books

Chasing Thirty Redux

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In the fall of 2011, I made a list: thirty things I wanted to do before I turned thirty. I was twenty eight at the time. I’d just gone through a breakup that I was more relieved than sad about, I was living with my parents after a big move back from New York, and was feeling generally stalled out. Nothing was happening with my career, nothing was happening with my writing, and I no longer had the distinction of living in New York. So I started a blog, which I pitched as a column to a site I’d just begun reading and loved: The Gloss. I chronicled my adventures and reflections in a weekly column called Chasing Thirty, which I’ve now collected and made available as an e-book that you can download for free on Noisetrade Books.

I had great fun with the list and the column. During that year, I travelled to Argentina, joined a salsa dancing team, published one of my collecting-dust novels on the site in serial format, learned Spanish, and hosted a fake bachelorette party, among other adventures.

Re-reading these columns four years later has been an entertaining and somewhat sobering experience. It is no exaggeration to say that the very best and the very worst moments of my life have all taken place between now and when I began writing the column. I lost my sister, I met the love of my life and got engaged, I sold a novel, found a job I love. When I re-read these columns, I see harbingers of all of these things and am deeply grateful for the friends, family, and co-workers who’ve been by my side through the highs and lows.

I didn’t do all thirty things on the list. But I can see now that it was never about that. It was about figuring out what I really wanted and finding a way to put that out into the world. To say it aloud, to write it down. Writing the weekly column forced me to reflect on what it meant to be me in that moment. What did I fear? What did I hope for? Who was I and what did I want?

Looking back on the experience is a great reminder that when you feel stuck, the best to do is to start moving and keep moving. Even if you don’t find yourself going in exactly the right direction, you’ll be going somewhere, and sometimes, that’s all you need.

 

 

PNBA from the Other Side

Last year, I attended the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association’s annual tradeshow on behalf of Girl Friday. I moderated a panel on building book communities and sat on a second panel about reading and influencing. Last year was my first time at the conference and I was amazed by the sense of community. Here were folks from Northwest booksellers and libraries big and small—along with sales reps from publishers of all sizes—and everyone seemed to be friends with each other. This was the book community as its best. I’ve attended a number of writers’ conferences with GFP over the past couple of years and while they’re a lot of fun, the atmosphere is entirely different. Many of the attendees at those conferences are writers hungry for contact with agents, publishers, and anyone else who might shepherd their work to the top of the proverbial pile. I love talking to fellow writers at any stage, but this dynamic often creates an unfortunate atmosphere of “us and them”. (Note to aspiring writers: if you think that foisting your manuscript on an unsuspecting agent when you see them a conference is an effective strategy, be advised, it is not.)

This year I attended the conference as an author with my effervescent Simon and Schuster sales rep Christine. I spent the bulk of Saturday hanging out by the S&S booth chatting with booksellers and librarians about Losing the Light and signing galleys for folks to add to their overstuffed totes. One bookseller told me she brought a tiny bag with what she needed for the trip, and her biggest suitcase to cart books home in. Getting a haul of free books just never get old.

Not long after I arrived I was introduced to a bookseller from Powell’s (the mecca of Northwest bookstores) and found myself in the transcendent moment of being asked, for the very first time, to sign a copy of my own book. I signed many more copies throughout the day, and by the time I left, had exhausted my supply of galleys.

Chatting with booksellers and library folks throughout the day, I heard many incredible stories of all the creative ways they interact with their communities. There were tales of book clubs and French clubs and pairings with local restaurants and wineries. One owner of a small bookseller told me about the older gentleman who comes into the bookstore each and every day. “We sent him a card when his cat died,” she told me, “we were so sad for him.”

I thought how lucky the communities that these bookstores belonged to were to have them. That sense of community and knowledge—not only of the books they carry but of their particular patrons—is something that can never truly be replicated online. As easy as it is for readers to purchase a book they want with the click of the button, helping them figure out which book they want is more complex than ever. In our ever-expanding world of reading options, the flood of content we all contend with, the presence of a trusted source to place something in our hands and say “read this” has never been more crucial.

Long live the bookseller. 

First Comes Love

What is the most important element to writing a book? The one thing you must have?

Is it talent? Knowledge? Marketing chutzpah? Dedicated writing habits?

All of these matter a great deal but they’re nothing without passion.

As my colleague and friend Jenna pointed out in a post on the Girl Friday blog not long ago, the writing process is a long one. And the publishing process—that of bringing the book you labored so hard to create to the world—makes it longer yet. Combined, it can feel relentless and endless: a process that almost certainly takes years, perhaps many of them.

Being a writer is a life’s work. It takes years of practice and study (also known as reading) to hone your craft. Being an author is another deal entirely: this is a the business end of books and many people who write books—memoirists with one extraordinary story to tell, subject matter experts, politicians—are not writers primarily. But one thing all authors must share is an abiding passion for their book.

The good news is that you’re not entirely alone in this: you can and should enlist many people to help you along on your journey. Right now for instance, between my agent, my editor, my in-house marketing and publicity team, my hired publicist, and various industry friends that are offering their support (god bless them), I have a veritable village working with me to bring my book to the world. And that is a beautiful thing. Part of the dream of landing a traditional publishing deal is that other people are investing in your book because they believe in it. Some things didn’t change so much post book deal—I still get up to write in the mornings, I still go to work, I’m still me—but this was one huge thing that did. As I said to a friend recently: after being the only one carrying the lonely torch of my writing aspirations all these years, suddenly having other people care about my book—not about me but about the book itself—is a revelation. In this way my writing life feel markedly different.

And yet.

I continue to care more than all of them, and that’s exactly as it should be. Being a writer is tough stuff, it almost certainly involves quite a lot of rejection and disappointment before any kind of real success can be found. And life will always try to crowd writing out. I’m busy, you’re busy, we’re all busy. Can we just agree on that? America is too busy and too obsessed by being busy, so it’s not likely to change anytime soon. This is a topic for another day—but it’s a certainty that you will have many demands on your time other than writing. So what will bring you there? What will inspire you to wake up earlier than you need to? Devote hours of your weekend? The world is indifferent to whether you write or not, I promise you.

And this is the thing you can never outsource. Even if you’re one of those authors I mentioned—the non-writer authors—you still need to have a passionate drive to see your story told. The author is at the molten core of any book project: and if they lose steam at any point in the process that Jenna so elegantly laid out? That project is doomed.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many experts you hire, how much fancy software you purchase, or impressive degrees you amass: You absolutely must feel the love.  

 

 

Ten Lessons from #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter

When I was a creative writing major in college, I got my first taste of the bafflingly obnoxious way that some people respond to a pronouncement of writerly ambitions:

“Don’t worry,” one bro a friend and I met an L.A. bar told me, “I had a bullshit major in college too. I turned out fine.”

Reader, I assure you, he did not turn out fine.

This was an egregious example but many well-meaning (ish) people seemed to fret about what I would do with such a fanciful degree. Did I want to teach? No…I wanted to write. And hey! What do you know, a decade after graduation, I use my degree every day of my life. So there.

One fantasizes that getting a book deal will stem the tide of this mystifying awkwardness. At very least, if one becomes famous for it, people will be respectful of the profession, right? Oh, sadly not, as last week’s hilarious and cringe-inducing hashtag #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter on Twitter proved.

As a public service message to all, here are ten things you should keep in mind when talking to writers:  

1.      We don’t like to work for free any more than you do: 

2.      We don’t need to hear your book idea…

3.      And we definitely don’t want to write it for you: 

4.      This IS our job. We get paid for it (see above): 

5.      Buy the book cheapskate. This is how we make a living (see above): 

6.      Wait, you do know how to read right?

7.      That’s so funny, because we have totally dabbled in brain surgery! 

8.      Why didn’t WE think of that?

9.      If you can’t say something nice…

10.      Let us go fetch you a gold star, BRB: 

 

What’s it all about?

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My boyfriend was a groomsman in a wedding last weekend and though I knew some of the guests, I was meeting most of the people there for the first time. In the adult world this usually means answering one question over and over again “What do you do?” and in my case—as part of the answer to this question is “I’m a novelist.”—the inevitable follow-up question: “What is your book about?”

Even though I’ve gotten increasingly good at answering this question, it still makes me feel a little put on the spot. There will always be a part of me that screams I don’t know, never mind, STOP ASKING ME! as though the question is a threat, as though the person’s response to my answer might be “Well that sounds like a dumb book, why did you write that?” I ask the same question of fellow writers I meet, by the way, it’s the utterly obvious and polite question to ask really, what else do you say in response to “I’m a writer”?

If you want to be a professional writer of books, you need to be able to answer this question, first to yourself, then to the agents you’d like to represent you, to the publishing house you hope buys the book, to the readers you hope to draw in, and to every person you ever encounter socially for the rest of your life until you are so famous you can just say “Oh hi, I’m J.K. Rowling.” And there’s no further explanation needed.

In many ways the entire process of packaging and marketing a book is an attempt to answer this question. The cover copy should obviously tell the reader what the book is about, but so should the images on the cover itself, the book’s title, and even the font of the book’s title.

Titles have been on my mind quite a lot lately as we’ve been trying to come up with a new one for my book. On the one hand, brainstorming about titles can be a fun exercise, and it’s awesome to have such bright bookish minds weighing in; on the other hand, the whole discussion makes me want to take a long nap. This book has been in my life for thirteen years. I’ve had dozens of drafts and working titles over those years: short dramatic ones, long overwrought ones, pseudo-intellectual obscure ones pulled form lines of poetry. At this point, I feel like a bride who has tried on too many wedding dresses.

And a book’s title is important with a capital “I”—you dream of people calling it by its name. “Have you read The Book yet? You must. It’s so good.” But what name should that be? Out of the 80,000 words that comprise the final book, how do I choose two or three to introduce it to the world? One simple phrase to answer the eternal question: “What is your book about?”

 

 

Endurance

As I hoofed it around the lake this past Saturday on my morning run, sweating buckets as the temperature climbed towards ninety, I called on a well-used part of my psyche to spur myself on for the final mile. It’s the part that says “Yes, you can. You don’t want to, it’s unpleasant, but yes, actually you can,” when whatever else it is that is screaming out in protest threatens to overwhelm me.

One of the best compliments I ever received was from a childhood tennis coach and friend of my family’s named Perry. Growing up, he was like a big brother to me and his influence in me went far beyond developing a surefire second serve. It was he who taught me that being tough and being positive were usually the same thing on the tennis court. Your most fearsome opponent was yourself, and the moment you started talking her down, you might as well give up.

A couple of years ago when I was getting back into tennis many years after my college career ended, he said to me after I just finished cranking through a set of forehands: “There it is, AD, the eye of the tiger.” I laughed at the hokey reference and asked exactly what he meant by that. “It’s the look you get: so determined and focused. In all the years I’ve coached, I’ve only seen a few other people who had it.” As Perry pointed out, I’d beaten many people over the years that I had no business beating because of “the eye”. Players who were ranked much higher than me, who had better strokes, were stronger and faster, had more raw talent, and had been paying since they were three. The one thing in my tennis game that I could count on was that I wanted it more than my opponent. When I got on the court with someone who wanted it as much? Those were the matches I lived for.

Tennis is a game where skill matters a great deal, of course, but it’s also a physically and mentally taxing sport. The willingness to do whatever it takes to win can make the difference between losing a match and being done with it and winning, albeit excruciatingly slowly. 

Writing is exactly like this.

It takes a long time to learn how to write a book, and even longer to time to actually write one, and much longer still to write a decent book. And that’s before you even step into the publishing arena to endure—most likely—years of rejection letters, close calls, and other varied disappointments and indignities.

Going through these things is no fun, but somehow talking about it once you’re on the other side of it (you have a book deal, or even better, a bestseller) is downright glee-inducing. Writers love to talk about the struggle easily as much as readers love to revel in the stories of an unemployed JK Rowling scrawling the idea for Harry Potter on a napkin while her train was stalled or Cheryl Strayed having her garbage service discontinued just a year before Wild hit.

Of course writers would want people to know what they went through to get where they are, how hard-earned their success really is. Any writer can tell you that there are few things more frustrating than when a friend or acquaintance with no writing background casually suggests that perhaps they too should write their novel or memoir and get their share of publishing pie.

I also think that looking back on the hard-fought ascent to writing success—however you define it—has a tendency to make writers nostalgic. Because as good as it feels to finally be getting somewhere with your writing, it was on that rocky path that—bit by bit, bird by bird—you found yourself, that you discovered that part of you that says: yes, actually, you can. 

Compare Despair

Are we living in the age of envy?

It used to be that we could only compare ourselves to those we knew in real life, and even then only when we saw or spoke to them. Now unfathomable amounts of information about our co-workers, friends, exes, and acquaintances are a click away. Once upon a time celebrities were remote, glamorous beings with no pretentions of being “just like us”. Now I could probably hop on Instagram and tell you what Cara Delevingne had for breakfast. Photos of Reese Witherspoon come up on my feed right in between pictures of my friends’ dogs, the spectacular bloody mary from their brunch, and stunning vistas from their hikes. Regular users of social media develop a kind of sixth sense for curating snapshots of their lives: a funny conversation overheard at the office of their cool job, a hot new novel placed next to a between a cappuccino with elaborately designed foam, held by their perfect manicure.

Pouring over these updates can be fun…or it can induce stomach-churning envy.

Last week Jilly Gagnon, writing for Elle.com, talked about exploring her feelings of jealousy after a friend of hers landed a flashy book deal. She had her own book deal, but her friend (who was a year younger than her, to add insult to injury) was already garnering praise and attention from the press. To wit, she learned of the good news via a media newsletter.

It may sound petty to feel envious under such circumstances—after all there are surely many who gladly switch places with Gagnon—but I doubt there’s an author out there who couldn’t sympathize.

Since I signed my own book deal back in October, I’ve been spending a lot of time deliberately comparing my work to that of my contemporaries. This is a necessary part of figuring out how to market my book. Determining which authors appeal to the audience you hope to reach is a solid first step to connecting with that audience. But spending so much time thinking about how your work stacks up to those you admire—sometimes even reaching out to them to ask for their support in terms of a blurb—is humbling. You look at what they have—the prime spot on the bestseller list, the movie deal with Reese Witherspoon’s production company, the prestigious awards—and wonder how you could ever live up to it. You wonder: am I really in this league?

But, as I must keep reminding myself, envy is a spectacular waste of energy better used elsewhere. And in truth, no matter how good someone appears to have it, you never know what someone else’s life is really like. Jo Piazza—a writer many are doubtlessly envying furiously right about now—wrote last week about how perfect her life probably looks on social media, and how far from reality that image really is.

It is also true that, without exception, every writer I know who has had any measure of success (and many who haven't yet) has worked hard, has persevered through rejection, and done the noble work of continuing create in the face of the world’s indifference.    

When I catch myself feeling covetous of someone else’s success, I try to focus on how far I’ve come. My current success might not stack up so well to that of Cheryl Strayed or Donna Tartt, But compared to the career of Andrea Dunlop a year ago? I’m kicking ass.  

Handling Criticism

Last week I came upon yet another story about an author losing his mind over a bad review. (You can read through the debacle here if you have some time to kill.) The indie author in question went absolutely hysterical on a reviewer who left him a one star review, eventually resorting to calling her (and everyone else who jumped into the fray) the scum of the earth, accusing them of heartlessly sabotaging his career.

Lest you think this kind of behavior is limited to the Wild West world of Indie publishing, be assured that it isn’t. Not long ago bestselling author Ayelet Waldman threw a very public fit, not over a bad review but over the perceived snub of her latest novel not being included on the New York Times “Most Notable Books” list. Author Kathleen Hale actually stalked a reviewer and then wrote about it in a piece on The Guardian that is both compelling and cringe-worthy.  

Hale mention in the piece that Goodreads is aware of the the potential downfalls of letting authors and readers connect so directly. They issue the issue the following warning to authors who attempt to comment on reviews of their own work: 

“We really, really (really!) don’t think you should comment on this review, even to thank the reviewer. If you think this review is against our Review Guidelines, please flag it to bring it to our attention. Keep in mind that if this is a review of the book, even one including factual errors, we generally will not remove it.
“If you still feel you must leave a comment, click ‘Accept and Continue’ below to proceed (but again, we don’t recommend it).”

Most writers are sensitive people and having one’s work in the world can feel excruciatingly vulnerable. Feeling frustrated, pissed-off, and distraught over a bad review is absolutely understandable. Especially in this new world where “critics” include not only educated readers at papers of record with actual codes of conduct, but basically anyone with an internet connection and an axe to grind. And yet, reviews are never meant to be a dialog—no matter how bait-y they appear—and any author who does engage, loses almost by default. There is virtually no way to respond (at least publicly) to a review and come out looking good, the very act of doing it is petty. Putting art into the world for public consumption, you are opening yourself to criticism and it is a bargain that you must accept. This does not include, by the way, personal attacks. Your looks, your character, your worth as a person, shouldn’t be up for scrutiny. But reactions to your work? The good, the bad, and the ugly are all fair game.

So what’s an author to do?

Not reading reviews is an option. Gretchen Rubin, a bestselling author many times over, doesn’t read hers. I admire the discipline of a writer who can do that; I can imagine where that would be healthier than the alternative. I have a feeling that my curiosity would get the best of me though, and besides, if you never read the reviews, you also never get to hear the good.

It’s also worth remembering that getting reviewed in the first place is a privileged position. Many authors’ work—even that which comes from venerable publishing houses—is roundly ignored by the media. If there’s anything worse—or at least just as bad—as a bad review, it’s silence. 

The lucky writer has been through years—maybe decades—of rejection by the time they are receiving—or not receiving—their first reviews. They’ve forged an iron belief in themselves, they’ve built a resilience that can’t be shouted down. They’re determined to carry on no matter what. I like to think I’ve done some of that work over this last decade.

All the same, I might go ahead and stay off of Goodreads.

 

The Meaning of Makeup

The internet was awash with thought-provoking pieces last week about Caitlyn Jenner’s stunning Vanity Fair reveal: from pleas not to forget the more vulnerable members of the community to Janet Mock’s examination of (among other things) what the female aesthetic represents for those in trans community. KJ Dell Antonia’s Motherlode column on how the photos of Caitlyn present a teachable moment for our daughters resonated with me because upon seeing the cover, I was struck by how similar it was to most other magazine covers. As Dell Antonia pointed out, the level of manipulation that goes into a photo shoot like Jenner’s is mind-boggling. The hair extensions, the makeup, the push-up bras and Spanx, the lighting and styling to hide this and highlight that. None of this would be any different if Jenner were a cis-gendered woman, this is just the cover girl treatment. And that’s before we even get to the airbrushing and photo-shopping.

I can imagine that after a lifetime of hiding her true self, it must have felt freeing to revel in all the trappings of female glamour. I imagine that this artifice helped her make her way to her most authentic self.

Her famous stepdaughter isn’t often seen styled to any less degree of precision. Kim Kardashian is known, among other things, for her application of aggressively contoured, piled on makeup. Kim is a beautiful woman even without it, of course, as we know from the photos of her in no makeup (or at least minimal makeup) that regularly circulate. If I were a celebrity, I’m certain I’d never leave the house barefaced. The press is vicious to women about their looks.

I don’t wear makeup on the day-to-day. It’s not a political statement, though I certainly don’t feel that women should be pressured to wear makeup to look “pulled together”. I used to wear makeup daily, but at some point I just stopped. I don’t even remember making the decision to do so. I still wear it when I’m out on the town, if I have an important meeting, if I’m having my picture taken for some reason.

My comfort without makeup has its limits. Years ago, before I met my boyfriend, my therapist suggested that I try going on dates in a t-shirt and jeans, hair back, no makeup. Basically, what I usually looked like when I was in her office. It was meant to be an exercise in being vulnerable. The idea of not going through the pre-date ritual of suiting up in my most flattering clothes, blowing out my hair, and putting on a full face of makeup was surprisingly terrifying. So much so that I never tried it.   

Amanda Filipacchi’s brilliant novel The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty looks at beauty as artifice from both sides of the coin. Costume designer Barb, distraught that her beauty may have been the cause of her dear friend’s suicide (because he told her so, not because she’s an egomaniac) dons a carefully constructed ugly suit (bad teeth, a frizzy grey wig, an extra sixty pounds) to hide her looks; convinced that any man worth her love will see beyond it. Meanwhile one of her best friends, brilliant but homely composer Lily, fears that her looks will forever separate her from the man she loves. They present equal and opposite examples of how every woman’s life is affected by the construct of beauty.

Of course, being female is about much more than styled hair, mascara, and push-up bras. Hearing the experiences of Jenner, Mock, Laverne Cox, and the many other trans-women who’ve bravely come forward to tell their stories, challenges us all to think harder about what it really means to be a woman. And it has nothing to do with makeup.  

The Artist Isn’t Present

I love chatting with my fellow writers on Twitter. The ability to do so is what turned me from a Twitter dabbler to an enthusiast. Being able to reach out and let an author—and the world at large—know how I loved a book or piece of writing in one click is a singular joy. Sometimes it has other benefits—the person follows me or reads my work, sometimes we even become friends—but just being able to send them this low-key, non-intrusive love note feels good in and of itself. The connection I feel with a book I love can been stunningly deep, this gesture of reaching out to the author is small, light, but still meaningful.

These days, when I go to write something to an author on Twitter—say Maria Semple—and they’re nowhere to be found, I feel in some tiny sense unmoored and disappointed, like I’ve discovered they’re no longer living.

I’m thirty-three, a peculiar age in that I’m technically in—but in many ways not of—the millennial generation. It means that most of my life happened entirely without the presence of social media and smart phones. I didn’t own a cell phone of any kind until I was out of college. I talked to other teenagers (or “teenagers” *shudder*) in AOL chatrooms (scree-errr-chhhh), I bought wagon axles in the general store on Oregon Trail.

For most of my life I read books without updating anyone other than the next friend who asked me for a reading recommendation. It was a given that the act of reading was a solitary, one-way experience. You’re only option was to write an author you loved a fan letter—which it never occurred to me to do. Once I worked in New York publishing, I met lots of authors in person. Some of them were deeply charming, some were downright off-putting, but there was always something surreal about being faced with a person you’ve become so intimately acquainted with on the page.

Once, when Ian McEwan was visiting the Doubleday offices from England, I drilled my friend Chastity—his publicist’s assistant—for his whereabouts in the building. I contrived to be carrying something to the copy machine the moment I knew he’d be arriving on our floor. When I saw him—kind eyes behind signature spectacles—I stood stunned for a brief moment, before booking it off down the hallway towards the copier. His work was too dear to me to risk having a moment of awkwardness. What if he was dismissive? What if he was, like several distinguished male authors I’d met, an unabashed ogler? (I have no reason to believe that Mr. McEwan is either of these things, by the way, he has a sterling reputation). I could easily have asked his publicist Nicole to introduce me, but Ian McEwan the artist was too important to me to risk it on a moment in the presence of Ian McEwan the man.

The desire to connect can cut both ways. One of the most buzzed about authors of the last few years is Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, who is not only not on Twitter, but completely anonymous: with people speculating that she is everything from a male to a group of authors writing together. The mystery seems to be working for her—though it’s earned her some scorn from the press—and she represents a particular fantasy: that of being able to produce one’s work entirely in peace. The hustle of trying to promote yourself a writer, of putting yourself out there, can be wearing.

The way we read—the way we interact with art and artists as a whole—has fundamentally changed. Social media provides a cozier connection to those we admire than was ever available to us previously. No artist should be feel beholden to this—you don’t owe anyone access to your personal life—but insofar as reading and writing is about making a human connection, I can’t help but think that the ability to share the love with the click of a button has improved the experience. What do you think?

 

 

The Gift of Waiting

Pursuing a professional career as a writer involves a lot of waiting. My agent Carly wrote a great post a few weeks ago about what to do when you’re waiting for something to happen in publishing: waiting for your novel to come out, waiting to hear back from agents, waiting for reviews to come in. Her advice is on-point; twiddling your thumbs and obsessing over parts of the publishing process you can’t control (read: most of it) is crazy-making. I’m pretty good at keeping myself occupied, but lately, I’m trying to cultivate an appreciation for the “waiting” part.  

It’s too easy to become overly focused on the next goal in your life and let the days rush by in a hurricane of to-do lists and busyness. We barrel through the days and weeks towards the next milestone: whether it’s a promotion at work, an artistic pursuit, or a step forward with our romantic partner. We’re a culture that prizes doing. Waiting? Being? Those we struggle with. Okay, I struggle with those things. I like to do, I’m proactive, persistent, disciplined. All good things. To a point.  

“Busy” has become the ultimate place to hide in our culture. Absorb yourself in work, in tasks, in accomplishments, and people won’t question you. You’re doing stuff, lots of stuff, you’re on it, in fact, you are all over it.

It’s easier to pinpoint the wrongness of this in the rearview than it is in the moment. I think back on the summer I was working on my first novel (or rather, the first one I tried to get published). I was still living in New York then, and it would be sweltering already when I woke up at 6:30 to write before work. I’d go down to Dunkin Doughnuts every morning and get a big iced coffee to keep me company; the guy at the counter soon begin to recognize me and start making my coffee the moment he saw me walk in the door. I was still many years away from a book deal—and it wouldn’t be for the novel I was working on then—but it was the happiest summer I spent in New York. Those mornings at my desk, ice coffee sweating bullets through its plastic cup, I was full of purpose. I was, for the first time in my newly-minted adult life, being a writer.

I just turned thirty-three a few weeks ago. The thirties are a decade full of huge potential milestones both personal and professional: you’re supposed to hit your stride in your career, but also get married, buy a house, have some kids. Maybe none of these things are on your list, but I suspect you’ve got something equally ambitious in the other direction on deck in that case: travel the world, write all the books, build your own canoe, run a marathon.

My novel doesn’t come out for almost a year. Sometimes that feels like forever, and yet that on-sale date will arrive before I know it. On the personal side, I’ve been with my boyfriend for over a year, and we have lots of proper, grown-up, settled down plans for the next few years. Lots of milestones to hit, lots of things to do.

But right now, in this moment, it’s a seventy degree spring day in Seattle and those I love are safe and sound. I have a book on the horizon and a man I love by my side. It’s a pretty good place to be.  

Essential Blogs for Writers Part Two: Book Blogs

There are many roads to becoming a writer. But whether you’re an autodidact or an MFA candidate, one thing you surely are if you aim to become a writer is a passionate reader. Regardless of what structures we employ to sharpen our craft, consuming as many books as possible is a necessity.

There are all kinds of ways to find your next good book: your local bookstore, your favorite magazine (The books section in O Magazine is half the reason I subscribe), your bookish friends, social media, and of course, blogs. The latter has been an underutilized source for me, a problem I’d like to remedy. The world of books is vast, and the more diverse your sources of discovery, the better informed you will be.

The world of book blogs can feel overwhelming, but engaging with the passionate souls who tend them is worth the effort. Book blogs often don’t use the stringent review structure of more traditional review sections like The New York Times so it’s important to find those with an approach and voice that suite your tastes.  

If you’ve dipped a toe in the world of book blogs, you’ve likely heard of places like The Rumpus, Book Riot, and Bookslut. Here are five slightly lesser known site I love:

Beth Fish Reads: A well-written and extremely savvy book blog from a freelance book editor, reviewer, and journalist. In addition to reviews, interviews, and guest posts from authors, she has a weekend cookbook feature and Imprint Fridays, where she focuses on the offerings from a specific publishing imprint. This blog is as well-curated as it is delightful.

Liz & Lisa: The blog of co-authors and lifelong best friends Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke is a great stop if you love contemporary women’s fiction. These are the gals you wish would start a book club in your neighborhood. You won’t find critical reviews here, they save their space for the stuff they love and want to recommend. They cover most traditionally published work, but occasionally will cover some of the self-published gems, which can be especially hard to get wind of. Chick lit with plenty of brains and heart is what these gals are all about.    

She Reads: Founded by authors Marybeth Whalen and Ariel Lawhorn in 2009, what started as an online book club has become a thriving community hotspot featuring book recommendations, author interviews, book discussion, and book-related recipes. If you’re looking to win your next book club meeting (and why wouldn’t you be?) this is the place for you.

Book Patrol: Managed by Seattle-based longtime bookseller Michael Lieberman, this site features not only the standard reviews and interviews, but a host of other bookish delights from Hemingway-inspired t-shirts to vintage cover art, and much more. It’s the internet equivalent of spending an hour roaming around your favorite quirky local bookstore.

The Book Wheel Blog: This blog features mostly book content with a dash of pop culture, all written in the author’s fun, approachable style. Blogger and book lover Allison (who works as a shark conservationist) is like that unpretentious friend you can both discuss literary fiction with but also won’t judge you for watching Bravo. And she knows about sharks so…not going to lie, I just kind of want to have brunch with her.

 

Next up: Blogs to Help You Manage Your Life (so you can make time for writing)

YOU: a Thoroughly Modern Bunny Boiler

I haven’t been able to get YOU by Caroline Kepnes out of my head since I read it several months ago. For starters, Kepnes’ writing is excellent, an intoxicating mix of humor, horror, and heart. The book’s narrator, Joe Goldberg, is the most relatable psychopath since Tom Ripley. Like Ripley, Joe is surrounded by privilege that has been denied him, and hearing him bitterly opine on those around him is a sincere, pop-culture laced pleasure. His rivals for the affections of Beck (the titular “you” to whom the book is addressed) are so delightfully loathsome that it’s easy to sympathize with Joe’s hatred of them. From pretty-boy trust funder Benji, to cruel, insecure snob Peach, to the duplicitous, amoral Dr. Nicky—we like Joe better than anyone else in the book. Even though we know we shouldn’t.

Kepnes pulls off a number of difficult feats in the book, from making us sympathize with a psychopath, to using the notoriously difficult second person to stunning effect. YOU is compulsively readable. But as the book settled in further, I realized there was something darker and more compelling to this story for me than most thrillers, even ones as finely written as YOU.   

The thing is, unlike Ripley or Sabastian Faulks’ creepy outsider Englby (another favorite of mine) Joe isn’t just captivating, he’s familiar. Luckily for me,I’ve never had a stalker or anything close to it (and before someone gets all #notallmen on me, I know that stalking and its many gradations are anomalies). Most men that I’ve known in my life have respected the lives, choices, and autonomy of the women around them. But any women who has put in her time in the dating pool has, at very least, had a few dates who made her a little…nervous. Even if the guy who wouldn’t stop calling, or the one who googled and memorized every last detail of your online life before your first date, or the one who desperately wanted you to tell him you loved him on the third date, wasn’t ever going to turn into a murderous psychopath. Probably.

Like any good horror story, YOU is thrilling because it lets us follow a narrative to its extreme and unlikely conclusion. Much like Glen Close’s lovesick, obsessive (probably mentally ill) character, Alex, in Fatal Attraction, we can see why Joe is charming and attractive at first. I mean, he’s a cute guy who works in an indie book store. I spent my entire 20s in New York hoping to be asked out in an indie bookstore! But unlike Fatal Attraction, which is from the POV of the stalked and handily makes a caricature of Alex, in YOU we get to see things from Joe’s perspective, and to horrify ourselves by empathizing with him.

The book adds an additional layer of creepy familiarity by taking on another omnipresent fear: that the constant stream of minutiae we put on social media might be turned against us—not by sophisticated North Korean hackers, but just by a regular (if intelligent) Joe. If someone wants to comb through all that we’ve made available of ourselves online, for most of us, they’d have plenty to work with. Imagine what could be discovered about you, how you could be manipulated, if someone spent enough time researching you online? There’s a dark thrill to exploring all of this within the safe confines of a novel. Maybe there’s even a little comfort for the reader in feeling that she can now count Joe as the devil she knows, can reassure herself that if she ever saw anything like him in real life, she’d run the hell away before he could so much as friend her on Facebook.  

Marketing Inspiration from the Patron Saint of Self-Publishing

Let me begin by telling you about the late, great E. Lynn Harris. I worked with him back when I was a baby publicist at Doubleday, and I remember him for many reasons. He was kind and funny, full of good gossip and southern charm. He was generous in the extreme and used his good fortune to care for a vast entourage of friends and family. He also sent us the best thank-you gifts eve

r after publicity campaigns. His work itself was delightful, veering from his poignant, heartbreaking memoir of growing up gay in the South to his tales of the raucous and raunchy secret lives of Atlanta’s elite; I’m still not convinced thatThe Real Housewives of Atlanta did not spring fully formed from his brain.

E. Lynn had an extraordinary backstory, the kind of up-by-your-bootstraps tale that politicians like to trot out to show what makes our country special. He was born in 1955 and grew up poor in Mississippi and Arkansas before going on to graduate from the University of Arkansas, where he became the first male cheerleader and the first black yearbook editor. He went on to work as a computer salesman for IBM before finally quitting to pursue his writing passion. When he couldn’t find a publisher for his first book, Invisible Life,he self-published it. Mind you, this was 1991—none of the sleek self-publishing print-on-demand models that have taken over the marketplace existed; no one even bought books online yet. But E. Lynn knew there was an audience for his work, and he knew just where to find it. E. Lynn drove around to Atlanta beauty salons, natural hubs of chitchat and connection (this was pre-social-media), and told the ladies about his book. Via this deeply authentic word-of-mouth marketing, E. Lynn sold thousands of copies out of the trunk of his car (literally) and was eventually picked up by Doubleday, who published him until his sudden death in 2009. Every single one of his books became a New York Times bestseller.

I miss E. Lynn. I still think about him, and I bring him up frequently when I speak in conferences or classes. I think of E. Lynn as the patron saint of self-publishing, and as one of the best examples of grassroots book marketing the world has ever known.

Keep his story in mind as you head into what is for many authors the most difficult part of the process: marketing your book. Getting attention for a book has never been easy, and it’s tempting to think that it’s harder than ever now, given the deluge of new titles hitting shelves every week. But never have there been so many tools with which to market your work as an author. You, my friend, need not pack your trunk full of copies of your novels. (Though I still think beauty salons are a brilliant place to market.) So, what do you do?

Don’t rely on traditional media. If you have a best friend who happens to be a book reviewer or radio producer, sure, give them a ring. But regardless of who is publishing your book, opportunities for media coverage have diminished drastically while the number of titles going on sale every week has exploded. It’s especially difficult for fiction, as the meager book-review section is often the only opportunity for coverage. And most reviewers are still pretty reticent to review self-published books, not because they’re snobs about it (though some probably are) but because they’re so inundated with books that they have to draw the line somewhere.

Embrace social media. Now is the moment to ditch your technophobia and harness the power of social networks. Social media can help you every step of the way in your self-publishing journey, from raising the money to fund your book project with sites like Kickstarter and Inkshares, to finding a community of beta readers on Book Country, to helping you market your book to readers through blogging platforms, Twitter, Goodreads, and more. This landscape can feel daunting, but it’s also incredibly empowering for authors to have these tools at their disposal. Just as you no longer need to wait by the phone for a publisher to give you a green light to publish your book, you no longer need the approval of the traditional media to let people know about it.

Start early. Don’t wait until your book is coming out to start promoting it. You need to be finding and attracting your audience long before the book goes on sale. Connections, whether online or off, take time to build, and these are going to be the centerpiece of your marketing efforts. Books take time to create (though self-publishing is much faster than traditional publishing), so while you’re waiting for the book to make its way through the editorial and production processes, start thinking about how you’re going to sell that puppy. Using some combination of the above-mentioned social media tools can be a very effective strategy, but it takes a sustained effort, ideally one that starts six months to a year before the book goes on sale.    

Build relationships. Marketing your work is not about telling people to buy your book. It’s about building relationships: relationships with bookstores, with other writers, with online communities, with librarians, and with any other potential readers and champions of your work. Always be on the lookout for how you can find, contribute to, and nurture these communities. Don’t neglect the part of the process that involves being a loyal reader, customer, and friend.

Know your audience. Maybe you’re writing on a subject that easily lends itself to social media content: vegetable gardening or World War II fighter jets. But maybe it’s not so clear what to blog or tweet about. This is a problem for many novelists in particular. Therefore, I encourage you not to look at your book’s subject matter but rather at its audience. What are they interested in? What can you give them besides your book? This is where finding and connecting with authors of similar books (something in-house folks do frequently for blurbs and endorsements) can be key. Get to know your audience to best learn how to serve them.

 If approached the right way, marketing your book can be rewarding and evenfun. So go forth and find your readers, and may the legend of E. Lynn Harris light your way.