Notes on a book launch

Here's what I learned from my book launch, including a few tips that might help you, too.

A couple of weeks before my book came out, a friend told me: “Just so you know, you’re going to be answering the same questions over and over and over.” He’d worked in book promotions for a decade, so he knew.

He did not have to say “and this is the BEST-CASE SCENARIO” out loud. I understood that part intuitively.

It is better to be invited to do podcasts and website Q&As than not, obviously, and yet it is also like facing an endless series of job interviews, with all the attendant self-questioning, self-loathing, and sense of missed conversational chances after.

Later that same day, feeling okay or what I thought was okay, I drove to Target to pick up an order of trash bags and supposedly organic baby-food purees. I had just maneuvered into one of the numbered spots and cranked up the Moana soundtrack to soothe the little guy when I remembered what my friend said and felt my blood sugar plunge in response.

My upper spine started to quiver and jerk. A fizzy ill feeling spread through my legs. How long had it been since I’d had a panic attack? Years. But there I was having one in the Target parking lot, to the Moana soundtrack, with my hands freezing to the steering wheel, so that when the store employee came to my car-window to confirm the order, I jumped like someone in a horror movie.

What really sucks about making things and wanting recognition for having made those things is how you have to give up creative control and—in the best-case scenario—let yourself in for being exhausted for months on end as you launch your project per your contractual obligation.

It’s daunting to go from the years of introversion, the making phase, to the period of extroversion, the promoting phase.

Or is it me? How come no one talks about how daunting it is??

Some theories:

• No one wants to seem ungrateful; after all, haven’t you worked your whole life to have exactly these “problems”?

• Wanting your efforts to seem effortless, as though you’re a pro who never gets tired or feels intimidated by the territory

• Taboos against letting outsiders in on any aspect of the Sorrowful Mystery that is, say, traditional publishing and its operations, or professional filmmaking and its operations, or professional art-making and its operations, et al

Whatever the answer is, the book launch is now behind me, more or less, and I’m logged off Zoom (unless you can see this Häagen-Dazs I’m having for breakfast?), all while muddling through a breakthrough case of Covid that I am convinced I summoned for myself and my family through sheer burnout.

On the one hand, I am extremely happy to report that, in its first eight weeks of life, the book has sold or shipped more copies than 98% of books do in their first year, per industry statistics. On the other hand, I feel just the tiniest bit bereft and sad because I’m project-less now and my nature abhors a vacuum. But while it’s all still fresh in my mind, I thought I’d share some notes about what worked and what didn’t, which may be helpful when you launch your next thing. I’ll start with the four events/elements that seemed to have the greatest or at least most noticeable impact on sales:

• A profile in my hometown newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, that came about after I pitched one of the paper’s columnists on the book.

• An official Reddit AMA that came through my PR person, and was timed for the anniversary of Poe’s death on October 7th.

• A book-related essay about Poe’s career that I wrote for the Wall Street Journal, after a friend who contributes to the paper helped me pitch them.

• A local TV appearance that resulted from my brother knowing a producer at the station, and then me pitching various station producers on the book’s news-worthiness.

The arresting thing, at least to me, is that each of these produced a sales bump of about the same size, so that I can conclude that, at least in terms of total copies moved, a local TV appearance = a WSJ essay = a Reddit AMA = a Richmond Times-Dispatch article. Which makes me think that playing to your hometown crowd can be every bit as effective as a big get like the Journal, or making the “front page of the internet” as Reddit is sometimes called. I think it’s because you might consider that people in your immediate area are warmer leads than a more national, disparate audience.

In other words, the stories that run locally are just as important as the ones that play out on bigger stages.

The other thing it makes me think is how, despite the much-heralded death of traditional media, that so-called “earned media” still has a huge sales role to play—and this is where pitching becomes seriously important, especially for a non-famous writer or creator (like me, for instance).

Even when I was working a connection, I still had to convince the third-party editor or producer that my book is newsworthy. So while connections can get you an at-bat, they can’t get you on base, at least not in my experience. You’ve got to be able to hit the ball, or at least take a good swing. It is invaluable to have years of pitching experience, perhaps especially years of rejected-pitch experience. Why? Because pitching experience is sales experience for people looking to get coverage of their projects.

You may be thinking: Cat, for the love of gob!!! Not another freelance manifesto, please! I shall spiel anyway: It doesn’t matter if you’re a writer or not. You could be an actor or a filmmaker or a comedian or a YouTuber instead. The point of doing any work in “traditional” media like newspapers or formal TV is not to make any immediate money; it’s about getting the sales experience and learning to identify how producers and podcasters and editors THINK, what they regard as show- or story-worthy, and how to package your ideas in a quick and palatable way.

Yes, it feels rude to push your ideas into someone’s inbox, even if you know they’re in the market, and it can be outright nauseating to talk about yourself and put yourself out there to be rejected or not. Yet the sooner you start gaining this experience—and getting used to nausea—the better off you may be.

Lest that seem like self-congratulation, I should say I had a big piece killed by uh, let’s call it a major newspaper, which is to say that sometimes I totally failed to close when the stakes were high indeed.

Also, an hour before my WSJ rewrite was due, I had a panic attack to bookend that one from back in August in the Target parking lot.

See, by that point in the rewrite, I’d been at my grimy wireless keyboard for what felt like five straight days (but was really just many early mornings and late nights), and the end-of-week deadline was now just minutes away—thus I called up my husband and cried. “I can’t do this. I don’t WANT to do this,” I told him through actual sobs.

He paused in his lawn-mowing to take my call, and in his measured way, asked me what I was trying to say in the essay. I splurted some out-of-order nonsense, i.e. my thinking. Then he asked me some follow-up questions, and I figured out the essay’s conclusion to the point where I started rudely trying to end the call before he could inform me of some important lawn-care developments.

Before we hung up, he also told me that “you know, the good thing is you don’t have to do this”—because we both have day jobs, that is, and if my side work is making me miserable, there’s always the option of just giving it up like a sane person. And that’s when I started saying that no no no I do really want to do this, and I got off the phone and finished the piece and turned it the f in. It’s almost as if when you’re not grossly intimidated and crying to your husband about wanting to quit, then you’re not growing, and man I hate that so much.

Another, far more comforting realization I’ve had? Things just naturally come in fits and starts, this is the rhythm of life, and correspondingly the creative life has its moments of awful busyness and utter slackness. Both extremes can be difficult to cope with, and this has also probably always been the case. Poe himself said so in a letter to his on-again, off-again buddy James Russell Lowell:

I can feel for the “constitutional indolence” of which you complain — for it is one of my own besetting sins. I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious — by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but solitary communion with the “mountains & the woods” — the “altars” of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.

Don’t you love how he calls it a disease? Makes me feel better about my own excessively slothful and excessively industrious creative process, even as the teeter-totter of it, the shifts between periods, ALWAYS throws me off. Maybe that’s you, too.

A few more quick notes:

• Almost every podcast now is recorded via Zoom call, which is a real change since I started doing podcasts circa 2016. Now you have to have normal-person hair, and a clean shirt on, and some kind of interesting background if you can muster it. So the workload of doing one is a lot higher than it used to be. I think it makes them more intimate and interesting, though—and just having the conversation with the host is a reason to do them, anyway. You meet smart, interesting people, and how many of us get to do that with any frequency?

• Speaking of video, the number-one question I’ve gotten from folks is, where are your YouTube videos? People really prefer video over articles, and damn I am so behind on this point, though I mean to correct it in 2022. If I had the last five years to do over again, I would’ve started posting videos, dividing my time between that and freelancing.

• LinkedIn is a surprisingly good place to post links, judging by the sheer number of cold reach-outs I’ve received. Maybe it’s because that platform allows for easy DMing and DMing feels pretty low-stakes, whereas, say, a Twitter DM can feel a bit abrupt, like you’re jumping friendship stages in a weirdo way. From what I can tell, Instagram and LinkedIn are better ways to meet and connect with readers than Twitter, though I will say I’ve made more friends on Twitter than any other platform. So, a reason to stay on there, when few/no others exist!

• A handy way to get around the fact that most regional newspapers now have no dedicated books or arts editor—so that most no longer do any reviewing—is pitching one of their reporters or columnists a human-interest story about your project.

A good link

I enjoyed Elle Griffin’s post about making art vs. being on the internet. Vanity Fair’s coverage of Substack burnout and exit strategies might be filed under Least Surprising Development Ever, but it’s good to track the tail of media waves if only because it helps you spot the peaks and troughs when the next wave rolls along.

As always, thank you for reading, and with fingers crossed for your projects,

Cat