Dear Reader – this feels like a Dear Reader moment – I am so excited to finally share with you what I’ve been working for the last couple of years. It’s going to be announced to the world tomorrow but I’ve been given permission to tell you first. It feels a little weird to be announcing this while there are so many terrible things going on around the world but hopefully it will provide a little light in the dark so here goes.

Drum roll, please…

I’ve written a book. It’s called Single: Living a Complete Life on Your Own Terms and I’ve written it for you. I got not one but two book deals, which I still cannot believe and I’m so excited to say that it’s going to be published by Headline in the UK and Penguin in the US. It is available to pre-order NOW and will be published in February on the 11th February in the US and on the 13th February (Galentine’s Day!) in the UK.

As I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, I launched The Single Supplement in 2019 because I felt it was time to shift the conversation around being single. I felt patronised by most of the articles I was reading which assumed I was lonely and miserable all the time, or that my sole concern was dating and finding a partner when there was so much more going on for me.

This newsletter took off and around it a community has grown - one full of people from all walks of life, spanning age, place and life circumstance. (Check out the comments under last week’s newsletter which perfectly highlights this!) Single is the culmination of many of those conversations from within my community and beyond, along with an exploration of my own experience as a single woman – the highs and the lows. It’s both a celebration and a deep dive into an experience shared by all adults at some point, by choice or not.

Before I continue, I thought now might be a good time to reveal the covers. Here they are in all their glory. What do you think? I love them. I really wanted them to be vibrant and bold – the kind of covers that make people stop and have a look but also feel proud to read in public or display on their bookshelves.

It’s been a long journey to get to this point and I wouldn’t have got here without you. Your support, your interest in my writing and you simply being part of the community has enabled me to write this book and get it published and I’m so grateful to you. I have been absolutely dying to tell you about it since first getting the deals in summer 2022.

I will be sharing with you more about the process with lots of behind the scenes stuff and what I was up to when I was taking extended breaks from writing to you all. I hope you’ll forgive me for being coy all this time.

What’s Single about?

In Single, I cement everything I’ve learned since launching this newsletter five years ago but it’s not just back issues of the newsletter joined together to make a book, it’s a whole new text and I have worked so hard on it. It’s a dream come true but I also hope this book will mean a lot to you too. I hope when you read it, you’ll think I’ve done the single community proud. This is my greatest wish.

So what’s it about? In the words of my US publisher: “A vibrant life is within reach for all of us, with or without a partner. Whether you are single long term, recently, keen not to be, happy to be, considering becoming, voluntarily, involuntarily, and so on, Single is an optimistic companion, providing comfort, hope, and understanding to anyone who reads it. It is a reminder that you are not alone, you have what it takes to handle life’s challenges, and you deserve to squeeze as much joy as you can out of your life right now, instead of feeling like you’re waiting for it to start.”

Single a mixture of memoir and narrative nonfiction and features more than 50 interviews with the likes of Rebecca Humphries, Annie Lord, Poorna Bell, Charlie Craggs, Sara Eckel, Shani Silver, Stephanie Yeboah and the late Kris Hallenga – along with many members of this community and experts such as Bella De Paulo. These interviews were my favourite part of the process. I laughed. I nodded along so much I looked like one of those bobble head dogs. I was confronted with experiences I had been avoiding thinking too much about. I said ‘me too’ so many times I sounded like a broken record and in some of them I even cried.

Writing the book and interviewing these women had a profound effect on me and helped me clarify what I really wanted in my own life. I’ll be sharing more about that but it’s no coincidence that shortly after I finished writing the book – before the proper and long process of editing began – I decided to ask Tom to coparent with me. While the book is not about having a baby with my friend, it charts my journey right up until I made that decision – which I only realised in retrospect. It covers everything from my worst heartbreak in 2010 to my reasons for choosing to stay single ‘for a while’ in 2013 and right up until realising, as I was nearing the first draft in March 2023, that I’d been single for ten years. There is a chapter on the question of motherhood but there are also chapters on feeling left behind friends, where to live when you’re single, navigating holidays and special occasions, dealing with hard times alone, managing personal finances, career, ambition, and self-reliance and so much more.

I hope the book offers both comfort, inspiration and insight, and helps readers to live their best lives, whether they are single for a day or a lifetime. It’s a deeply personal book – more personal than I intended when I first proposed the idea – and I hope by being vulnerable and telling my “truthiest truth”, it will help you feel less alone.

Why pre-order?

Pre-orders are so important for authors and it would mean the world to me if you would consider pre-ordering today. For those who have never done it before, it’s where you order the book ahead of publication. Books are then sent out so you should get it the day it’s published. If the price gets reduced, the retailers do honour that. I like to pre-order from my favourite authors because when the book arrives, it’s like getting a present in the post. A present from past you!

For those who don’t know pre-orders mean bookstores can see which books people want to buy, which means they are more likely to stock the book in their shops, which in turn means more will see it and buy it. It also helps publishers ascertain how many books to print and how much money to put into marketing.

In the words of Emma Gannon, pre-order support can genuinely make or break a book.

If you have ever found this newsletter uplifting or interesting or comforting, please consider pre-ordering the book. If you believe single issues need to be put firmly on the agenda, helping ensure this book makes a mark will help with that goal. If you are no longer single, you could pre-order it for a friend who is – or just for yourself as hopefully given you are still here, you’ll enjoy it.

Here are the important links:

• Preorder if you’re in the UK here.

• Preorder if you’re in the US here.

Thanks so much again for all your support. I couldn’t have got this far with you.

Have a good week.

Nicola

Follow me on Instagram: @Nicola_Slawson

About me

nicola_slawson

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Nicola Slawson is passionate about telling human stories – either other people's or her own – and is a freelance journalist, writer and public speaker. She is based in Shropshire in the UK. The Single Supplement is an award-winning newsletter on Substack, especially for single people. Follow Nicola on Instagram.

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