“For the next week each morning I opened my emails and wrote CANCELLED across another page in my diary. Until, one morning, it was empty.”
When lockdown wiped out Samantha Clark’s debut book events, she set about learning how to reach out to readers.
One morning at the start of March 2020 I was in London, sitting at a table in a high-gloss, steel-and-glass restaurant with a fine view of the Thames, drinking excellent coffee with two well-groomed and dynamic young women: my publisher and publicist. This was a long way from my quiet home in Orkney. For the next two months my diary was full of readings, talks, radio interviews, launch events, book festival appearances, trips booked for me by others, flights and hotels paid for. It felt like something big was about to happen. I was excited, hopeful and nervous. My first book, The Clearing: A Memoir of Art, Family and Mental Health, had just been published by Little, Brown that morning. It had taken me seven years to write, another year to rework it with my agent, and another two years to do further revisions for my publishing editor and polish the final manuscript. I had been patient. I had worked diligently. This moment had been a very, very long time coming.
But by the time I got home a couple of days later all of our plans were already starting to unravel. Then the full lockdown was announced. For the next week each morning I opened my emails and wrote CANCELLED across another page in my diary. Until, one morning, it was empty.
After my launch event was called off, the book festivals cancelled and the bookshops all closed, and then the book distributors too, and my publicist was put on furlough, and my publisher said “I’m so sorry” as my little book vanished under a wave of global calamity, after I’d got my self-pitying petulance out of the way, I settled in for the long haul. If the long journey to publication had taught me anything it was the need for tenacity. From under the disappointment and the sheer, disorienting enormity of what was happening, there emerged a small but growing sense of quiet determination.
I learned that it’s not enough to write a book and get it published. You have to sell it too, even if you have a big, mainstream publisher behind you. They say that getting a book published is not a sprint but a marathon, and that’s certainly true, but they don’t tell you that selling the book once it’s published doesn’t even have a finishing line!
From a standing start in March, when I didn’t even have a Twitter account, I started to learn how to use social media to communicate directly with readers. I’ve been contacting book bloggers, doing Zoom sessions with book groups, sending out books for review and following up every lead, learning as I go along. Slowly, I’m starting to gain some traction and, as the paperback release date nears, more opportunities are opening up. For example, I recently did an interview with Winifred Robinson for Radio 4 ‘You and Yours’ that came about from one of these connections.
I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed the sense of community and conversation that is coming out of all this. It feels authentic and creative. I have received so many messages from readers who have connected deeply with The Clearing, who really love it and say they will keep and re-read it, or that they have gifted it to friends and family. This has been the way I’ve been introduced to the books that have been most precious to my own reading life, so it’s wonderful to hear about my own book making its way out in the world like that, hand to hand, word of mouth, book by book.
Samantha Clark is a visual artist and writer. She lives with her partner and two chickens at the end of a potholed track in Orkney. She completed a PhD in Creative Writing at St Andrews University in 2017, received a Scottish Book Trust New Writers award in 2018 and a Scottish Emerging Writers Residency in 2020. Her first book “The Clearing” was published by Little, Brown in March 2020. You can find out more about both strands of her creative practice at www.samanthaclark.net. She can be also found on Instagram and Facebook as @samclarkartwrite and Twitter as @sam_clark_art
About THE CLEARING
‘Samantha Clark writes on the subtle edge of words and thought. She renders the world within and the world of ideas with electric sensitivity and acute intelligence’ – Jay Griffiths
‘Perceptive…a reflection on art, life and the beauty to be found in things we can never fully understand.’ – Times Literary Supplement
Samantha Clark enjoyed a busy career as an artist before returning home to Glasgow to take care of the house that her parents had left behind. Moving from room to room, sifting through the clutter of belongings, reflecting on her mother’s long, sedated years of mental illness and her father’s retreat to the world of amateur radio and model planes, Samantha began to contemplate her inheritance.
A need for creativity and a desire for solitude had sprung up from a childhood shaped by anxiety and confusion. Weaving in the works and lives of others, including celebrated painter Agnes Martin and scientist of dark matter Vera Rubin, The Clearing is a powerful account of what we must do with the things we cannot know.
OUT IN PAPERBACK MARCH 4th 2021
