The Shadow Biography Ready, but No Proof Copy

I think I have finished my second book, The Shadow Biography. It has been professionally proofread and formatted; the cover has been professionally designed, and everything has finally come together. Before publishing, due in Jan. 2027, I want to hold a proof copy of the paperback in my hands and give it a final once-over.

This ought to be straightforward. Order a copy, check it, and make any adjustments with time to spare.

But I live in Bulgaria, and Amazon does not deliver paperback proof copies or author copies here.

I can register with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and use its publishing system in much the same way as an author elsewhere in the EU. Bulgaria is a full EU member, and although I would expect postage costs to vary, I had assumed that delivery would at least be possible.

I wrote to Amazon asking why it was not. Their reply simply confirmed that they do not deliver these copies to Bulgaria. No reason was given.

Amazon has told me that it will not send the book to Bulgaria, but I still do not know why. I can use its publishing service from here, yet getting a proof copy means paying to have it sent through another country. I find that discriminatory, and the reply I received has given me no reason to think otherwise.

A forwarding company, GGBG, could potentially receive the book in Germany and send it on to Bulgaria. Unfortunately, problems with registration and logging in have prevented me from using the service, and I have not yet been told why. If I could use it, I would have to pay for both stages of delivery, along with any applicable handling fees. Possible customs charges would depend on where the book was sent from.

I could end up paying roughly twice the book’s intended retail price if I asked someone I know in the UK to forward it. I would already have paid for the copy and delivery to their address, then face another postage bill of around €10 to get it to Bulgaria, with possible customs charges still to come.

That leaves me considering publication without seeing a printed copy first. After paying to have the book prepared properly, I am uncomfortable taking that chance. Any problems discovered afterwards would already be in a book available to readers, and checking a retail copy would mean paying full price for my own paperback.

I am astounded and angry that getting one copy sent here has become such an obstacle.

Well, I have got that off my chest, although the problem remains. I hope it can be sorted out soon. I have begun planning my third book and would like to give it some attention without this unfinished business hanging over the second.Top of FormBottom of Form

 

Why Don’t People Who Have a Story to Tell Tell It?

 A few years ago, I was one of those people. Plenty had happened in my life, yet much of it remained known only to me. At the time, I had little inclination to write about it. Why on earth would anyone want to hear my story?

It was only when I became rather isolated in Bulgaria that my thinking began to change. With limited conversation skills in Bulgarian, there was no easy outlet for daily gossip or the tales from earlier in my life that might otherwise have found their way into conversation. I suppose turning to writing was almost inevitable. The laptop became the listener in my native tongue.

I can therefore understand people who have no urge to put their stories or ideas into print. Writing had hardly seemed an obvious thing for me to do either, until my circumstances gave me a reason to begin. There are also those who want to write but never get round to it, though that is a slightly different matter.

Another reason to start was the prospect of having something to show for the time I spent. I see many people spending most of their free hours watching television or playing computer games, with nothing much to show for it afterwards. Each to their own, I suppose. For me, having words on a page appealed because they would still be there when I returned to them. There was also the possibility that someone else might read them.

It does seem a pity, though, that some people I know have lived through things many others would be interested to hear about, yet see little reason to write them down. I am thinking of ordinary people whose lives have taken unpredictable turns, or whose philosophies of life interest me. Fame and wealth have very little to do with that interest.

Perhaps some of them have the same doubt I once had about whether anyone would want to hear their story. I would happily read what they had to say, including the parts they might think too ordinary to mention.

Writing with a Masked Pen

We often finish a book with an impression of the person who wrote it. After spending hours with their words, we begin to imagine how they might speak across a table, whether they would be good company, perhaps what they would find funny. Do authors talk in the same way they write? I wonder how much of that person we have supplied ourselves.

Or do some authors find writing easier than conversation and socialising? A quiet person may write with considerable boldness, having time to consider words they would struggle to find in company. The page gives them a chance to revise a sentence before anyone else sees it. That need not amount to putting on an act. If we met them briefly, we might never hear the thoughts they can express quite readily in writing.

Perhaps there are three types of authors: the hermit, the showperson and normal people. I would be reluctant to decide who qualifies for the last group, particularly if I had to include myself. Their books may never reveal any of these traits, leaving readers with a quite different impression of the person behind them.

Are authors normal people, though, and is there such a thing as a normal person? If normal means being like most people, we first have to decide which people count and which parts of their lives we are comparing. Somebody who seems entirely ordinary at work may spend their evenings pursuing an interest their colleagues would find baffling. Much depends on what they have allowed us to see. I cannot see why writing should put someone in a separate category of person. Spending hours over a paragraph may look peculiar to somebody who would prefer to spend those hours repairing a motorbike, though either might struggle to understand the other’s idea of an enjoyable afternoon. We seem quite willing to call a person normal once their peculiarities resemble our own.

Does a writing style reveal the author’s personality, or does it give them somewhere to hide? There is something of the actor in a writer who can produce a voice that readers find convincing, then leave it behind when the work is finished. The difficulty comes when we assume that the voice continues through the rest of their life. We accept quite readily that an actor can play someone whose temperament bears little resemblance to their own, and would hardly expect an actor who plays a villain to behave like one when the filming ends. Writing allows a similar freedom, although the performance is less visible. We see the words and may forget how much work went into making them sound natural.

A clown can write a serious book. The familiar image of the tragic clown complicates this, because it encourages us to imagine unhappiness behind the painted smile. That is another assumption. The person wearing the costume could be perfectly content, with an interest in something that calls for serious writing. Neither the costume nor the book would give us the whole person.

I have watched interviews with comedians who seemed to have very little of the wit or humour I associated with their performances. Away from a script, some were surprisingly serious.

Perhaps I had expected them to keep entertaining me simply because they were comedians. Yet being able to construct something funny does not oblige someone to provide amusement whenever they speak. A joke that works on the page may have taken considerable thought and revision.

P. G. Wodehouse offers an interesting example. Gerald Clarke’s introduction to their Paris Review interview describes his quiet, largely secluded later life on Long Island and the attention from interviewers that he found tiring. I would hesitate to expect the creator of Bertie Wooster to provide Bertie’s performance over lunch. Neil Gaiman described anger at unfairness beneath Terry Pratchett’s genial authorial voice, complicating any assumption that a humorist must be permanently jolly.

Franz Kafka gives us a glimpse in the other direction. His name can bring to mind the anxiety and confinement of his fiction, but the Bodleian Libraries’ exhibition Kafka: Making of an Icon drew attention to a postcard in which he joked to his brother-in-law about his exceptional skiing skills, despite being severely ill at the time. That small exchange interests me because it belongs to ordinary family life, somewhere we may forget to look when imagining the author of such unsettling stories.

These examples hardly establish that the writers were entirely unlike their books. They do suggest that the person we construct from a particular kind of writing can be incomplete. Someone who writes humour has other moods, while an author whose work unsettles us may also enjoy being ridiculous. We make people surprisingly narrow when we expect them to resemble the shelf on which their books belong.

Once mental health enters the discussion, it opens a can of worms. Does writing offer someone a temporary escape from thoughts they find difficult to live with? Could inventing another life give them some distance from their own, or might writing bring them closer to what troubles them? Those are questions I would want to leave open. We cannot settle them by deciding that every cheerful writer must be concealing sadness, or that dark writing tells us the author is unwell.

The About the Author section seems to offer a direct route, although that too has been written for an audience. Its facts may be accurate, but someone has chosen which ones to include and how to arrange them. A career, a place of residence and a few interests make a useful introduction. There is a great deal of living that will never fit into those paragraphs.

Nonfiction may seem to allow less concealment, especially when written in the first person. Someone writing about regret or unfairness may omit the humour they enjoy elsewhere.

I am full of humour, although I do not relay much of it in my books. Readers meet me while I am considering questions that occupy a serious part of my attention, and they have little opportunity to discover what I am like outside that writing. There is something of me in the subjects I choose and how I approach them, but anyone expecting to know my personality from those pages would have quite a bit missing.

Hiding parts of your personality behind the contents of a book suits many authors. Writing with a masked pen seems a fitting term for it.

I can see the attraction of sharing work without having to make the rest of your life available for inspection. Other arts allow that freedom too. A painting can express a mood its creator does not carry around all day, and a piece of music need not describe the temperament of the person who composed it. For me, that is one of the beauties of art. A writer can care deeply about a book and still keep much of themselves private. Readers may understand what I am trying to say while having very little idea of what I would be like across the table.

A book can reveal something of its author without showing us the whole person.

What to Expect from The Shadow Biography

My second book, The Shadow Biography, is almost ready, and those expecting another version of The Luck Illusion may be surprised by its new direction.

Readers of The Luck Illusion will remember Walsdos, whose story opened the examination of luck and the circumstances that shape success and failure. In The Shadow Biography, we follow Zhelina’s life, with the analysis growing out of her experiences and the imagined alternatives that enter her account. I wanted to develop how I use narrative within serious nonfiction, giving readers more time to recognise something of their own lives in hers.

The Luck Illusion considers the causes we overlook when we judge how a life has turned out. The Shadow Biography examines the other life we imagine alongside the one we have lived, and the authority we sometimes give it when looking back.

An old decision can return years later with far more attached to it than we considered at the time. The job we declined seems to offer the satisfying career we wanted, while the uncertainty surrounding that offer has become difficult to recall. We know what happened after we turned it down, and that knowledge enters the comparison. What might have happened begins to feel like something we lost.
This is the question running through the book: what if the other life looks better only because we never lived it?

Zhelina misses what a friend is saying because her attention has returned to a city she never lived in. The conversation continues around her as she considers a life elsewhere, one she can imagine in detail without ever having lived through its difficulties.

Research on memory helps explain how later experiences can make it harder to remember why we chose as we did, or how uncertain we were at the time, though some regrets may still be justified. As with my first book, I have tried to write about this in a way that general readers can follow.

The concluding Shadow Biography Review offers a way to revisit an ‘if only’ of your own. It asks you to return to what you knew when you made the decision and to question the life you later built around it. The opportunity may have gone, although some of what you hoped to find through it may still be possible.

An unlived life cannot prove the life you lived was wrong.

When Someone Calls Your Book Liberating

There are plenty of things an author is pleased to hear about a book: that somebody enjoyed it, found it interesting or came away questioning something they had taken for granted. But liberating is not usually one of them. It is an unexpected word to hear about a book, and when a reader used it to describe The Luck Illusion, I was caught off guard. Why would a book about luck and causality feel like release?

I kept returning to that question, partly because I never considered "liberating" while writing the book. I had been concerned with the explanations we give to events after we know how they turned out. By then, of course, we have something the person living through them never had: the ending.

A business fails, a relationship ends, an opportunity disappears, or a decision takes us somewhere we never expected. Afterwards, we go back over what happened, and certain moments begin to stand out. Perhaps there was a mistake. Other people were involved, circumstances changed around us, we didn't know things, and events elsewhere eventually reached us. Once the ending is known, some of that becomes remarkably easy to lose.

Outcomes become judgements about people, including ourselves. Once we know what happened, it is surprisingly easy to build an account of the person around the result and leave much of what happened along the way behind. An earlier decision can look obvious in retrospect. Things we barely noticed at the time take on an importance they didn't have when we were making the decision. We know the ending.

Perhaps release comes into it when we return to an old decision and realise how much later knowledge we have attached to it. Years of later knowledge can attach to that old decision until it becomes hard to remember what we actually knew at the time. A poor choice may then appear far more obvious than it once did.

Success deserves the same scrutiny, although we are more comfortable with its stories. The work, persistence and decisions are easy enough to remember because we were there doing them. Somewhere in the account, the person who noticed us may receive less attention, along with an opportunity that arrived at the right moment, somebody else’s decision or circumstances that happened to favour us.

None of those other influences needs to diminish what somebody achieved. They are simply part of how it happened.

“Luck is compressed causality” became a phrase I returned to while writing the book. We say somebody was lucky or unlucky and somehow the word seems sufficient. Behind it may be years of decisions, other people, timing, accidents and circumstances we know nothing about. Usually we never get anywhere near the full account.

The Luck Illusion cannot recover every missing cause behind what has happened to us, and I suspect there are many we will never know about. I had always thought of the book in terms of understanding, and had given much less thought to what that understanding might actually feel like to somebody carrying an old failure around with them. Years later, we have accumulated information that was not there when the decision was made. It is very easy to forget when we learned it.

So, I take particular pleasure in somebody describing The Luck Illusion as liberating. I wanted readers to look more closely at the explanations we give to success and failure. I hadn't thought much about what might happen afterwards.

Somebody may return to something that happened years ago and still wish they had acted differently. Going over it again might bring back circumstances that had gradually disappeared from the story, without necessarily changing what they think they should have done.

Someone might even find that an old judgement no longer carries quite the weight it once did. If the book can do that, it has done more than I expected.