“Come along and raise a glass to me,” you are shouting eagerly at the world. “Come and look at my fat successful face! I’ll stand in the middle grinning while you all wave and clap!”
Once you are doing something so outrageously tawdry and humiliating, frankly, you might as well pipe your name over the canapes in mashed potato and ask Kate Moss to sing.
In the case of a book launch, all you are celebrating is the draining years you have spent writing something that probably won’t be visible in bookshops but may one day be sold for sixpence to someone who pops into a charity shop looking for a solution to a wonky table in the cafe next door.
You might get some very nice letters, but you could get that same warm glow by taking gifts to a children’s home or spending the winter looking after old neighbors. If there are any you don’t hate. Relatively speaking, all publishing is vanity publishing.
Besides, most books are pointless, unoriginal, overpriced and overlong — and I can’t promise mine isn’t one of them. So, hurray for the death of the book and its final replacement by another computer game for people to enjoy. The enormous plus of nobody reading any more books is that nobody will write any more books.
Oh, and by the way: When columnists start moaning that you can’t read a Kindle in the bath, ask yourself what kind of books they buy normally. Rubber ones? Drop a proper book in water and it bloody ruins it. Or, depending on your point of view, improves it immeasurably.
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