Boring other people, as my wife will confirm, is something that I’m not unaccustomed to. What I didn’t want was to add “the novel I wrote that lives on a USB in a drawer under some old chequebooks” to the list of things that get more airtime than they deserve.
That was the crossroads I found myself at in late 2013. After a year of starting, stopping and restarting, I had finally finished the novel that had filled the train journeys between Ayr and Glasgow and my initial attempts to get it published through conventional means were about to be scuppered at every turn. Agents and publishers alike took turns to say no. Some knocked back submissions in a bland, matter-of-fact way; other rejections were laced with positivity. I was reminded of what Rudyard Kipling said about meeting triumph and disaster and treating those two impostors just the same. Except in my case, triumph and disaster said the same thing: we’re not going to publish your book.
I started writing Cabra Cadabra not long after moving to Scotland to join the BBC in September 2012. I hadn’t really wanted to leave Dublin and so the book was a sort of a farewell in some ways. I began writing, to use a timely metaphor, like someone who had purchased a New Year gym membership. “Look at me go, I’m writing. I’m an author!” But realistically I doubted my own staying power to last the course, especially when I found out that a novel has to have a 70,000-word minimum. Even crowbarring in 19,000 wholly unnecessary swear words left me with a lot of plot and dialogue to fill.
At the start, it was less a labour of love and more just a labour. Both in terms of toil and the almost excruciating experience of giving birth to each and every word. It was all about small gains and, as the chapter numbers started to climb, it started to feel like it was becoming too late to turn back. In fact, the deeper I went, the more I found that I was actually enjoying it. Not to say it became much easier, but I started to grow to like my characters more and more and found the dialogue flowed a little easier as I instinctively knew how they would react to certain situations. My thoughts after reading the first draft? “There’s worse than this out there.”
Given my background in television, early incarnations of the idea were that it would become a screenplay but realistically I knew that it was easier to get a novel published than a film commissioned. And while I’m still sure that is the case, it must be said that there is nothing easy about getting a book published, especially with no background or reputation. So like I say, I was at a crossroads. Would the satisfaction of having actually finished it be enough to balance the reality that nobody would ever read it? I think you know the answer.
As much as I wanted to be able to say I had written a book and start pub conversations with the tongue-in-cheek preface, “speaking as a novelist”, I also wanted to tell a story that some people might enjoy or even relate to. While Cabra Cadabra is a comedy first and foremost, it explores issues that men of a certain age deal with but never really deal with. It centres on two months in the lives of two 20-something guys who are struggling with different levels of personal insecurity. Gary was a child prodigy magician who after being sexually abused gave up on his dreams, growing up to be an out-of-sorts young man, chronically lacking in self-esteem. His brash and cocky best friend Collie is, on the surface, everything Gary wants to be but beneath it all he struggle with intimacy and most of his personal relationships suffer as a result.
After losing his job, Gary rediscovers magic as an escape route from his post-redundancy funk and slowly but surely he finds a part of himself he thought was lost and helps Collie deal with his demons along the way. Overall it deals with themes that some young men can identify with; difficulty in opening up and sharing one’s problems, the overall benefits of not keeping problems bottled up and the awkward internalising many men deal with in the face of difficult emotional situations.
Hilarious, right? Maybe I need to work on my punchlines. But in truth I am particularly proud of the sharp Dublin dialogue and while all the deeper stuff is dealt with in a humorous way the message, I hope, is clear.
So where was I? Yes, publishing. Someone recommended a company called Emu Ink, whose selling point is assisted publishing, rather than self-publishing. They look after edits, art work and formatting for the ebook so your book gets a professional combing and what you publish bears more or a resemblance to a book written by a proper writer and not a chancer with a laptop on a train. Of course, you pay for the privilege and print runs are an extra expense. There were disagreements along the way, but it was important to remember it was my name, my book and my investment – financial and emotional. For example, I wasn’t happy with the original cover and had it redone despite a deadline. But these exchanges are healthy and for the greater good.
Overall the service is cheap enough if you can afford it, but the further you get from the origin, the more the graph slopes steeply against you. It makes your book adventure into a business and, oddly, one way to make your money back is to spend more money on a print run. Essentially, to recover the initial investment of €1,500, I will need 803 Kindle downloads to break even. It’s a daunting figure for someone who is starting from a base of having no profile as an author and no online reviews to cling to in the beginning. However, to spend an extra €820 on hard copies and sell them all, the debt would be wiped out. So spending about 50 per cent more means that I need to sell a quarter of the volume, albeit in a different format. The ebook sales after that become a bonus rather than a necessity.
I was somewhere in the middle of the investment axis but after having our first baby last year my wife Elaine was supportive enough to let me pawn the family silver. Perhaps she thinks this publishing craic is a gravy train bound all the way to royalties central where a Hollywood exec is waiting on the platform to buy the rights for the exact value of the mortgage. She should write a book too. Her imagination is clearly more vivid than mine. Or maybe, just maybe, she couldn’t handle the prospect of years of stories about the unpublished novel on the USB stick in the drawer.
Eamonn Donohoe is a journalist, broadcaster and award-winning television producer. He has worked for Sky News, TV3, the Irish Daily Mail and RTÉ, where he was a regular reporter and served as editor of the Sunday Game evening show in 2012. He now works as a television producer for BBC Scotland in Glasgow and was a programme editor on BBC Sport's coverage of the 2014 Commonwealth Games. He is an unashamed League of Ireland apologist and supports Longford Town FC. He lives in Ayr with his wife Elaine, son Tom and step-cat Douglas.
[ Cabra Cadabra is available on hard copy and ebookOpens in new window ]
