Three little words

The recent story of Vicky Ball (48), the British author, whose success went viral after she tweeted about her sales at a marketing event, was touted around the maintstream press as a good news story. And on the surface, it is. A struggling author published by a small press, who suddenly hits the sales jackpot. What’s not to like? Within hours, Vicky’s post on X, which expressed her delight at having sold just two copies of her book at an authors’ event at the Galleywood Heritage Centre in Chelmsford, England, had attracted more than 24 million views and 745, 000 likes. As a result, her 2020 novel, Powerless, written during the Covid lockdown, began selling like hot cakes on Amazon.

Powerless, a thriller “with lots of twists”, shot up the Amazon besteller charts hitting number 3 on its teen and young adult fiction list. ( As a guide, to win an Amazon best-seller badge, you’d need to sell somewhere between 3,500 and 5000 copies within 24 hours.)

I don’t begrudge Vicky Ball her success. Really, I don’t. Who could not be cheered that this middle-aged teacher and creative writing student at the University of Essex has been catapulted into the literary big time in such a gloriously unexpected manner? (Although I am reminded of the words of that great American cynic, author Gore Vidal, who declared “whenever a friend succeeds, a little part of me dies”.)

But what’s really being celebrated here? Not Vicky Ball’s talent as a writer. Unless you count the power of these three words – “sold two books” followed by two grinning emojis – to transform her writerly reputation and her fortunes.

Perhaps it’s evidence of the amount of goodwill that still exists on social media that moved thousands of people to buy a book by an unknown author out of sympathy for her poor sales record. (Endearingly, Vicky Ball said she wasn’t feeling sorry for herself when she posted her X message: “I’ve done some events where I haven’t sold any.”)

We’ve all cheered at those David and Goliath stories where a small publisher gets an author on to a prestigous prize list, beating off competition from the behemoths in publishing, or those unlikely word-of-mouth successes where readers influence the success of an overlooked book by simply passing it on to their friends. But Vicky Ball’s sudden elevation has nothing to do with her work. It has to do with the power of social media. The only difference in this case is that it worked for the good not the detriment of its target.

By responding to Vicky Ball’s plight – one similar to many self-published authors or writers published by small presses – the social media public was recognising the sheer hard graft involved. These are writers who not only have to create the content i.e. write the books, but they have to be their own marketing and PR agents, and they often have to sell the books, one copy at a time. It’s a side of publishing that’s rarely spotlighted.

Vicky Ball has become the standard bearer for that tribe. But she’s only one. There are thousands who will never get the random stroke of good luck she has. I’m not arguing against her massive boost in sales. But my reservations are similar to the argument against giving money to beggars on the street. Your coin may help the person with her hand outstretched but it does nothing to counterbalance the inequities of the system that got her there.

Similarly with publishing. At one end of the spectrum you have celebrity authors who get paid silly money simply for being famous in another sphere; at the other end you have Vicky Ball, who has to hawk her books around and sell them one copy at time. The ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots that we see in wider society, is also true of the literary world. This goes back to the 1990s when the measurement of a book’s success shifted from the literary to the financial; when accountants not editors became the final arbiters of what got published. In the press, the amount of an advance became a yardstick to judge a book’s “worth”. The circular capitalist argument came into play i.e. this book must be good because of how much was paid for it.

This monetising of literary judgement has, I believe, worked to the detriment of all writers.

Vicky Ball is exactly the same writer she was three weeks ago before all this happened to her. The only difference is that she has attracted the mercurial attention of social media and it, not her work, has “infuenced” her transformation into a marketing success.

Good luck to her!