#GuestPost by Zoe McCann author of #TheDrinkShrink

The Drink Shrink by Zoe McCann published July 8th 2024 and is described as ‘a book for people who don’t have time to read – you know, because they’re too busy hoovering up their partner’s body hair and keeping their children alive – and it’s guaranteed to make you laugh out loud.’

Belfast author Zoe McCann made the decision to publish The Drink Shrink independently:

‘after growing seriously fed up with all the waiting around and rejections
involved in the journey towards traditional publishing‘.

She has kindly shared a warts-and-all guest post highlighting the trials and tribulations of her experiences, which I’m sure many of you reading will find quite honest, authentic, humorous and refreshing.

I do so hope you enjoy.

[ About The Drink Shrink ]

Clodagh Kelly couldn’t be happier about her marriage ending. OK, she might be single, childless and working in a bar, but she’s got insight, and you can’t put a price on that. Besides, she’s embarking on a new literary project that she expects will turn out to be her passport to success: a self-help book dispensing cocktail-based solutions to life’s most pressing dilemmas. From financial hardship to infertility, Clodagh’s experienced them all, and she doesn’t see why she shouldn’t plumb the depths of her own misery for laughs – especially seeing as she’s 100% over all the things that have happened to her, her divorce included…

Told through text messages and cocktail recipes, the Drink Shrink tells the story of one 30-something’s efforts to rebuild her life with the help of a cocktail or three. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll come away convinced that when life gives you lemons, there’s only one sensible solution… put them in your gin!

[ Guest Post by Zoe McCann ]

Self-published author. Am I the only one whose heart sinks at those words? Deciding to publish your own book always struck me as the literary equivalent of singing at your own wedding or casting yourself in your own film. I’ve always just found it a bit cringe, a bit desperate, a bit look at meeeeee!

Northern Irish people don’t like that kind of thing. We’ve been trained from an early age to recognise anyone who shows the slightest bit of pride in their abilities as a wanker, and we usually do a very good job of tearing them down before they can infect the culture with their show-offy ways. As far as we’re concerned, talents should be downplayed or flatly denied, and the only acceptable way to make it in any sphere is to be accidentally discovered by an influential patron who then persuades you against all your natural inclinations to step out into the spotlight, to which you are highly allergic.

You can’t just know you’re good at something and decide to do it. You have to be invited. There are processes. There are gatekeepers. You can’t just stick your head up above the parapet and announce to the world that you’re an author and expect people to go along with it.

I have the good grace to be ashamed of this prejudice, at least. I’m not a complete wanker (please see above). But my formative years were spent in the world of academia, where people specialise in wearing tweed and looking down their noses at others, and in hindsight that experience probably consolidated my unquestioned belief that value was something that had to be conferred by others and that it was downright bad manners to self-identify as anything other than a total failure.

So naturally, believing this, I viewed anyone who went down the self-publishing route with a healthy dose of scepticism. In my head, no one deserved to call themselves an author unless they’d gone through the gruelling process of acquiring a literary agent and convincing an editor to take a punt on their manuscript and they’d survived rejection after rejection until finally they’d emerged, bloodied but victorious, with a traditional publishing deal. I thought in order to be a ‘real’ author, you needed to have your work ratified by the shadowy ombudsman of the London literary scene – and if you didn’t succeed in winning their stamp of approval, you were basically crap.

Back in the day, when I told people I’d written a book and they invariably responded with ‘oh, my aunt’s a published author. I’ll ask her if she has any tips for you’, I’d have to bite my lip hard to avoid exclaiming, ‘No, she’s not! She used a vanity press! She’s a FRAUD!’

Thankfully, though, I thought I’d never have to worry about navigating the embarrassing world of self-publishing, because I was more talented than the average person. I was going to make it. After all, didn’t I have an agent? It was only a matter of time before I got the deal I deserved. Those other poor self-published wankers out there, they just hadn’t been as good as me, and that’s why it hadn’t worked out for them.

Reader, the fall from my high horse was extremely unpleasant. It went on for years and it culminated in an existential crisis of Rylan proportions that saw me retching by the side of a road and – in hindsight, somewhat dramatically – declaring that I didn’t want to live anymore.

But like most suffering in life, it was very instructive. Because I learned, eventually – through all the many rejections, through the vast range of responses I got to my manuscript, through the contradictory advice I received from countless influential and successful people in the publishing world – that the tastemakers don’t necessarily know any better than the rest of us. Talent doesn’t necessarily rise to the top. A lot of who makes it and who doesn’t is down to timing and luck – and crucially, there’s just as much variation in quality in the world of self-publishing as there is in the world of traditional publishing.

All of that is highly convenient for me, of course, because I now find myself in the position of being forced to self-publish my novel after none of my four (FOUR!) agents were able to secure me a deal. But I do recognise it, now, as the truth, and I recognise my earlier prejudice for what it was: the internalised snobbery of someone with chronically low self-esteem, who’s spent their life dying for recognition from the ‘right’ people.

Most importantly, I now recognise that allowing someone else to determine your worth is a really stupid idea. No, you don’t want to be a wanker, tone deaf to criticism and hell-bent on shoving your creative turds down the mouths of the unsuspecting public. But neither do you want to be an insecure, cringing mess who believes anyone who tells you you’re not good enough, even when that person is demonstrably thicker than you. You have to find the balance: the sweet spot between self-belief and self-delusion, between self-aggrandizement and self-effacement. And you don’t find that in the opinions of other people.

Where do you find it, then? Well, as it happens, I do actually have some thoughts about that. But if you want to know what they are, you’ll have to go and download my debut self-published novel…

Purchase Link ~ The Drink Shrink…

[ Bio ]

Zoe McCann wasted several years in academia before realising most people would rather stick pins in their eyes than read anything longer than a Tweet. These days she works in housing and only quotes poetry in cases of emergency. She started writing novels in 2018 and went through four agents, two nervous breakdowns and innumerable bottles of gin without so much as a whiff of a traditional publishing deal. Now she’s gone rogue and made the selfless decision to self-publish so that you, the public, can benefit from her astonishing insights into the human condition.

Zoe looks exactly the same as she did when she was 18, but has in fact been orbiting the sun since 1985. She lives in Belfast and spends her free time eating traybakes, angsting over minor decisions and worrying about what other people think of her. She is divorced, childless and primarily interested in having a laugh before her chronic despair expresses itself as a terminal illness.

Instagram ~ @zomccann