on online trawling expeditions.

But I am not simply a researcher, or even primarily a researcher. This makes writing seem like a secondary thing, something that’s merely necessary to finish off and present the research. I prefer to say I am a writer of books. If I am asked the question that invariably follows: what genre? – you will have to accept that there is more than one answer. I have written several books about family history. I have written books that I call “reflections on experience”, and others on ethics and values, and I have produced several books of poetry.

Most people then assume that I am a “jack of all trades and master of none”. They want me to be more specific (that is, narrow). They don’t want my breadth of writership to be greater than their breadth of readership. I try not to take part in such altercations. The books are there, and they are what they are, insults and inferences aside. For my part, I ask: did you enjoy them? And, were they helpful?

Sometimes, a person reads one of my books and says nice things. One person obtained my first novel (a reflection on experience) the day before he flew from Sydney to San Francisco, so he read it on the plane – a good use of a long flight. After arrival, he sent me a text message to say that he thoroughly enjoyed it, and he savoured it for days afterwards. 

Another person said my book saved his life! (This was a different book.) I thought this was a bold claim, and I asked for more details. He said he had travelled to Thailand to do community work, and was planning to return to Sydney when COVID happened. The country was in lockdown, so he couldn’t leave. For a couple of years, the main book he had to read was my book. He read it again and again, and learned the names of all the characters and all the twists of the plot. It kept him sane.

The author’s book stall at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, July 2014

However, overall, I get little feedback on my books. I get little indication that many people have even read my books. That was not the case for my first two books. They were about a specific place, Kyogle in northern New South Wales. They were official works, commissioned by the Shire Council and the local school respectively. They sold in impressive numbers for a small town, and the feedback was very positive. People thought I had done their region proud. 

One old man, whom I didn’t know, stopped me in the street and told me he loved the book. He said he never read, and he hadn’t read a book in more than ten years, but he read every last word in my history of Kyogle, called Places in the Bush.

It was several years before I started writing “my own” books. But I would observe that I always had a “day job”. I always paid my own way. I wasn’t like those intense people with persistently uncombed hair who live in a haphazard fashion, slaving away on their masterpiece for months or years, depending on those around them to support them and excuse their apparent dissoluteness. I don’t say this as criticism, merely as affirmation that I made a decision as a young adult to pay the rent first. 

It was part and parcel of the fact that I grew up in a family where money had to be worked for, and I grew up keenly aware that it was the responsibility of anyone entering adulthood that they should support themselves.

Writing is not a job, and society does not owe you a living. The exceptions, of course, are where writing is a job, and where an author has “cracked the big time”. I did have a job as a writer for a couple of decades. I wrote commentary on management topics for a publishing company. It was a satisfactory living, writing competently but anonymously on subjects I was expected to address in order to meet our audience’s professional needs. 

The modest success of this career did not carry over to the books I wrote personally. I moved into an arena where I wanted to articulate my perspectives on experience. It was a shift, because formerly I needed to project authority, an air that I knew what I was talking about. I did, in fact, know what I was talking about, but eventually life pushes you into areas where you can’t rely on the concept of authority. Then, all you’ve got to say is, “My experience was this, and this is how I dealt with it…” 

Miles Franklin was still only young when she wrote the book, My Brilliant Career, and it was published by a (traditional) publishing company. It went into bookshops, and people had opinions about it. Her story was about wanting to be an author, and persevering through the obstacles that faced her, which included being a woman in a world where only men wrote books, and having to undertake paying work (being a governess). I haven’t had the same obstacles, apart from having to have a job, which initially was teaching.

Glenn’s display of books at book launch in February 2019

However, I have found the world of publishing formidable. Nowadays it is crowded, and publishers tend to be dismissive. Often, they don’t even reply to letters or manuscripts.

The first book I wrote after the Kyogle books was on business ethics. I had thought that a publisher would be interested. It was in the period after 2001, when several large corporations in America (eg Enron) and Australia (eg OneTel) had collapsed, and the reasons were primarily due to bad ethics. But the most concrete response I got was from the publisher who asked me if I was a university lecturer and could I require all of my students to buy the book?

Again, no criticism; I am just describing the shape of the landscape. In the end, I self-published and promoted the book myself. I had a book launch in a bookshop that had a space upstairs for events. I managed to sell enough books to pay for the cost of the book launch. The sad point was when, after the book launch, the shop said they didn’t want copies of the book for the shop. Could I please take them away?

I suppose that some people would have kept up the pursuit, looking for other avenues for publicity and other bookshops to take copies to sell. In fact, I did work on this for six months, and I spoke at conferences about the book and the ideas in it. The result was, I did not create any traction at all. Some people would have left it alone at that point, and taken up a day job or gone back to their day job. I already had a day job, which meant two things. First, I was not in a state of financial crisis, and secondly, I didn’t have to give up.

But give up what? I could give up on the book, or I could give up writing. My drive was to keep on writing, along with the day job. I know that some people think that you have to be prepared to take great risks. They would advise you to give up the day job, to sacrifice everything, and put all your energy into doing what is going (apparently inevitably) to make you a success. People who write books with advice like that tend to be very successful, feeding into (other people’s) dreams and desires.

My approach was a bit more measured. I didn’t really have a plan, but I was still impelled to write – moved along, you might say. Some things evolved which helped me. The printing of the ethics book was a big cost, and a storage problem. Boxes of books filled up my garage, and I had no bookshop outlets. I sold a few through my website, but there was a large disproportion between sales and stock. However, technology was making print-on-demand viable for books. Would it be possible to produce books and not print them at all, or just to produce a few to have on hand?

After the ethics book and one other, I was able to take this approach. Eventually I threw out most of the books in the garage. It hurt, but there was no alternative. I would have been buried underneath that pile for years. One of the first lessons of having a brilliant career is not to get locked into methodologies that magnify failure. 

One must work with the flow and not against it. One must work with time and not seek to force matters to bend to your will. I face obstacles, but I learn the strength of my will, and the directions in which to apply it. My books are not idle entertainment; they seek to serve the good. And I learn the lessons I have to learn, such as how to accept responsibility as well as to carry it lightly. I know I have been too serious in the past.

Each time there is a finished book, I have learned something. There are always lessons in the subject matter. From Siegfried and Ellen (the sailor and baron, and the dressmaker) I learned a lot about what they did with their lives, and how they lived their lives. From the problem of how to find out about them, I learned more about the pathways the research process can take. And I experienced once again how I could only do so much. Sometimes I could only guess and suggest what the truth might have been. But if readers find it heart-warming or inspiring, that at least is something that I felt along the way.

And if readers are scant or undetectable, I take comfort from words written by Ursula Le Guin: the will to create is its own justification. She goes further; she says that the creator’s primary responsibility towards their work does not cut them off from society. Rather, it engages them deeply with society. 

So, in any conventional sense, mine is not a brilliant career, but I write books, and I assume it as a responsibility. I seek to do it well. And the books are, at least, available.