I was skimming The Guardian today when I came across this feature: ‘Kate Figes asks publishers about the books they wish they'd bagged and those that should have done better'. And there was Juliet, my editor, talking about ‘Jerusalem' as an example of the latter. I can't say it was totally out of the blue, because Juliet was good enough to warn me about the article a couple of weeks ago. Nonetheless, it still came as something of a shock to read public acknowledgement of my commercial failure.

Publishing is such a peculiar business. Generally, it takes years to write a book. For reasons mysterious to me, it then take at least a further year to publish the thing. Hope, therefore, is your long term companion. I imagine what a writer hopes for is various. In my case, it's pretty much book sales pure and simple. Then again, I've had critical success, so maybe bestselling authors secretly crave great reviews. That would certainly make me feel better.

After Hope, you have a brief fling with Possibility around the publication date. Generally, Possibility lasts for anything from one day to a month, depending on the efforts of your publishers and your own sixth sense as to how it's all going. A rule of thumb: if your publicist sends you nothing but questionnaires from e-zines and blogs with accompanying notes that read something like, ‘I know it's only online, but actually it's pretty fucking great!' ... you know you're in trouble.

Nonetheless, there is advantage to having your relationship with Possibility curtailed as quickly as possible, since its duration is precisely mirrored by the duration of your rebound into Despair. You don't want to hang out with Despair for too long. Being Despair, she has an air of desperation, and it'll rub off on you if you're not careful.

After Despair, you soon slip into a comfortable liaison with Resignation. Resignation is a generous companion. She understands it wasn't your fault. She blames the publishers and begins sentences that begin with ‘if only' and end in ellipses. ‘If only they'd run a tube campaign ...' ‘If only they'd paid for a window display ...' ‘If only they'd worn sandwich boards proclaiming your genius and paraded on the streets of every major city ...' If only? Then what? Resignation asks questions to which you can never know the answer and which, to my mind, are none of your business anyway. It is not the novelist's job to consider what sells and why, because nothing is more likely to produce a crappy novel.

After a variable length of time, therefore, you have to leave Resignation behind. Generally this happens when you start writing again and, for a while, you two-time Resignation and Hope. But then Resignation starts asking awkward questions about why you're staying in so late, that kind of thing, and you have to let her go. And so you come back to Hope. You always come back to Hope.

A common definition of madness is repeating an action and expecting a different result. I'm just saying.

My dad once asked, ‘Why don't you just write something popular?' I wonder what he meant by that. Does he think I set out to write books that people don't want to read? That would be ridiculous. Perhaps that's what I do.

I learned many life lessons from the sitcom, Friends. I remember one episode in which Phoebe, discussing her singing, says something like, ‘I dream of going unrecognized in my lifetime.' Maybe I'm the same. Then again, maybe I'd be a better writer if I hadn't learned life lessons from Friends. I'd definitely be a better writer if I didn't use phrases like ‘life lessons'.

Sometimes I read critically acclaimed, commercially successful books and I'm utterly intimidated by their brilliance. Sometimes I read critically panned, commercial flops and their brilliance shames my complaining. Sometimes I read critically acclaimed, commercially successful books and I'm bewildered by how bad they are. Basically, I don't get it.

Sometimes I wish I wasn't a writer. I'm a waste of a good education. I never planned this. At college, I started writing for reasons of vanity. Afterwards, I kept at it for fear I couldn't hold down a proper job. And here I am 15 odd years and 7 odd books later and I'm still vain and arguably less employable.

But, I don't feel like this very often and I keep writing. I write because, for better or worse, I'm now a writer, and I find joy in the process. What's more, isn't the cycle of hope, possibility, resignation and despair the very stuff of a good story? So I read The Guardian and declare ‘Bring it on!' before muttering quietly under my breath, ‘Because next time it will be different ...'

And the main reason ‘Jerusalem' didn't sell more copies? Because Waterstones didn't support it and Penguin priced the paperback at £17. I may not get the nuances of fate and happenstance, but the basics are hardly rocket science ...