Publication Day!!

Put down your smartphone and buy my book (please)

Today’s the day. Always On is now on sale - it’s in bookstores, Amazon will be delivering copies to those wise enough to have ordered in advance, you can download it as an ebook and the audiobook should be available very soon.

For any author the day their book is published is like the moment you cross the finishing line in a marathon. At some stages of the long journey you feel you are never going to get there, so there is a sense of almost tearful relief.

It was in June 2019 that Jamie Birkett, an editor at Bloomsbury, got in touch with me to inquire whether I had any interest in writing a book. There followed a series of meetings, phone calls, and emails. Draft outlines of what a book might look like whizzed back and forth between us with Jamie constantly urging this daily news reporter to take a longer view of the momentous events I had witnessed as the smartphone era unfolded.

Finally, after we had come up with a proposal that satisfied Jamie’s bosses, I signed a contract just before Christmas. Bloomsbury’s plan, they told me, was to publish in June 2021 which meant it had to be written by the previous October

My face fell when I heard this - having attended and hugely enjoyed the Hay Festival which takes place in May I had dreams of showing off the book there.

Well okay, they said, but in that case you’ll have to deliver the first draft by the beginning of September 2020. Publishing is about as far from a just-in-time industry as you can imagine.

So I decided to take a month off from the BBC to get a good start on the job and spent January writing at home in my loft, popping out to interview some key people. By February, when I returned to work, I had completed about a third of the book. But immediately I was off to California to record a couple of radio programmes - a good chance to pick up some more interviews, but the pace of writing slowed down.

And then we all know what happened - the pandemic arrived. In mid-March I retreated again to my loft, where I proceeded to broadcast on radio and TV while continuing to work on the book. Covid-19 had a major impact on the shape of Always On which had been supposed to end with an exploration of what tech could do for my various health conditions.

Instead, the final section looks at how the pandemic highlighted both the positive and negative sides of the tools of the social smartphone era. There’s a chapter on the battle to build an effective contact tracing app, a project which I observed at close quarters, and another on the way misinformation about the virus spread at speed through our ultra-connected world.

Anyway, I hit my first deadline in September, only to have to do some major revisions in November as the social media giants struggled to deal with a tidal wave of falsehoods before and after the US Presidential election.

By March, the fifth and final round of proofreading was finished and I spent three days recording the audiobook from my loft.

Now publication day is here but sadly I am not going to the Hay Festival, a pared-back event this year. Still, I’m excited to hear what readers think - and may permit myself a celebratory drink tonight.

Then, after today’s brief interruption, this newsletter will continue with more posts, photos and videos about each chapter.

Now, if you haven’t ordered the book yet, why not get it from your local independent book shop? I’ve just rung mine, Pitshanger Books, and they will be getting some in.