Simon Pegg is a winsome actor, but even he may struggle to make me look charming

Actors claim that the hardest thing about their profession is the ever-present possibility of rejection, but they have it easy compared to authors. First we have to find favour with an agent, then a publisher, then an editor, then the critics — on and on it goes. Rejection hangs over us like the Sword of Damocles, ready to fall at any second. Of the tens of thousands of authors working in the UK, the number who actually make a living from writing books — that is, earn enough to give up their day jobs — is probably no more than a dozen.

Even those few authors who are lucky enough to write bestsellers don’t escape the spectre of rejection. On the contrary, success in the book business simply means that you risk failing on a greater scale. For instance, I wrote a bestseller in 2001 called How To Lose Friends & Alienate People that has just been turned into a film starring Simon Pegg and Kirsten Dunst. It isn’t due to be released until next year, but I suspect that the next stage will be to do a series of ‘test screenings’. What this means is it will be shown to audiences of approximately 350 people who will then be asked to fill out cards saying whether they’d recommend it or not. If an insufficiently large percentage of the audience gives it the thumbs up, the director will return to the edit suite and the testing process will continue. The object is to produce a cut of the film that meets with the approval of the vast majority of the audience.