San Francisco Writers Conference 2015 recap

This year I celebrated Valentine’s Day with several hundred fellow book lovers at the San Francisco Writers Conference. It was Girl Friday’s first time at the conference so we weren’t sure what to expect. Conferences require a huge amount of time and energy, and the SFWC made it well worth it.  

We attended AWP last year, which is a terrific conference in its own right, but one of the things that comes to mind when I remember the experience is the rows and rows of exhibitor tables stretching as far as the eye could see. It was an amazing panoply of publishers, writing programs, chapbooks, and literary magazines, but the level of overwhelm was high.

At the SFWC, we were tucked in a cozy table in the reception area with only a handful of neighboring booths, and we had ample opportunity to get to know our fellow exhibitors during the lulls. There were some familiar faces from the EFA, to our right were the gals from Pubslush and to our left Jennifer (who wins my award for subtly on-message outfits) from Bookhive, a new company that offers reader focus groups to help authors hone their market. Across the way was the Blurb booth, who had my favorite marketing device of the conference: a chalkboard where you could write what your next book was about.  

On Friday, I did a panel with my dear friend Lucy Silag, who was there repping Book Country. Our talk was packed to the gills with folks who seemed incredibly receptive to our message about honing and marketing their work by building book communities both online and off. During the Q and A, someone asked if filming himself jumping from a plane while reading his book would make a good marketing device. It might, I told him, it’s all about the audience. Would his audience be charmed or simply confused by such extreme antics? Book Country filmed us during the panel, did interviews with Christina, Meg, and me about our work, and got some footage of us chatting to folks at the Girl Friday booth. We’ll share all of these as soon as we’ve got our hands on them!   

For me, the highlight of the conference was meeting Judith Curr, publisher of Atria Books, who was the conference’s keynote speaker. The Girls Friday and I were feeling a little star-struck after she came by our table to learn about us and chat; she’s warm and smart and incredibly glamorous, like someone Hollywood might cast to play a powerhouse lady publisher. As luck would have it, Atria is publishing my debut novel next year and as we listened to Judith’s show-stopping keynote on Sunday morning, I couldn’t help but think how jealous I would be if I wasn’t lucky enough to have landed with them. She told the rapt audience (no small feat at 8am on the fourth day of a conference) about her own fascinating background growing up as one of seven siblings in Queensland, Australia and how she came to work in New York just as Amazon was launching and upending the whole system. She took us through the questions she asks each editor who wants to acquire a book for Atria: Why this book? Who will read it? How will they buy it? One of the things she said in her keynote that stuck with me was that every author has to decide what will make them happy and to celebrate each milestone along the way. Will it make you happy to get published? To sell ten thousand copies? It’s no good to simply say that you want every book to be a bestseller. Set realistic goals, celebrate when you reach them, and then move the bar. It seems like a good formula for not remaining in a constant state of writerly angst.

If I have any regrets about the conference, I wish we could have gone to more panels. The two I went to were dynamite: one featured the aforementioned delightful Judith and bestselling Atria author John Lescroart. On Sunday I went to a talk featuring the dynamic and insightful Penny Sansevieri, who did an incredibly engaging mini-class on the rather prosaic subject of Amazon marketing. Never has someone made keywords so much fun. Our own Kate Chynoweth moderated a fascinating panel on heroes and villains, where we gained insight on creating nuanced characters that readers will want to come back to again and again. And we heard editors deconstruct their methods—one of whom was advocating a twenty-two-step process.

Conferences are a rare opportunity to meet hundreds of your fellow writers and connect, drink wine, and learn about all of the newfangled things folks are coming up with to sell, promote, and create books. Until next year San Fran, up next PNWA!

Book Marketing: the Long Game

I signed my book deal with Atria last fall. The manuscript is done but the book doesn’t come out until March 2016, giving me a little over a year to wait patiently for book to meet world. Except I’m not a very good waiter. I’m like five year old or a German Shepherd, I need a job to do if you don’t want the furniture destroyed.

I was reminded last week in talking to a friend, a memoirist whose just-released book was on a much tighter schedule than mine, that having this kind of time is actually a huge blessing. I’m always telling clients and students that they should start as early as possible when it comes to their social media and marketing efforts. Ideally marketing should be a gradual, organic process, and that takes time.

As the social media and marketing director of GFP, this is where I put my money where my mouth is. As an author with a year-long countdown ahead of her, here’s what’s on my to-do list now:  

Read My Butt Off

I always try to read lots of fiction by contemporary authors. I love to shout out and connect with the ones I like on social media (little harder to do with say, Jane Austen). This is lots of fun, but it’s also vital. If I want the author community to support me when my book comes out, I sure as hell better support it now. Right now I’m also in the process of asking folks for blurbs, and you better believe I’m not sidling up to anyone asking them to give my book an endorsement if I didn’t read (and love) theirs.

Pro Tip: If you’re a writer, reading should be a daily habit. No excuses. Reading books by authors with a similar audience will help you hone your own work and understand your reader better. Be generous with other authors; they’re your teammates, not your competition.

Work On My Next Book

It’s somewhat surreal to finally be finished with a book I worked on off-and-on for over a decade. I’m thrilled on the one hand, but it’s also hard to let go. But there’s nothing like the distraction of a new love to help you move on from an old one. So I’m making it a point to get up early and work on my new novel for an hour a day before I go into the office, just as I would if I had a deadline looming.

Pro Tip: Looking forward to the next book is one of the best things you can do for yourself once you’ve finished working on something. It will help you not feel as though you have all of your eggs in one proverbial basket. This isn’t the time to let the good habits you developed writing the last book fall by the wayside.

Social Media

I’ll go into more detail about this in a later post, but here’s a quick summary of my social media routine: I’m spending plenty of time on Twitter: finding new authors and writers to follow and interact with, using the hell out of the #amreading hashtag, and looking for interesting bookish conversations to jump into. I’m also blogging every week (hi!) and working on an in-world Tumblr specifically for the book. And naturally, I’m logging and rating all the great books I’m reading on Goodreads.

Pro Tip:  Social media can become overwhelming and all-consuming pretty easily. Develop what feels like a doable strategy (blog once a week, Tweet every day, put together Pinterest Boards for your characters, etc.) and set aside some time to do it. I block out two hours over the weekend to do my social media for the following week.

Get Face Time

I can’t emphasize this enough, the best way to set yourself up for success is to spend time with and support other writers and book folks. I’m lucky in that there is a significant crossover with my day job here. I’m heading to the San Francisco Writers Conference this coming weekend, and have a half dozen other conferences and panels booked for the coming year. I also run a bi-monthly publishing and author mixer with a bookseller friend of mine.

Pro tip: Even if you don’t have the necessary access or resources to go to big conferences and events, you likely have a local bookstore where you can attend readings, shop, and chat with the staff. Social media is awesome, but nothing beats face-to-face for making a connection.

On Comebacks Yet To Come

You may have heard there was a little football game yesterday. I won’t delve into the specifics, but it did not go as my fair city had hoped. The atmosphere in the Girl Friday office today is funereal, and I don’t even want to talk about what my boyfriend is going through right now. There was much yelling and throwing of shoes at our house last night.

Nothing anyone can say is gonna make us Hawk fans feel better right now. Telling us to think of next season right this moment is like telling someone who just got dumped that there are other fish in the sea. True, but it doesn’t help.

But it’s worth remembering that failure is a part of what makes any team (or writer) great. It’s what sharpens us and makes us better. It’s a tough but effective teacher. No sports narrative is complete without its moments of darkness, no writer worth their salt without their piles of rejection letters.

In honor of our Hawks and their greatness past, present, and future, I’m rerunning a post I wrote last year about what authors can learn from athletes. So whether you’re bumming out over a rejection letter or your team’s heartbreaking loss, just remember the power of living to fight another day.

March Madness: What Authors can Learn from Athletes

 To the uninitiated (read: me) the frenzy surrounding the NCAA basketball tournament can seem like, well, madness. But as my best hope of spending time with my boyfriend this time of year is to settle in for a game or thirty, I figured I’d better give the sport a shot. Somewhere between my diatribe about how Charles Barkley should really reconsider his three-piece suits and choking up during an NCAA commercial, I started to get into it. The thrill of victory! The rivalries! The copious man tears during post-game press conferences!

I’m a sucker for sports. I’ve been both a writer and an athlete for most of my life and in some ways I feel like what I learned on the tennis court has been as helpful as anything I learned in the classroom. You may not think that writing a novel and sinking a sweet three-pointer at the buzzer have much in common, but you, my friend, would be wrong.

Greatness is mostly about discipline

Some people mistake the act of creating for divine inspiration that descends from the heavens, a muse that lands on your shoulder and whispers in your ear. Some think writing is a natural talent that you are born with. To which I say: pffffftttt. Of course individuals are born with varying degrees of innate talent for writing, basketball, singing, clog dancing, or whatever, but that’s only the raw material. The rest is craft, muscle memory, technique. HARD WORK. For writers, this means waking up in the morning and putting your butt in your chair, over and over again, until you have something good. It means reading everything you can get your hands on. It means attacking your writing with the dogged discipline that a point guard practices his free throws.

Resilience is key

One of the most valuable things I learned from sports was how to bounce back. After a devastating loss—one where your teammates and classmates are counting on you, where the stakes are high and you choke big time—it can be tempting to literally take your ball and go home. For good. Anyone who has been through the process of submitting a novel to agents or publishers will not have to make much of a leap to know where I’m going with this one. Rejection hurts, it can feel like an almost physical blow when you open that email that says, “Thank you for submitting Your Great American Novel, unfortunately…” but you have to find a way to carry on. You have to work to stay in touch with the part of you that says, “I must do this”. Get back up and fight another day.

It’s not all about the glory

Sure, some of the guys playing for powerhouses like Florida and Kansas will go on to illustrious careers in the NBA, but for most college players the only reason the public will remember them in a year is if they do something embarrassing like sob into their terrible mustache after a tough loss. For the average player from say, Dayton, this is as good as it’s going to get and you can bet they’re loving every second. There’s nothing wrong with dreaming big—it can big an excellent motivator, just as your dreams of publication can be as well. But ultimately, you have to do it for the love.

 Furthermore…

It’s not about money

What supposedly makes college ball purer and more fun to watch than the NBA is that you don’t have high-salaried players showboating and making it all about them. It’s about the sport, not the cash. Clients often ask me what their chances are of making money off of their book. Oh, friend, even if your book is beautifully written, perfectly plotted, and masterfully rendered … make money? You might want to think about trying something more realistic to earn a living, like raising Arabian horses. Of course, you should do your best to find readers, to sell books, and to promote your work, but it should never be about that. Book sales are capricious at best—it should always come back to love and dedication.

 Be a good competitor

It always gets me right here when the opposing teams congratulate each other at the end of a basketball game. I love a show of good sportsmanship, of bromance forged in battle. The world of book publishing (especially if you live in a place like New York where everything from dating to riding the subway feels like a competitive sport) can feel ruthless at times. But writers are always better off supporting each other than tearing one another down. First of all, a bad reputation will not serve you. Furthermore, writing can be a lonely life and the more friends you make who can truly empathize, the better. So give blurbs, review and recommend other people’s work, show up to events, support your community. Be the person everyone is rooting for, and keep working hard.

The Ecstasy of Editorial

Girl Friday, where I work, has all kinds of editorial clients: novelists, memoirists, business book authors, you name it. Most of them are wonderful and grateful for the fabulous work that my talented colleagues do to improve their books. But every once in a while we get someone who just doesn’t want to be told, a writer who rejects the notion that the editorial process will improve their work, which isobviously perfect as it is. Frankly, I find this arrogant and not a little bit self-destructive. In my humble (informed and reasoned) opinion, there is a not a writer in the world whose work cannot be made better, sharper, clearer, and more powerful via the editorial process. Got that? Not one.

I’m not saying there are no bad editors out there—a good fit is paramount—but I believe the process itself to be sacred. Lots of elements of publishing are up for debate in the modern era. This isn’t one of them.

My novel The Sojourn was raised by an editorial village that encompasses everyone from my college mentor to the fine folks at Aria Books. I’ve been working on the novel off and on for twelve years and over that time a number of professors, writers, and colleagues have given me feedback on it. But in the name of brevity, I will only talk about the editorial process as it concerns the book’s most recent iteration.

At the beginning of last year, after a number of attempts at getting published, I decided to have another go. If I was going to take my beloved novel back out into the world, I wanted to give it the best possible chance of succeeding, so I hired one of Girl Friday’s talented editors Amara Holstein to help me out. She was smart and cool and a Francophile like me, a perfect fit. She helped me smooth things on the line and most importantly: cut, cut, cut. I knew I had pacing problems, and I needed an expert third party to tell me what could get the axe. I asked her to ruthlessly extract anything that wasn’t moving the plot forward. Once Amara and I finished our revisions, I sent it out with a certainty that whatever happened, I would know I’d done everything I could. It didn’t take long to see the results of our efforts.

About a month later, I received a revise and resubmit letter from one of my top choice agents Carly Watters. She told me she liked the book but wanted to know if I’d be willing to make some changes. I was thrilled with her feedback. First of all, it meant I had an agent interested who had a keen editorial eye and was willing to do the work necessary to give a book the best chance at selling. And her suggestions themselves felt so spot on it seemed like we’d been working together for years. I revised in a hurry. I sent it back to Carly and she called me the next day. I had other agents looking, but there was no way I wasn’t going with her. In addition to everything else I knew about Carly when I queried her, I now knew that he was a clear communicator and had an editorial eye that could make my work better.

After we sold the book to Atria, I got a chance to work with my in-house editor, the delightful Sarah Cantin. I knew from previous conversations that we had a ton in common and a shared vision for the book. Digging in with her was great fun. Reading her notes and feeling the empathy and appreciation she had for my characters bowled me over. Endings in particular are so tricky, and Sarah helped me hone mine in a way I couldn’t have done without her. After all the years I’d spent with the book, seeing it all come together in a way that felt so right was incredible.

Next came that unsung hero of the editorial process, the copyeditor. A big part of the copyeditor’s job is to clean up mistakes and ensure consistency, but there’s more to it than that. My meticulous copyeditor, Steve Boldt, caught things such as a character getting on the wrong train to her destination, or the fact that I had my heroine calling her mother from France when it would be the middle of the night California time. It’s easy to miss these kinds of details when you’re focusing on bigger issues, but leaving them in could risk distracting the reader, and even losing their confidence. Seeing this manuscript that I’d labored over for so many years get its final polish was a pleasure akin to having my car detailed.

Much is made of what a lonely art writing is, and it’s true that you need to be prepared for some solitude. The years of rejection can be wearying: you wonder if your voice will ever be heard, if anyone will ever give a damn. But it makes it all the sweeter when such gifted people care enough about your work to put their own creative talents into it. Even if it isn’t always easy to hear critical feedback, heed thy editor(s) my friend, they are on your side.  

I’m on the Bandwagon and it Feels Great

If you pay any attention to sports (or any mainstream media), you know that the Seahawks pulled off an epic comeback to win the NFC Championships yesterday. It was a glorious moment for Seattle fans and anyone else who appreciates heroic sporting feats (maybe not Packers fans).

I’m a newly minted fan, but I was jumping up and down with the rest of the sports bar (and the city) yesterday when the Hawks pulled it out. Over the last two years, I’ve had lots of reasons to come to the football-loving table. My colleagues at Girl Friday are HUGE fans, my local team got seriously awesome, and I started dating (then moved in with a diehard sports fan.

There are still plenty of reasons to take issue with the sport, especially as a feminist, but as the inimitable Roxane Gay points out in her excellent, aptly-titled essay collection Bad Feminist, there is no way to do it perfectly. You can have strongly held beliefs and still want to zone out and watch some horrible reality television, listen to some aggressive hip hop while you work out, or drink at noon and watch the game with the rest of your city without feeling guilty. I’ve got issues with the NFL for days, for everything from their shameful “charity” efforts, to past handling of domestic violence and rape charges, to their sometimes blatant disregard for their own players’ health and safety. But the sport and the organization are not synonymous; you can have objections and still be a fan. Here’s why I watch: 

The Seahawks 
Yes, they win football games. But the reasons to love this particular team are legion (of Boom). If there was ever going to be a team to get me into the sport, it’s these guys. This is not only great group of players but a great group of men, as my colleague Lam pointed out on the GFP blog last week. From our darling Quarterback Russell Wilson, who is known for his good works off the field (he visits Seattle Children’s Hospital every week!) to our silver fox of a coach, Pete Caroll who always keeps it classy, the team consistently represents our city well. We’ve got brainiacs like Richard Sherman, who is always on point in interviews and was a stand-out at Stanford, and Steven Haushka who majored in neuroscience, and then we’ve got characters like the one and only Marshawn Lynch, who tries to stick it to the NFL every chance he gets. In their post-game interviews on Sunday, every player pointed to the greatness of their teammates and the love they had for each other. Right or wrong, young men all over the country look at football players as role models, and you could scarcely find better ones than these guys.

America

There are few things that can bring people together like a football game. At the bar where we watched the game on Sunday, we were surrounded by an impressive mix of people; football fandom crosses all kind of barriers. This deeply American sport has a unique power to bring conversations to the national forefront. True, we are talking about domestic violence because of the NFL’s abysmal handling of it, but we’re talking about it. One of the reasons football makes such a compelling backdrop for fictional dramas (see below) is because it brings up so many issues of class, race, and culture. Being clued into what’s happening with football will tell you a lot about the state of the nation, and that can be eye-opening, especially when you live in a liberal enclave like Seattle.  

Common Ground

People get plenty passionate about sports, but it’s still a more neutral subject than say, politics or religion. It provides a common language with which to speak to each other about deeper issues. I may be new to football, but I’m not new to sports. I’ve was a competitive tennis player growing up and in college, and I believe in the things that any sport can teach you: integrity, discipline, resilience, and teamwork, to name a few. Professional sports, and football in particular, have a dark side but at there is also a lot of good. There are many life lessons to be taken from watching a team at their best.

Drama

Before I started watching or appreciating football as a sport, I loved football as a storytelling device in movies like Varsity Blue, Remember the Titans, and TV shows like Friday Night Lights. Why? Drama! Football is a high stakes sport, both brutal and beautiful at its best. Everyone I watched the game with yesterday went through the whole spectrum of emotions, from despair to disbelief to joy and back again. Sometimes you just want to just up and down with strangers feeling all the feels. And that’s a beautiful thing.  

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.  

How to Have the Best 2015 Possible

I originally tried to write a post about making more meaningful resolutions. About planning and giving yourself targets and actionable goals to get from where you are now to where you want to be. You see, I did this for myself in 2014 and it seemed miraculous. I got a book deal, I found love, I got promoted. It was a banner year. As I look forward to 2015, I find myself frantically trying to decode how I managed to have all this good fortune all at once.

It’s true I worked hard for these things, and it definitely helped to set intentions and hold myself accountable. I did some goal-setting with a friend of mine and we had regular check-ins. Giving structure to abstract goals like romantic and artistic achievement can be life-changing. And yet, to pretend I was in control of all the things that happened to me in the last twelve months is laughable. I controlled what I could, the rest was fate, God, the universe, whichever your poison.

2014 was a good year, but the ones that come before? Not so much. 2013 was okay. Nothing great happened, nothing terrible happened. But 2012 and 2011? Those were truly awful years, dominated by an all-consuming family crisis and its accompanying emotional pitfalls, poor decisions, and paralysis.

I choose to believe that I did nothing in this life or any former one to bring about those awful years. Sometimes fate is just a real bitch. Martha Beck, one of my all-time favorite wisdom givers, calls this phenomenon a rumble strip, and suggests that much can be learned from them.

It seems that my own rumble strip produced a happier life on the other side. And perhaps this has as much to do with why 2014 was so good as anything else. If I didn’t engineer my bad years, then I suppose I didn’t completely engineer the good one either. Maybe I just had it coming.  

One of the things I learned from my bad patch is how much you can’t  control: others people’s choices, your family’s health and safety, the vagaries of courts and other bureaucracies. Many things happen that are deeply, profoundly unfair. The upside of being faced with such cosmic indifference, however, is that harnessing the things you can control—your own choices, whom you spend your time with, what you eat, how much you write—suddenly seems wildly simple. That’s the happiness you can plan for, that you can take steps toward.  

I like the esteemed Gretchen Rubin (master planner of happiness) on the subject. For her, it’s all about good habits:

“It took me a long time to realize that what I thought of as “resolutions” could almost always be characterized as “habits.” Most often, when people want to make some kind of change in the New Year, they want to master some kind of habit.”

Here are a few of hers.

I love a can-do attitude, but we’d all like to get the universe on our side. For this, let’s turn to my girl Martha Beck for a little practical magic.

She suggests using adjectives to describe your goals rather than the regular noun + verb formula, which can focus you on “imagined situations” rather than “Imagined experiences”.  

”By using adjectives, you can avoid this trap by focusing all your efforts on the quality of the experience you want to create. This process is harder than “normal” goal setting—it requires some serious soul-searching and perhaps a good thesaurus—but it does pay off.”

Incidentally, one of my goals this year is to get back to blogging. Happy 2015.  I’ll be here all year, folks.

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.