If you had told me a week ago that reading a book would cure me of my ten year smoking habit, I would have laughed in your face. Then I would have lit a cigarette. Just to console myself. But a week ago, I picked up Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Quit Smoking and four days ago, I smoked my last cigarette. Miraculously, I haven’t wanted to smoke since. I know what you’re thinking – that I probably was one of those smokers who could take it or leave it. Not true. I smoked about half a pack a day, which isn’t much to some, but I had been known to scale the school walls to get out of school property to get that nicotine hit. Though ultimately I did well on my exams because of the number of detentions I was given for getting caught smoking (in the end my head teacher gave up giving me detentions and begged me not to set fire to school property), I couldn’t shake off the guilt about doing something that was bad for me. I consoled myself that Gabriel Garcia Marquez smoked six packs a day while writing Love in the Time of Cholera. (He is still alive today at 81.)
As much as I loved smoking, the reason I couldn’t give up was because of my experiences of trauma in attempting to quit before: tears, tyranny, insomnia, weight gain, grey clouds, misery, misery, misery. Several people had mentioned that they had quit without experiencing any nasty withdrawal symptoms using the Allen Carr book. I treated these comments with cynicism and caution, but I thought I would give it a try. It was cheaper than hypnotherapy.
It turned out to be a bit of a page turner – I had to know what the secret formula was and was desperate to know if it would work for me.
Since finishing the book, not only have I kicked the habit, I’ve also been unusually cheerful and hyperactive. What I didn’t expect was the boredom. Having recently moved house, I have not yet installed broadband, got a phone line or a TV and I found myself pacing my living room.
We in the publishing industry are always worried about our competitors – the internet, TV, video games which vie for our readers’ attention. But had we missed something? Perhaps cigarettes have been a silent competitor for years. George Orwell wrote in 1946 that contrary to belief, people in the forties didn’t choose not to read because they couldn’t afford it, they just preferred to spend money on other things (cigarettes included) instead. I get it. Cigarettes sedate us, we can happily sit without doing anything other than smoking for hours. It is a form of entertainment in and of itself. 
But following my miraculous feat, I’ve been reflecting on the relationship between books and cigarettes. Maybe we give our competitors too much credit. It is easy to forget that throughout history it has been ideas and not technology that have moved the world forward. After all, if a book can change this
wall-scaling, self-deceiving, emotionally unstable addict into a happy, confident non-smoker then we in publishing should spend less time worrying and try to carry on buying, editing, marketing and selling great books. Maybe, as Allen Carr promised, this optimism and happiness is the real side effect of giving up smoking. In any case, I have renewed faith that publishers are definitely in it for the long haul.
Hannah Michell, Online Marketing Executive
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