Peter Pan, Christopher Robin and Alice became immortal children. The people behind them had to carry those fictional identities into adult life. A chain of literary coincidences links bookshops, publishers, illustrators, family tragedies and two men who might have understood one another but never met.

While writing The Short, Strange Life of Dr John William Polidori, I began to see a strange thread running from the machine-breaking of the 1810s to the current fight against AI scraping. The loom, the vampire and the algorithm may seem unlikely companions — but all three raise the same question: who profits when human skill is harvested by someone more powerful?

A bestseller is not a successful book. It is a measurement. When two million people buy the same novel in the same decade, they are not all responding to the prose style, or the plot, or the cover. They are responding to something the book supplies that ordinary life, in that particular decade, is withholding. The sales figure is evidence of a specific collective hunger. And if you know how to read it, it tells you more about a society than most official records.

Writing is no longer only something authors do. It is also something sold back to them through courses, critiques, webinars, mentoring, self-publishing advice and promises of access. This essay asks when publishing stopped merely selling books to readers and began selling the dream of authorship to writers.

As creators of books, we invest not only our time and creativity but also a part of ourselves into our works, for us it is never ‘just a job