Nobody turned up to my book-signing. I tweeted about it. Next thing you know, I’m a bestseller*.

(*Well, briefly UK Amazon’s Number 1 in Dystopian Fiction for Children)

People wore t-shirts. They drank iced coffee. They smiled. This was unusual behaviour, suspicious even, for a spring day in London.

But Saturday 13th April 2024 wasn’t a usual day. It was the first sunny Saturday we’d enjoyed all year. And it was also the last before schools returned from their Easter break.

Let’s hit the park! Let’s drive to the coast! Let’s make like we live in Paris and eat on the pavement!

Unfortunately, Saturday 13th April was also the day I was scheduled for a bookshop signing, from three pm to four, to celebrate the recent publication of my kids’ novel How to Stop the End of the World.

This is my fifth book. Like the others, it’s meant to be fun and entertaining and not too serious because, God knows, young people have enough to worry about. I’m also a great believer that if you want to encourage reading for pleasure, you’ve got to provide kids with books that are a pleasure to read.

A new book. And it’s the hope that kills you. For, in the same way that sports fans dare dream that this might be the season that their team is victorious, regardless of evidence to the contrary, I made the mistake of fantasising that How to Stop the End of the World might be my breakout hit, the one to secure those Netflix and films deals. Fortune and glory and finally some respect from my children.

A month after publication, I was beginning to row back such fantasies. Why? Well, for one thing, its Amazon ranking was hovering around the 170000 mark and, for another:

Nobody turned up to the book signing.

They’d put me in the rear of the bookshop, my chair and desk of books in the middle of the children’s section. I’ve not experienced such silence and solitude since an ill-advised experimentation with meditation in my twenties.

In fairness to my fractured ego, very few people came into the bookshop at all. It wasn’t as if there were crowds, all deciding to avoid me.

And, if I’m honest, I did talk to one family.

‘I don’t read books,’ said the daughter when Dad, a friendly man who treated me with the polite sympathy you might employ for an injured bird in your back garden.

‘This might be the book that changes that,’ I offered, never comfortable with the hard sell.

She wasn’t convinced.

I sat there and I tried not to look at my phone too much and I wandered around the bookshop and I smiled at the booksellers and I played Wordle and I looked at the books around me and wondered why so many were blue.

At ten to four, two children came running towards me. My heart almost exploded in excitement. They stopped short, however. Why? Because, obviously, they were after the JellyCats (collectable soft toys) that were positioned just ahead of me.

Look, I know that many writers would love the opportunity to be invited to a bookshop. I know too that many writers work hard to get their books published. And I should be grateful to see my stories in print. I know all this. And more.

But I also know that I had a book-signing for my new book and NOBODY TURNED UP.

Four o’clock came. I made my apologies to the very sweet, very apologetic booksellers, left the store, and did what any writer in my position would do. I bought a bottle of wine, I tweeted an image of the empty shop, and I went home.

Literally nobody has shown up to my book event. Was worried that my ego and career aspirations were getting out of control, so this is a useful corrective.

‘How did it go?’ asked my eight-year-old.

‘Err …’ I said.

Luckily, he was playing on the Xbox, so didn’t bother with a follow-up question. I was struggling with my own personal disappointment, without having to cope with my kids realising that their father is a massive loser. Sure, it’s a lesson all must learn, but normally dads fool sons until at least the teenage years.

And so I drank the wine. It wasn’t great. And I also began noticing the growing frequency of Twitter alerts. By early evening, sad, dejected, lying on the sofa, I’d gotten a few thousands likes. Not bad. Half decent.

Post-Musk, a successful tweet for me would get around ten likes, so this was something. Not sufficient to mitigate the whole nobody turning up to my book signing disappointment, but something at least. I watched an episode of Fallout, wondered if I’d be better trying to write for video games, and went to bed.

In the morning, tens of thousands had liked my tweet. Some had even left genuinely nice comments. Had I woken up in Opposite World? Social media isn’t known for its empathy.

By the end of Sunday, hundreds of thousands had liked it. And, as I write, almost 18 million have seen image of the empty desk and my self-deprecating tweet. Do I feel embarrassed? No! Do I wish 18 million people had bought the book? Yes!

Of course, this wasn’t the first time I’d gone viral. (Covid notwithstanding.) Two years ago 236,000 people liked the following message:

As a teacher, you’re sometimes privileged to witness life moments. I saw a girl approach a boy to ask if he wanted her number. He paused, then pulled out his phone. Utter joy on the girl’s face. I then confiscated the phone as it’s against rules to have it out in the corridor.

I am a teacher. It is against rules to have phones out in the corridor. The rest of the tweet is fabricated. At the time, I thought this would be obvious, given the clear set-up/punchline structure and also because you’d have to be a sociopath to actually broadcast this to the world if it had actually happened.

But we live in troubled times. Nuance has joined CDs and drainpipe jeans as artefacts from another age.

I received death threats. Quite a few. There were hundreds of responses stating that teachers like me were the reason that so many people hate school and, consequently, I was to blame for the imminent collapse of society. The ‘c’ word was bandied about with careless abandon. And so I turned off replies. People worked around this by ‘quote tweeting’ it. The message even made its way to ‘Fesshole’, an anonymous confessions account, where someone passed it off as their own guilty secret. It migrated to other platforms too— friends/family were soon sending me Insta/TikTok messages where it had made an appearance, often accompanied by stickers/text etc that threatened death/willed harm upon me.

In short, going viral wasn’t a winning experience. Yes, I gained a few followers. But I also considered quitting all social media.

But this latest tweet, I told myself, the nobody showing at my signing one, this was different. It was about books, for one thing. My books! And actually contained an image of my latest novel — albeit upside-down. Millions of views! In short: the kind of publicity that money can’t buy. Well … the kind of money that publishers won’t spend on a mid-list marketing campaign, that is. And, although the traffic was driven by people feeling sorry for me, I didn’t care if that meant that they might buy my book. A sympathy purchase has the same royalty rate as a fan buying it.

And people did buy it. Even Americans! I quickly replied to the viral tweet with a link, feeling slightly guilty that it was to Amazon, as opposed to local, independent bookshops (but that’s late-stage capitalism for you) and dared myself to return to that dizzy excitement I felt when the book was first released.

More lovely messages. People actually being nice on social media. (Apart from a few queries as to whether the book was ‘woke’ or not. And the correspondent who seemed offended by the title. Also, the thousands of messages that told me that ‘it wasn’t the end of the world’ became a little irritating.) Alison Moyet was one of the them. Belfast Books even put a link to the book as their homepage.

This time, dreams of success looked to be rooted in reality. The book was soaring up the Amazon rankings. By Monday, it had reached 696, a number that doesn’t seem great but, given how many books are published (everyone’s a children’s author these days), I was very pleased. It reached a higher placing than my last one had achieved after being selected as ‘Book of the Week’ by The Sunday Times.

(My excitement was slightly tempered when I noticed that a celeb’s children’s book, an actor who’d obviously taken up writing after struggling to get TV work, was in the top 100, but still, How to Stop the End of the World was briefly #1 for Dystopian Fiction for Children, which sounds like a niche category because … it is. But, potentially, provides me with sufficient evidence to claim I’m a bestseller.)

What if the book continued to rise? What if a Hollywood producer saw the tweet? What if the TV company that are no longer replying to my emails had a change of mind? How much money would I need to be able to quit my teaching job? Was now the time to pitch the book for adults?

It was almost as if God had been waiting for this reaction. Quickly, things calmed. I tweeted a few more times. With lessening impact. The Amazon ranking dropped. And continued dropping. Desperately, I tweeted more. Some really good tweets.

And, yes, these received more engagement than usual. But not 18 million views more. Success had felt so close. But now, like the spring sun, it faded.

Verily, this pan’s flash was past. Lightning had struck but, inevitably, was followed by rain.

So what now, almost a week later? I’m yet to be invited onto any late-night talkshows or, even, mid-morning ones. Yesterday, I made the mistake of visiting a website that claimed to be able to convert Amazon rankings to sales totals. For a tweet that was seen by almost 20 million people, I reckon I’ve sold, at the most, a hundred extra copies.

Don’t think I’m not enormously grateful. I’m genuinely thankful for each and every reader. I really hope they enjoy the book. But, to be honest, I’m beginning to regret buying that Lamborghini.

One lesson I’ve learnt, however, is that next time I’m asked to visit a bookshop, I’ll do my best to ensure nobody turns up.

That might very well be the secret to becoming a bestseller. Finally.

How to Stop the End of the World is out now in the UK. It will be published in the US and Canada in September.

Bookshop link: 7498337

Amazon link: https://amzn.eu/d/23CdYnh

Colin Coleridge is facing a long, boring summer holiday with NOTHING to do. But when he notices some weird markings outside his house, and some strangers acting VERY suspiciously in his neighbour’s garden, he decides to investigate.

And before too long, Colin and his new friend Lucy have found themselves caught up in a mission involving an ancient sword, a mysterious curse, and a plan to SAVE THE WORLD…

Hilarious, fast-paced, and action-packed, How to Stop the End of the World is an apocalyptically funny adventure for readers aged 9+, from the highly-acclaimed author of Escape from Camp Boring and When Things Went Wild.