launching something

After a year of writing, editing, organising and procrastinating, my first book Fringes - Life on the Edge of Professional Rugby is out.

After all that time, all the promises to myself and others, all the agonising about what to leave in, what to take out, how much to reveal of myself, it's done and out in the world.

Now, I have the ability to remix Fringes whenever I want - I have already several times, correcting any lingering mistakes that others have flagged up or adding people to the acknowledgements that I'd previously forgotten. No one will realise unless they bought an early print copy. Those mistakes are forever.

There are a couple of things people ask me now, almost immediately after saying hello.

They ask what I'm writing next

This makes me think that what I've written that wasn't enough, that people aren't impressed by the book, that one thing isn't enough, that there needs to be a next thing.

It's amazing what you ascribe to other people that may not necessarily be true.

It may be true though. Much of the advice around publishing books is that the best thing to do is write the next one. That's how to best market your work. Ernest Hemingway would stop mid-sentence each afternoon, heading off to the bar with his narrative hanging in mid-air, ready for him to pick up the next day. Robert Harris writes a book and when he finishes, immediately begins the next one. They keep churning.

I will follow it up but it definitely won't be as long. It'll be more actionable and useful for retiring athletes and career changers. That or it'll be a post-apocalyptic tale of a young man alone in the wilderness, with stories for company.

They ask how many copies I've sold, as if that's the sole barometer of the value of my work

Today I read a blog post by a guy called Tom Critchlow. He talked about hacking together a small coding project that used the Spotify API to display the most played albums. It was something he enjoyed and was proud of but didn't think was necessarily very good.

Then he went to interview for Google.

All anybody wanted to know about was his hacked together music project, calling him a successful music entrepreneur. He knew he was nothing of the sort and felt like a fraud, playing down his entrepreneurial status. That's when he realised even at a company like Google, nobody did anything of their own, that by doing something himself, launched under his name that was entirely his work, he stood out.

Even at Google I realized - most people I worked with had never actually put their own ideas out into the world. Everything they had worked on was a work project or a byproduct of their job.

I've found a similar thing. People I haven't seen for a long time send me messages or talk to me about my book when I bump into them in the street. It's great and it's proof that doing something of your own, entirely off your own back makes you stand out. I enlisted people to help along the way of course, but the lion's share of the graft was mine, and commensurately, any praise or criticism is now completely mine too.

It’s a massive differentiator to have launched something. To have had an idea, and put it into the world.

People asking me about the book means that I've done what I wanted. I've done something myself, that was scary, that took effort and that I believe is good. It makes me stand out.

One person asked me at a dinner party why I'd written it and one of the reasons is that I felt that I used to be interesting. I used to live the odd and aberrant life of an athlete and even in that strange world, I’ve had a particularly niche experience. I was someone who was regarded as unusual whereas I felt like I'd gotten stale since hanging up my boots. This was something interesting for me to do that would then cast me again, as an interesting person.

No one asked me to do it, no one made me do it, no one paid me to do it. But I did it and it exists. Even without releasing it, I'd have felt a sense of accomplishment. But putting it out there, however worrying, is the next step, it’s the next way that I'll grow and learn. So that's what I've done.