I woke up with one thought - it would have been really nice to wake up with someone this morning. I was ready! Again! Finally! I’d just moved to London and knew next to nobody, so finding a girlfriend online seemed to be the best idea. And possibly the worst, too.
A few hours later I’d decided to write a book. And find a girlfriend. All at the same time. It was really rather foolish. The next three months were, you could say, quite intense. Luckily, as far as the book is concerned, it wasn’t a smooth ride. I embarked on the ‘challenge’ hoping not only to find someone to love, but to learn more about myself and the female of the species. What I discovered was quite terrifying, because it turned out that I’m totally hapless at dating and women confuse me more than those cryptic crosswords.
Once it was all over I decided to sit on the story for a while, because I was pretty tired. But eventually I started to push it out to publishers. A lot of them liked the tale, but rejected it nonetheless. ‘It’s a dating book, there’s too much competition, we couldn’t make it a bestseller.’ ‘It’s great, but we don’t know where we’d put it on the shelves.’ ‘Come back again when you’ve got something we can sell.’ Slowly, I realised something, publishers don’t like risk and it was a book about risk, it was a risky challenge, a risky idea.
And then I had a couple of offers. Wonderful, that is, to be offered money for a book, to know that someone will put it on the shelf for you. But it didn’t feel right. It was barely enough cash to cover three months of dating! So I said thank you, but no thank you. I need someone to believe in this as much as I do.
After a while, I took the decision to go rogue. We’re living in a new era of information sharing, the age of Kindle and iPad gives aspiring writers a fresh path and self-publishing is easier than ever so, much like the challenge itself, I’m going to go for it alone. I’m excited! The digital version will hit Amazon on December 10th 2011 and paperbacks will follow shortly afterwards. I can’t think of any better feeling than seeing someone reading the book on The Tube, chuckling so hard that they probably need to wipe their nose a bit.
So, here we go. I hope you enjoy reading DATE, and I hope you have someone nice in your life to share it with, because you’re brilliant x
Dave Cornthwaite, London, November 2011
