I Priced A Book High So You Wouldn’t Buy It

A true story

It was the spring of 2020. Seriously, how many horror novels are going to start that way in the decades to come? Anyway, I had been thoroughly enjoying the lockdown period, unlike many others. I was having the time of my life. I wrote four novels during that time, none of which were ever published on account of them being brain dumps rather than great literature and I was now moving on to wasting my warm spring days in my back garden, chatting online with people I had met at conferences in the preceding years.

One such woman, we shall call her T, chatted to me about all the things she had done to make money over the years. Some were a little crazy, to say the least, and it got me thinking about all the things I had done to earn a crust.

Believing that the apocalypse was coming, because I was dumb enough to buy into all the fear and anxiety we were fed around that time, I thought it might be fun to write a coaching book that would advise people on the dos and don’ts of online side hustles.

Which would have been fine, except when I started writing, it read more like a misery memoir with little sprinklings of humour here and there.

Fast forward a few weeks and the world was returning to an altered version of normal. I then could not believe that I had spent months locked up at home and had nothing to show for it work-wise. The novels I wrote were poor, the blogs were worse and the only thing I actually liked was the misery memoir.

I couldn’t release that though, could I?

Nothing I did was illegal. Everything was perfectly above board and on the right side of the law. But it was all morally questionable.

I pictured a job interview where the potential boss would say, “Oh we looked you up online and found this book you wrote.”

The shame!

I imagined that at some point in my future I would run into some legal trouble that would be made worse by the accusing side reading out my book’s list of chapter titles, showing how desperate I had been for money.

Guilty!

I created a horrific picture in my mind of my son being bullied and taunted by little urchins who had somehow found out about the book and my son losing respect for me.

He deserves better!

The problem was that I did actually want to return to a normal life and a normal job at some point. I had an idea that I wanted to teach English as a foreign language. I couldn’t teach if everyone knew what I had gotten up to in the name of earning some cash… professional gambling, niche erotica writing, getting kicked out of pyramid schemes…

And yet, I wanted the satisfaction of privately knowing I had achieved something during the lockdown.

So, I used a secret pen name and sent it out into the world with a price tag so high that I was sure nobody in their right mind would buy it. If it sold well and went viral, there was more risk of someone I knew reading it.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it was probably some of my best work and the reviews from strangers were wholly positive after it was published, proving to me that my gut feeling that this is actually a good story, is right. I even got listed on the Waterstones website. That never happened with any of the books I took seriously and priced cheaply!

I’ve now come to the stage where I no longer want to teach and despite my real name having a squeaky clean public image when you Google her, nobody will hire me because I’m still a carer for a disabled person. Nobody wants to hire a woman who won’t make the job her number one priority, ever and is open about that.

So, it feels like I have very little to lose by talking about this. I tell myself, it’s not dodgy. It was journalism. Taking up bizarre pastimes in the name of research for the book I was probably always going to write about side hustles. That’s how I would explain it, and to hell with anyone who doesn’t understand.

Of course, I’ll have to update it because a lot has happened since 2020 and new highs and lows need to be added, but that’s something I’ll do next time I have months to spare and nowhere to go.

This is not an affiliate link. It’s just a regular link to my book.