Author returns to native Cork to promote her debut novel

Her debut novel, ‘Promising Young Women’, has received rave reviews. Now, author Caroline O'Donoghue just has to return to her native Cork to promote it...

Here are some things you learn in the first month of your first book being out:

One:

Your book will not necessarily be everywhere right away.

Your book will not be in your local library; your book will not be in the airport; your book will not necessarily be on Six One news.

You will try to stage many moments whereby you accidentally “discover” your book in a shop window, the way burgeoning rock stars do in films when they suddenly hear their hit song on the radio, and it won’t happen. This is fine.

Usually, only a few hundred copies will go out nationwide to judge a book’s initial reception, and then more will be sent out as demand increases.

Learn to think of your book as a limited edition Magnum: selected stores only, before wide release.

Two:

Your parents will never fully accept this. Your mother, in fact, will call you from Ireland to tell you precisely how many copies are in Waterstones, Eason, and in various independent bookstores around the country.

They will ask you why you’re not on Ryan Tubridy; you will gently explain that your book is not famous enough to be on Ryan Tubridy yet and that they are getting ahead of themselves.

Three:

When you unexpectedly are featured on Ryan Tubridy, your parents will interpret this as them being right all along, and their self-appointed role as your PR agents will only grow larger.

This will only increase when they approach the owner of Waterstones Cork to arrange an in-store event, and then Waterstones Cork actually consents to putting said event on.

Four:

That a surprising amount of sales will come through your brother telling his old Tinder matches to buy your book.

Five:

That a surprising amount of sales will come through your other brother pushing it in his role as a car salesman in Audi Cork.

Six:

That a large segment of your sister’s friends will choose the book for their book club, and that when the book doesn’t arrive on time through Amazon Prime, the ensuing complaints will be forwarded to you.

Seven:

That, despite leaving Cork in 2011, during an economic recession so drastic that the last year you spent there only appears in your mind as a grey blur, you are somehow remembered there.

That, even though most of your friends have emigrated, and the HMV you worked at is dead, you have left some trace of yourself in the place that you hadn’t considered.

You have spent your entire adult life in London, a city where anonymity is the butter that holds the bread together.

You have loved the blank slate London has given you: loved that you are no-one’s younger sister here, no-one’s old school friend, no one’s teenage memory.

But you look at your family pushing the book on their colleagues, and your old school friends in your email inbox and remember that you are an O’Donoghue, and your mother is a Fahy, and that means something, in a small, Cork kind of way.

Eight:

Ex-boyfriends will get in contact. Most of them are proud of you. Most of them are leading wonderful, rich lives of their own. Some are just plain trouble.

Coat your door in lamb’s blood, eat the unleavened bread, and hurl yourself into the sea.

Nine:

You will be sent to bookshops to promote your book to an audience of seven people. Two of them are women in their sixties who were just browsing when the bookstore closed and stuck around because they had nothing else on. Hone in on those women.

Do not let them escape! Women in their sixties are your true people: they are the ones chairing the book clubs!

They are the ones who will buy two copies, for both of their daughters! Romance these women like they are the American GI manning the last helicopter out of Saigon.

Ten:

Stop Googling yourself.

Eleven:

No, really, stop Googling yourself.

Twelve:

When the therapist you choose starts telling you about her semi-professional poker career and her recent threesome, do not — and I mean this! — do not keep employing her because you think of her as a source of good material. Fire the therapist, but tell the story anyway.

Thirteen:

You will be much more surprised, however, by the people who you know very well who do not get in contact at all.

Try not to hold this against them. Everyone is carrying a rucksack full of rocks around, and you will be amazed at how many rocks are added when someone is doing something that they are not doing. This is fine.

Fourteen:

Promising Young Women: An Evening with Caroline O’Donoghue takes place on Thursday July 26 at 7pm at Waterstones, Cork.