This week on Barren Island Books, something a little different.

We've been exiling our guests to remote islands, armed only with their five chosen books and a few extra essentials, for six months now – and so we thought it was a good time to take stock. Thus far we've interviewed 28 amazing authors, who between them selected 132 books … or omnibuses … or entire series (because it's amazing what people will try and get away with when they think they're going to be deprived of their favourite reading matter). So which are the top picks? Which books and authors stand out as being preferred companions-in-exile? And which of our guests wins the prize for smuggling the greatest number of extra books onto their barren island? All will be revealed below.

Baby Smith just had his first ever birthday party. Only a family affair, but it took a surprising amount of preparation. We cooked. We cleaned. We went to three different supermarkets in search of the perfect menu. I baked a cake for the first time in, well, ever. I even made a pass the parcel. And the silly thing about all that is, he isn't going to remember any of it. The person who all that effort was aimed at is the one person who won't appreciate it. In that respect, it was a bit like a funeral.

Yes, I did just compare a child's birthday party to a funeral. But bear with me.

Many key events in life are for pretty much everyone's benefit except the person whose name is actually on the programme, as it were. Funerals are the obvious one: even if you believe in an afterlife and think the departed is watching events unfold from a cloud somewhere, showing them their own funeral is just adding insult to injury. Not only are they dead, but they can now see just how miserable everyone is as a result. (Or, worse, how happy ...) With my cynical hat on, I could say weddings aren't much of an improvement; after all, there must be a better way for a couple to celebrate the start of their new life together than by running up several thousand pounds' worth of debt on overpriced food and alcohol for a hundred distant relations and casual acquaintances.* And even birthdays, I have always found to be much more for other people's benefit than my own – because when it's my birthday, I have to be the host, and that means running around with plates of nachos and olives on sticks while everyone else talks about the economy and spills wine on my carpet.

At this point, based on the brilliance of my previous blog posts**, you're probably expecting me to pull some amazingly insightful writing comparison out of the bag. And that, dear friends, is why writing is like a funeral: it's not about you, the author/dead person, but about your readers/mourners ... But I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you, mostly because I'm still exhausted from helping Baby Smith unwrap a billion presents. So instead, I'll just say this.

Yes, our birthdays tend to be all about keeping other people happy.

Yes, our weddings basically consist of our guests enjoying free food and drink while we fret about the bill.

Yes, our funerals will be solely for the benefit of the loved ones we leave behind.

But that's OK. In a world where everything increasingly seems to be all about the individual; where each of us is concerned with our own ambitions and our own frustrations, our personal space and our 'me time'; where personality is much more prized than community ... maybe it's nice that many of our biggest social occasions turn it all on its head. And, after all, for every time we're called upon to play the host, there'll be many more times we get to spill wine on someone else's carpet.

As for Baby Smith, he seemed to enjoy himself. And he would have enjoyed himself just as much with no cake and no presents, only the family who'd come to see him. Perhaps, after all, that's the point of this post.



* Before you pick me up on this one, yes, I know not all weddings are like that. Sometimes the couple actually know all their guests.

** You can stop laughing now.

You're pretty amazing, aren't you? You've written a book. You've spent your valuable time on it, pushed other things aside for it, dedicated weeks or months or years of your life to the story in your head that wouldn't go away. You've made sacrifices, and you haven't given up, and somehow you've brought a whole world to life from nothing. Anyone who has the staying power to do that should be proud.

So now you're ready to send your precious book out into the world, and you've decided to self-publish. You love your story and your characters, and you can't wait to find other people who'll love them too. I understand that. I do. Writing is such a solitary pursuit that it's always wonderful to find an audience. To share what you've been doing all this time with people who get it. Without readers, after all, we writers are like chefs cooking endless banquets that no-one ever gets to eat.

But before you hit the button to submit your baby to CreateSpace or Lulu or Smashwords, I beg you, stop. Just for a moment.

Stop.

And give yourself an honest answer to this question: are you absolutely, positively, one hundred percent sure your book – this thing you've spent so much energy on already – is error-free? That you haven't mixed up rung and wrung or born and borne or bizarre and bazaar? That your sentences all make sense even after that last-minute edit you did in Chapter 12? That your apostrophes are in their proper places? Have you run it past at least two people who you know have a better grasp of grammar than you do?

If the answer to any of these questions is no then you really should reconsider. You owe it to those among the reading public who know the difference between its and it's, and who develop an uncontrollable twitch each time they encounter the wrong one. You owe it to those among the reading public who don't know the difference and will only start to learn it if they see things done properly in the books they enjoy. Most of all, you owe it to yourself: to make your magnum opus, your pride and your pain, the best it possibly can be. To earn a loyal following through professionalism and polish and knowing your craft. To never settle for second best.

Because the thing is, it's all on you. The buck stops here. It may feel like I'm picking on you right now, but that's because I am. I'm picking on you because there's no-one else. Of course self-published books aren't the only ones to suffer from these kinds of problems. Of course traditionally published books contain typos. But traditionally published books are subject to a whole host of different people making decisions on their behalf. The only person who's going to make decisions about your self-published book is you.

So, dear author, I implore you: employ an editor or a proofreader. Beg the services of a friend or several friends or a whole critique group. Better still, learn how to fix this stuff yourself. Of course you can't know everything – no-one can. Even the most experienced editor in the world lets the occasional error slip past her tired eyes. But if you are really serious about the rewarding, surprising, incredibly frustrating process that is writing, you can do yourself no greater favour than to keep learning. Because being an author is so, so much more than just getting the story down, patting yourself on the back and hitting Publish.

Words are your tools. Employ them as they were meant to be employed. Your book will thank you for it, and so will your readers.

Welcome to Barren Island Books, an interview show in no way related to a popular music-based radio programme. Every Thursday, I will be exiling my latest guest to a remote island with only five books for company, selected from the categories I give them. It’s up to them to make sure they choose wisely, because they’re going to be stuck with these books for a long, long time …

My interviewee this week is TRM, Dark Lord of the Alliance of Worldbuilders and author of Darkened Voices and The Ratter's Tale. When he's not being banished to a desert island, TRM can be found at trmsunfinishedworlds.weebly.com.