Hello, this is Emma Ganon, and thank you for listening to this podcast. I just wanted to let you know that my new book, The Success Myth, Letting Go of Having It All, is out on May the 18th.

I think it's my best book yet, so I'm excited for it to come out. And the book unpicks the eight success myths from happiness to money, to productivity, to celebrity, to the idea of finally arriving, and how chasing a version of success that doesn't align with your values can really take you off track, and this book is about getting back to yourself.

Breaking free, finding a new way forward, and it's available on May the 18th. If you love this podcast, you'll love the book, and it's available soon from all good bookshops, so you can order yours now. I hope you like it.

Hello, and welcome back to Control Old Delete. This is a replay episode from 2021 with the iconic author Nick Hornby. He's the author of many bestselling novels, including High Fidelity, About a Boy, and Juliet Naked.

In this episode, we talk about creative advice, thoughts on rejection, and being published. This is a great episode for all you writers out there. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

I've just inhaled everything again and went down a Nick Hornby memory lane, and I love the new cover of the paperback for just like you.

Does that, is it still exciting to see it come to life in that way after all these years?

Oh, yes. Now, I think that the manuscript becoming a book is a big thing, and then the paperback obviously is the time when you hope most people will engage.

So when you get a box of paperbacks delivered to the door, it's always exciting.

I can't wait to talk to you more about that book, but I just wanted to start off by thanking you really, because I've been rereading a lot of your interviews, and for someone who has done so much.

I feel like you keep it very real with how it was before, and all of the learnings and all of the rejections, and you know, that stuff that I think writers want to hear.

Oh, yeah, well, there was a lot of it, so I can talk at length if you want.

Well, I like that you do talk about how up into your 30s, you didn't really know what you wanted to do.

And it's kind of hard to believe because the minute you started writing, it feels like everything just started making sense.

Yes. I mean, it wasn't the moment I started writing. It was the moment I was published where everything started making sense.

Obviously, there'd been a fair bit of writing before that, but I think it took me a very long time to work out what kind of writer I was and what my voice was.

And I kind of had an instinct about what I wanted to do, but there didn't seem to be too many models for it.

So I kept losing confidence and then regaining it and losing it again and wondering off for a couple of years and coming back to it.

Because it's the publishing industry I suppose isn't it that writers come up against because there's molds that people have to fit.

And that's what's so inspiring about you because it feels like you'd never changed your voice.

You just had to find the person who liked it and wanted to publish it and then you were often away.

Yes. And I'd started trying to write scripts, first of all, and that was completely hopeless.

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