Greta Rainbow is writing about publishing again for Dirt, and this time it’s the fall of the glossy magazines. I really want to make a Fall of the House of Usher joke here, and actually I will. What you need to know about glossy magazines is that there was a crack in the roof and the endless scroll filled it.

Everything right now is oversaturation—there is too much “content,” and we know too much about each other. I will not say there are too many books, but there are not enough thought-up avenues to getting the right books to the right readers, we are lacking. I am working on this, but it means a kind of death of the old game, and because influencers are also a dying thing, we’re moving towards a publicity unknown (I secretly love this frontier).

During the dawn of the internet the slogan was “we have the whole world at our fingertips” and we do. And turns out it is actually NOT fun. The world I want at my fingertips is garden soil, not to see every person’s performance of life on a screen as if that’s some sort of “knowing” them. You are reading this newsletter in which I do talk about my personal life fairly regularly, but what you don’t know is that I shoved a banana into my mouth before my call this morning and then worried if I would have cleared it by the time the other person logged in, I haven’t gotten a real haircut in years but I did hack it off with kitchen shears in the shower, I’m surrounded by rolled up bags of white cheddar popcorn and scrunchies, and out of my window a yard that could lovingly be referred to as “trailer trash” for the amount of toys, balls, toddler vehicles, shovels, and action figures (reader, they’re Paw Patrol) that decorate the space. Somewhere there’s a half dead pumpkin.

And what the glossies have gotten markedly wrong is putting money into “content” (in an effort to compete with the infinite scroll AS IF THEY COULD?) that has quite literally no meaning to regular people who are in fact their readers. Why do we need “inspiration” and “aspiration” on the “good life” (re: New York) when we can just scroll a feed of Instagram influencers who may or may not even be real. We are sick of that, and not looking for another Kim Kardashian rebrand. Let us know when she passes the bar. The aspirational life is authenticity, it is not glossy at all. It is actually wondering what three chapsticks someone has at the bottom of their purse, not selling another little orange container of Laneige. (Perhaps this is the anti-gift-list?)

If glossy mags want to make any sort of come back, they have to bring Meaning back and free us from the listverse, where everything is just a link to Amazon so Jeff Bezos can inch his way (he’s moving faster than that) to owning the entire publishing universe and be responsible for half of the world’s landfills. I do not in fact want anymore links, I want Meat. I want nuance. I want complication. I actually want you to tell me a long, drawn-out story before you share the recipe. (Me four years ago would be aghast, but I want to TAKE. MY. TIME.)

Let’s talk about it in terms of Real Housewives franchises. The reason that Salt Lake City is topping the charts at the moment is that it isn’t planned in advance by Tamra Judge or Kyle Richards. Meaning there’s no sort of wily coordination between the housewives for a “storyline.” It’s pure wackadoo, and it feels authentic. Do I realize that Mary is married to her grandfather? Yes. Was her conversation with her son the most tender thing I watched on my television last season? Also, yes. Is she the funniest housewife that ever lived? She might, in fact, be. And that’s because she’s donning a dress on the cover of US Weekly when all the other women are wearing bathing suits. She’s authentic. We don’t tap her and she tings like plastic. (This is not a reference to plastic surgery, but a reference to the fact that bees have plastic in their bodies because humans are so obsessed with “recycled polyester” and FAKE THINGS that we are killing the environment, where we must survive because no one is colonizing Mars, for convenience).

And that is also what’s happening in publishing. Just because something seems intellectually entertaining doesn’t mean it can’t fall to the gloss of marketing. And part of that is the reasoning behind Olivia Nuzzi’s bomb of a canto. It didn’t sell because the story had already been dropped, and we didn’t want more details. The interest in Nuzzi’s relationship with RFK jr. fizzled after it was discovered and everyone on the internet made fun of her for a week—there wasn’t follow-up needed. It was a headline, not a story, we expect monsters to be monstrous. The most interesting part of that whole publication is that Vanity Fair gave her a job as West Coast editor, then published what had to be a hit piece excerpt of the book (it was badly written and unedited) and then fired her. That is the glossy magazine story I want from this—behind the scenes on each decision (and not from Nuzzi). I will not be linking to any of this, you can find it all online.

Cue Merriam Webster’s word of the year: SLOP. If it’s all slop, nothing will rise above it. Not books either. And they’ve been trying to feed us slop for years (Is this the Big Brother house?) as if it’s not exactly like hearing a constant low hum in one ear and wondering why we’re losing our collective minds.

Earlier this week I tried to write a newsletter on using the bit as a publicity technique. I mostly hated it, but now I think it might be useful here.

If there’s one thing about me, I never say die to the bit.

If we got a rapport, a little routine going, I revel in it. I delight. I am feasting on the bit.

Lately, my favorite bit is Jamelle Bouie talking to the people from different places in his house (this week he was in the fridge). I love that man already and it’s hilarious that he’ll be analyzing the regime’s movements from his dog walk in his bathrobe.

What he’s doing here is a mix of the bit and steaming hot (academic) goss on the political moment. People stay for the goss, but interact because of his new sport coat, his baseball cap, his goss from the vegetable drawer. While the goss is for smart people (sorry not sorry), the bit is for fun—a little lightheartedness when he’s telling us about treacherous behaviors, and we get a look at Bouie as a person and personality. He becomes, through the bit, someone we relate to and want to know, and makes listening to him feel like we’re listening to someone we care about and who cares about us. It’s this magic combination that also sells books, and makes what could be construed as “content” into conversation. He also feels approachable, simply a man walking his dog in the sun, even though he’s a New York Times columnist and a historian (which might be considered an “elitist” in some circles). The bit is authenticity.

For the last few weeks, the bit in our home is that my husband and I will whisperscream after our kids offer us a thirteenth reason why. It might actually be an unwritten rule in our marriage to follow the bit. If he starts something, I have to play along. It’s especially fun when we start doing voices during bedtime stories. Grumpy Monkey is a production, you’ve never heard a chain-smoking, retired special unit investigator and Buffalonian Marabou like mine.

And the bit is successful for so many reasons. It feels inclusive and familiar. There’s no limit on the number of people you can bring in (truly, isn’t a flash mob a kind of bit?). It can be dragged out for fun, spectacle, humor. Isn’t there some statistic about people rewatching beloved shows when they’re depressed? Consider that a bit—an echo of familiarization. It recurs for a purpose. It’s also why the Great British Baking Show won the hearts of well, everyone—it mixes a bit, a recurring format, with home bakers interacting with the bit (in this case, the two great hosts and the two great judges in a merry little field of pastels). Everyone is rooting for a Paul handshake, even if it’s from the left hand. It feels wholesome and authentic, but also narratively routine every time. Plus, I want to dress like everyone on this cast except Paul Hollywood.

The bit is an agreement between comedian and audience (not dissimilar to the agreement between author and reader). Plus, there’s the bewitching aspect of surprise too. Not all of it is routine. Jamelle Bouie was in a fridge! I never know when my husband might sing out “one of the good ones” in his twangiest trac(tor)-cent.

And my favorite part of any bit is the CRINGE FACTOR. Perhaps it’s even millennial cringe, but I digress. The reason the bit is so successful as a form of communion and banter is that it is actual people poking fun at themselves in a shared cringefest. In order to have a bit, you can’t be uptight. You can’t be performative. You have to let it all go and embrace the bit. The funny part is that anything can happen if you follow the bit long enough.

Even when comedians do it, they’re building a relationship with their audience to say, “this is what I’m going to be known for…” this is what you’re going to get from me, specifically. And then I’m going to throw in a little cha cha cha. (The classic kids book formula—rhyme, rhyme, rhyme, random bit, rhyme, rhyme, random!)

AI is not funny (and I don’t want it to be?). Glossy magazines that are 60% ads are not spirited, and they are both far from embodied. Commenting “treat” on someone’s Instagram ad for a pair of leggings made from 78% elastane (ACTUAL PETROLEUM) is not going to lead us to beautiful lives. I can judge myself too here.

Camaraderie, connection, human rites of passage, going outside into the world and complimenting someone on their outfit or taking their cart back to the lane while offering them your quarter (happened to me yesterday at Aldi) that is REAL. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to allow the world of Fahrenheit 451 to win out here. I refuse to be slopped into my couch and scrolled into my years.

Books are one of the last things we have without advertisements. They’re one of the last art mediums that is based purely in imagination from writer to author. There are no visual cues (other than a cover) for what you can interpret and think up while reading. Authors are some of the last creators standing between rote and bit. Why would we assume then that a list, a headline, a salacious backstory with no root sells books? It sells clicks, that’s it.

I’m looking at you TIME and your “People of the Year” being AI architects who can’t even climb out on that skyscraper scaffolding, they have to produce the scene on their tiny computer screens. How sad. How lacking in adrenaline. How complacent. I’m looking at glossy magazines that continue to put out “content” instead of stories with significance, and they will continue to die off. And yes, that’ll be hard from a publicity perspective for a little while, but what are they offering us now anyway? Haven’t we always, really, only had each other?

Other things I want to say that I don’t have a whole newsletter to say them in:

• Poetry Foundation is phasing out their programming, which is wild to me. They have a very large endowment, and could continue to do programming in Chicago and virtually without much hiccup in that money flow. Plus, one of the best ways to sell poetry is through readings and events—it’s the mix of things, but I like to think that programming continues the legacy of an oral tradition, and poetry as experience rather than lines on a page. Poetry also has a much longer shelf life than prose or nonfiction because the coverage isn’t as tied to publication date as a novel or memoir. That is partly due to events, so arguably the biggest poetry entity should really put their money where their mouth is and start letting us know where they’re funneling more local event coverage. Not only that, but it runs the only public poetry book club in the country, so I expect someone reading this to step up and launch one.

• I want this kind of breakdown from New York Public Library, but for every library ever. Let’s make it into infographics, let’s make it fun.

• I like the work at IMAGE and they’re currently in a budgeting shortfall. Donate if you can.

As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here, and you can buy our books here! You can also see what we’re working on and contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

Three Pine State titles were on the Literary Hub small press notable list: FRONTIER, Nicole Graev Lipson’s MOTHERS AND OTHER FICTIONAL CHARACTERS and Nin Andrews’ SON OF A BIRD, Rebecca van Laer’s CAT was recommended by Chronogram and you can listen to her chat about it on the Turn the Page podcast, Terese Svoboda had a piece published in Evergreen related to HITLER AND MY MOTHER-IN-LAW, Michelle Gurule’s THANK YOU, JOHN was reviewed in Brooklyn Rail and she had an entire profile this week in Times London, Jehanne Durbow has a new essay in Lilith related to her newest poetry collection CIVILIANS, Monica Ferrell’s THE FUTURE was in Publishers Weekly big poetry preview for 2026, The Stranger recommends reading Margot Kahn’s UNRELIABLE TREE, Jeremy Jones had an excerpt from CIPHER in Harper’s, and so much more on Twitter & Instagram.

So, to say I’m a fan of CT Tamburello is probably an understatement. And in the last few seasons of The Challenge, they zoom into his confessionals for “CT Pro Tips.” On the current season when he won a gimme elimination against Derek Chavez, his CT Pro Tip was something like “sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.” Which is going to be my two cents on “The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem” by (brilliant!) Tajja Isen published recently in The Walrus and written about by, well, all the publishing professionals on this platform in the last few weeks.

Here’s what I’m going to tell you about “track,” which is shorthand for the tracking system(s) that (mostly corporate) publishing uses to track sales. Wherever you end up on “track” is going to be dependent on the following: luck & timing of release, money put behind the book (I’m not talking big advance behind the author, I’m talking marketing and publicity backing by the publisher), distributor and presentations (sales meetings, institutes, book fairs, conferences, etc), buyers across retail, and the kind of platform you have built or plan to build as part of the strategy (this is leverage for the bigger advance). The chance of BREAKING OUT with phenomenal sales, on a major bestseller list, outside of the potion of these things takes a lot of work, and while not impossible, it is unlikely. And controlling factors are lopsided towards the publisher, so writers can feel outside of the bubble of understanding what it all takes, which I would argue is the actual problem at stake here.

An editor who is looking at your second manuscript on submission after your debut is (of course) looking at your debut sales, but, like most things in publishing, the reasoning for turning down your book is going to be vague and likely confusingly complimentary, while also being based on a number of factors that may not be reported to you or your agent. It’s these noncommittal conversations and lack of true knowledge of what goes on at each stage of publishing a book that I think is really where the misunderstanding of track occurs, not the formula of I did a, b, and c, and yet I can’t sell my second novel.

We are in a time in publishing where the formula no longer works. I’m talking formula for filling out a P&L sheet at the onset of proposing buying a book in an editorial meeting all the way to writing a spaghetti-thrown pitch to media editors, podcasters, creators, in hopes that something in that general email will convince them to request the book. Getting a New York Times book review is no longer going to move you out of ranking #11,687 on Amazon in your strongest keyword category. I say this all the time, I should put it on a bumper sticker, but everything strategically that you do to reach sales number and platform goals, has to be niched.

Syracuse University is pausing admission for certain humanities offerings (the comments on social implore them to bring back ceramics, in case you want to know what the people want) in order to establish a Center for the Creator Economy. This stat from the ArtNews link blew my mind, “According to a report from the Pew Research Center, 42 percent of American teenagers earned income through digital channels in 2024.” You mean teenagers are not walking to their neighbor’s house and offering to mow the lawn for cash? Car washes for fundraising? Of course they still are doing these things—the handmade flier about fall leaf-raking on our fridge from one of my husband’s students says so—but nearly half of teenagers are earning income digitally.

The creator economy is not necessarily about star power (though it often emphasizes a certain ideal to aesthetics & wealth, particularly if you’re doing video), but it is always about connection (aspirational, inspirational, funny, ragebait—this is what I am decidedly NOT—even pity, there are endless opportunities for connection, not all of them healthy obviously—I think a lot about that woman on Tiktok dating in Buffalo whose ratio of hate-comments to likes made my own Catholic guilt flare up, the pity and then the rage that consumed folks who followed her). Algorithms will change, homepage buttons will move all which ways (substack 👀), fads will develop as they always have, and virality is a gamble, but creating your space is key to building an audience beyond the control of the potion of above. It’s why Emma Gannon (whose newsletter I love) can choose a route out of traditional publishing for her next books, and even she is finding the media landscape “so hard.”

To create a space though, you have to have strategy around designing the space. Think of it like a hotel: you have to know what conversations are already happening in the neighboring rooms, and what you can add to them. What’s the doorway between you and x?

It’s good to know things like: what you are decidedly not, what you know a lot about or love to research, what your obsessions are, what your reoccurring themes are in your writing, what you continually return to in explaining yourself to yourself OR explaining your place in what you believe the world to be to yourself, where you want your “brand” to go—into what circles, toward what audiences, between what venn diagrams, what avenue is the best to do & present this work (video, podcast, newsletter, blog, media placements, photos, zines, whatever whatever whatever), but MOST important is what an audience would GET from following you. Notice I’m not saying what you can OFFER an audience, I’m saying what they GET out of it.

From selling thrift store bundles on Ebay or Poshmark to running a booktube channel, the “creator economy” is about finding genuine space to create community by letting folks know what they get when they come to you. Not what you can offer them, but what they will receive. It’s a mental shift to create with reception in mind, rather than offer.

The other thing to bear in mind in thinking about “brand” is that people don’t stay for WHAT you’re saying, they stay for HOW you’re saying it. For example, I will watch every Jamelle Bouie video that comes up, I find him to be the best combination of smart, witty, and sharp. The other day he posted a video in a new tan coat, and his entire comment section, though what he was saying was great, was about the coat. People of course come to his page for his commentary, but they also stay because of his presentation. Everyone has a take, everyone often has the same take (let’s be real), but what can you do to set yourself apart? I followed Tell the Bees early on, not because he does such a good job on pop culture takes, but because he often makes his arguments through Bravo shows. His gateway drug into his arguments is a connection point for me—he gives me philosophical analysis through Bravo hot takes.

Not to be a hater (well, maybe), but I love this video on Taylor Swift’s embrace of the “little white girl” schtick and why she and/or her team have decided she can’t outgrow it, or simply just shirk it at thirty-five. It’s not the content that made me watch the whole thing, but how fervently she argues her side, how excited she is to tell it, how she breaks it all down. This is marketing. It works in fun ways like this, and it also works to slide an entire nation in fascism, so right now marketing feels ominous to me.

Marketing isn’t what you’re saying, but how you’re communicating it. You can say a lot of things, you can talk about anything on the internet, but how you’re talking about it is what builds a platform, a brand. This part is not luck, it’s planning. It’s quite frankly, control of the narrative. It’s strategy. It’s trial and error, testing, and experimenting. It’s an acceptance of failure too, not everything you create will land, and it absolutely will not land in the ways you think it’ll be received. (I’m thinking this very Substack will go flat, but alas, it’s what I’ve written this morning).

When I was still teaching high schoolers, we did this professional development over a weekend at a kid’s museum that interpreted Albert Mehrabian’s 7-38-55 as a general rule for communication (it is not) The rule is 7% of communication on attitudes/feelings is spoken words, 38% is vocal tone, and 55% is body language. While Mehrabian’s rules are about deciphering likes/dislikes, this is not a general law of communication. I find this concept interesting though when it comes to marketing, particularly on the internet, particularly facing extraordinarily bad rates of literacy in America, in an environment where facts are so distorted and propaganda so rampant, that the creator economy might actually rely on this formula as a means of communication (generally). BUT YAY READING RAINBOW IS COMING BACK WITH MYCHAL THREETS!

Often in writing workshops, with folks who have spent or hope to spend their life in words, we ultimately resort to a like/dislike formula rather than a nuanced view on craft. Like/dislike is the easiest first read, notice/wonder begins to take things apart, but neither get close to true analysis (yet), let alone creation. Like/dislike is also the thorn of book criticism (that and quoting from the entire book as the “review”). Good book criticism has so much more to say than “it was good” (and why I might argue against the 800 word book review as a thing that sells books (sorry WaPo and NYT) because what kind of space is that to say anything of substance about an entire book. Though I realize everyone is catering to short attention spans (thanks to the creator economy—it’s a snake eating itself!).

This is all to say, since I need to round this out—if you want to care less about “track” and have more control over your book’s life, either you have to start thinking about marketing or you need a collaborator that is thinking about it specific to your work and not just generally about books (or even categories of books. Business books sell this way, etc, etc). We aren’t in a space where we can say, “to sell a literary novel, here’s what you do…” That’s just simply not how the game works anymore. It might seem scary when publishing hasn’t quite caught up to a less templated, more tailored approach to publicity and marketing (businesses do thrive on templates, anyone who has ever had to explain how to Save as PDF could tell you this), though S&S is attempting experimentation, and it might seem daunting to put this work outside of the publisher too, but it offers exactly what writer’s desire—a place to influence how their book is received. It is, in fact, better to be lucky AND good.

As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here, and you can buy our books here! You can also see what we’re working on and contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

You can read an embedded review of THANK YOU, JOHN by Michelle Gurule in High Country News, Margot Kahn’s poem from THE UNRELIABLE TREE was one of the first on The Slowdown with new host Maggie Smith, Ashley M. Jones is featured in Mother Jones for LULLABY FOR THE GRIEVING & work as Alabama Poet Laureate, Jeremy Jones is on Due South with CIPHER, Jocelyn Jane Cox was interviewed and excerpted from MOTION DAZZLE on Wisconsin Public Radio, Rebecca van Laer, author of CAT, wrote about animal memoirs (and human endevors) for Orion Magazine, Teresa Dzieglewicz’s SOMETHING SMALL FOR HOW TO SEE A RIVER was graphically reviewed in RHINO, Keetje Kuipers was interviewed on Awakeners, Diana Arterian was excerpted in Harvard Review, and Mary Ardery’s LEVEL WATCH was reviewed in Southern Review of Books, and so much more onTwitter & Instagram.

The interviews leading up to that pull out were fine, the editor (at first) understood the boundaries, but of course had 90% control of the framing and 100% control of the headline. (I hate the headlines-control because I would have completely switched the hierarchy of this TIME Ideas piece from Dr. Melody Glenn—being a mother didn’t make it impossible, the ER environment made it impossible to do both, but ALAS. Media loves framing motherhood this way). We don’t frequent pitching places like this (that was the first time) but we thought the story warranted it.

Last year, in the span of literally fifteen days around the American Thanksgiving holiday, The Daily Mail covered Blake Butler’s Molly three different times. November 20, they shared a diary entry excerpt, November 25 (an exclusive) Butler is interviewed (the angle is emotional and framed to portray Butler as telling his story to help others), and then December 5, the more salacious side of the memoir is covered. Take a wild guess which one got the most traction (relying on comments), and led to a few heated Twitter exchanges between Butler and folks defending Brodak. In every piece, there’s a large cover image of Molly about three scrolls down, which you might imagine is good book coverage. But the question is: are the folks reading The Daily Mail going to transfer to book buyers? Then, of course (lovers of drama that they are even if they pretend not to be), ten days later Alexander Schwartz covered the memoir for The New Yorker in a piece titled, “Can a Memoir Say Too Much?” (I would normally assume this coverage was planned in advance (months) of any Daily Mail coverage, but the headline question leads me to believe that it might have been prompted by the drama of the Twitter feud, fueled directly by the Daily Mail headlines). The New Yorker is more obviously the coveted audience Butler hoped would see his memoir, so in that case, the Daily Mail pieces were worth the effort to get to the hoped-for audience of more literary folks (who may then buy the book).

From responses on Twitter, I can’t be sure that Butler didn’t expect the heat, though the responses do seem surprised (perhaps, defensive). And yet, the first line of the New Yorker piece is a quote from Molly (kind of makes my brain hurt) which says, “Should I be allowed to make this said?” a line hundreds of pages into the book. So, the author has at least thought the question gathering heat—in fact, I would argue, that question, “Can I write this?” essentially, seems to be the central question of the whole publicity campaign. Notice that question isn’t HOW can I write this, but CAN I write this? It was unavoidable then.

A question that comes up often in memoir. Kelly McMasters writes about it for Literary Hub and Iris Jamahl Dunkle and McMasters talk about it on Fiction Non Fiction, Robert Siegel talked with his own mother for Harvard Review (side note: Siegel was one of my favorite professors during my MFA and he’s teaching a workshop on the ethics for Writing Workshop coming up in September), Alex Luppens-Dale for Book Riot has tried to write objectively about the legality, Elisa Gabbert has written about “ethical advice” for her old advice column at Electric Literature, and it’s a question that often comes up on podcasts like Family Secrets with Dani Shapiro and Let’s Talk Memoir with Ronit Plank.

Then, there’s the angle of this piece in The New York Times about writers penning dueling narratives about their divorce. First a memoir, then a novel, then another novel—who will get the final word? (And what’s the goal?) Everyone’s fav Leslie Jamison will have something similar happening in another year-ish if book announcements are reliable timelines, and it’s all kind of reminiscent of the Natalie Beach / Caroline Calloway writing feud.

Studies have showed that people tend to interact more with negative posts on social media, and negatively-spun stories in larger media which impacts our mental health. (The Data Behind Your Doom Scroll is a good read), so I can’t say that bad publicity isn’t good publicity, but I do think there’s something strange happening with “aspirational media.” Of course people are going to interact with scandal, or a story that obviously has two(or more)-sides to co-sign or debate. It’s a similar feeling to the long embrace of advice columns, we read them to see whether our values align or not, to … judge (somewhat). It’s as if media has become the guy that goes, “well, to play devil’s advocate…” Discourse > facts.

And for at least a decade now, we’ve moved from “inspiration media” to “aspirational media.” Maybe this has been happening forever, but I feel like with the rise of influencer media, the inspirational has been completely lost to the aspirational: shopping hauls, lavish vacations, body modification and filters, family structures, even “taking walks” has become a goal-oriented activity. The difference between inspirational media and aspirational media for me, is an I’m so happy for you / them / this, and I want that / them / this. A cheering, togethering vs. a hierarchy and a wish list.

And because the framing of the new profile of Gary Shtenyngart in the New York Times is “he’s the last of his kind,” it’s definitely an attempt at aspiration because the piece is saying essentially—you’ll never get here with your writing—that golden, George Plimpton age is over (but not for Gary). But look at what you could have if rather than simply writing, you embraced influencing. Of course the New York Times would never use the language of “influencing” here but they are arguing that Shtenyngart made an interesting turn toward style icon and now suddenly, he makes enough money to perhaps afford an 100k watch. I have not Book Scanned his sales, but I do remember back in my Bookstagram days feigning for a copy of Super Sad True Love Story and loving it, though I haven’t picked up another Shtenyngart book since, and I’m not sure why.

It is funny to be writing about him as a 10k suit style icon, when this is the shortest premise for his third book and the first I read of his, “The novel takes place in a near-future dystopian New York where life is dominated by media and retail.” I love this Reddit thread calling it, “the least subtle book I’ve ever read…” knowing full well that in the years since it was published in 2010, publishing has turned the coming-of-age, early-working, dystopian capitalist novel into a snow globe of oversaturated satire, as if they’re all being narrated by someone who would both hate the guy that says “to play devil’s advocate” and yet embrace that same voice in a sort of witty, existential crisis, art world, kind of way, but that’s a whole other thing.

In my personal opinion, this piece on Shtenyngart is bad publicity. Though, I’m sure there’s discourse (or will be) about the part on his penis. But another New York author and Columbia professor ordering a walking stick and being photographed with silk scarves (even if the Menswear guy is quoted—love him, and he is maybe a good binary to this inspirational/aspirational argument) might not exactly be a strong move at this very moment in time. Please don’t confuse this with the lip gloss, claw clip drama of another author sharing her favorite things (love the lipgloss you love!), but instead my take is on the sort of aspirational New York City life (I realize this was published in the New York Times), that no longer resonates with a larger public WITHOUT another piece of the puzzle. (Thinking here about the assistant / personal shopper who has a mystery boss on Tiktok—people love her, and the city she portrays, and that’s not the same thing). I would love to see more author’s collections of things (a new Substack idea! You can have it!), but these watch photos are not giving lovable Project Runway Tim Gunn, they’re giving Tim Gunn ew.

And to then pair them with the initial book description of his newest book, “…A poignant, sharp-eyed, and bitterly funny tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country rapidly coming apart, told through the eyes of their wondrous ten-year-old daughter…” is a choice. Coming apart for whom, Gary? I’ll admit here that “bitterly funny,” “dark humor,” “tragicomic” are immediate book turnoffs for me in publishing right now because I find that the voice has become kind of copy / paste, but even so—to pair a childhood fable (nostalgia! inspiration! delight!) with the multiple houses of a man (and the phrase “seven lush acres”) seems … jest at best. Though I am interested to see this return to voicy, child narrators in literary fiction, which people had definitely turned away from in recent fiction—it’s still a hard sell, I would argue (first we had Beautyland, now we have Vera, or Faith).

And more than anything, I think this is a sign of publishing eating itself. Refusing to expand regionally to remote work for editors who can acquire beyond the New York City literary machine (who have other ideas about people, places, things beyond the city), who see beyond our “elite literary publications” (would I recommend publishing in literary journals for authors starting out now?), who are thinking about reaching readers who don’t aspire to designer handbags (how big is the venn diagram overlap between those who frequent libraries and those who want a peronsal shopper at Hermés—can’t be sure! I literally see Pookie’s face when I think of Hermés so I need to remedy that in my brain so I can rid my imagination of private equity).

But now I’ve gotten too far from my original point and I’m showing my bi(a)as as someone living (who has always lived) in the American South and never planned to pursue publishing from Brooklyn. I just want to ask the question: does this piece sell Gary’s new book for you? Did you buy Molly because of the discourse? (I’ll admit here that I have not read it, though I was partial to the first excerpt in Harper’s). Do you put money behind the literary feud (did you order a copy of the Didion / Babitz book?—a choice even to list Didion as the first name in the title—I would love to hear the in-house arguments for this, if there were any). Is it worthwhile to you to read a divorce novel, a divorce memoir, and another divorce novel by two previously married writers in order to “see all sides” (or do you just like the drama)? Do these stories behind the books even work on you at all (publicity at large?). I guess the question is: where are you willing to put your time, money, and opinions, in a world of big four books that increasingly mirrors an ouroboros.

Writers I talk to are always saying they want to read more books with good writing (though no one can agree on what that means, institutionally or personally), and big publicity does not equal big sales, but it does say something (a lot of somethings) about what our media cares about and holds up, and perhaps how writers can think of framing for media vs. framing for the bookstore shopper, or the book clubber, or the librarian.

As a writer: would you rather have the “bad publicity” (or badly-framed, perhaps untrue of what you were attempting to do) or no publicity at all. There’s probably a piece of all publicity that gets the intention wrong—reviews an author doesn’t agree with, sentences that grate, a read that ignores one thread for another, etc). This is perhaps the real question, because it’ll help you figure out your own boundaries when it comes to marketing. Can you handle being misunderstood? (I, for one, would struggle).

As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here, and you can buy our books here! You can also see what we’re working on and contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

ICYMI: Lauren K. Watel’s Book of Potions was reviewed in Brooklyn Rail, Michelle Gurule wrote about the secret behind paying for dental work for Huff Post, Lara Lillibridge reviewed Mothers and Other Fictional Characters for MER Literary, Nin Andrews Son of a Bird was reviewed in Best American Poetry blog, Terese Svoboda wrote about her mother-in-law’s polio for Slate, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.

Okay, this is pure conjecture. At least from the reviews I’ve read on the publicist side of things. Manov literally says here that “many working book reviewers don’t have time” to … read the book they’re reviewing. A travesty. I’ll get back to this.

But we all know my feelings about blurbs, but if you’ve ever been on the inside of the blurb email chain where a press and author are trying to figure out who to ask because the author is not already a literary darling living in NYC, then you would understand that not everyone is scooping their friends and favors for a blurb.

Sometimes, writers are legitimately asking their heroes and hoping that a turnaround of eight-ish weeks (I’m being kind on how many weeks publishers offer) is enough time for that hero to come up with something compassionate enough that more than the hero’s name stands out on back matter. Though, again, let’s be real about blurbs— we are looking for name recognition and not so much substance on a blurb—though a bad blurb or a say-nothing blurb can do more harm than good. Worst all, if a blurb is confusing.

Last week a writer emailed me a blurb and said, “do you think she thought the book was trash?” That … shouldn’t be a question when you get a blurb back, but sometimes they say nothing. Fluff. They can sound pretty and say nothing too, I’ve read a lot of books like that. The same can be said of book reviews, and maybe those are the reviews Manov is talking about there. Personally, I love a specific blurb like a love a specific book review—about a point in the book that gripped them rather than a generality filled with adjectives like “unputdownable.” Some of the best blurbs I’ve seen are on JoAnna Novak’s many books. Read some from her most recent poetry collection here. Her most recent story collection here. An older poetry collection here. Her nonfiction book Contradiction Days arguably has the most boring blurbs of any of her books.

If you don’t feel like clicking a link, some lines: “Reading Novak is like eating a “mousetrap sandwich” on the edge of rapture,” (Sabrina Orah Mark); “If a third-trimester Holly Golightly, famished and sporting an island-tan, had been written by Jean Rhys for a leading role as a haberdasher in Rosemary’s Baby, we might suspect JoAnna Novak of plagiarizing a lost cult classic,” (Andrew Zawacki); “DOMESTIREXIA is an astonishing pleasure dome of lyric cake, all verve and scrumptious compression," (Greg Wrenn); “Novak makes language feel alive and peculiar, defamiliarized and zoo-like. I love the sensation of reading these poems aloud—thickly luxurious and 'I’m naked under this surplice, picking / varnish off my palms,” (Arisa White).

These blurbs live and breathe—bring back the body of the blurb. (LOL why did my lapsed-Catholic (is there such a thing?) brain, “amen” like I was first communioning. It lives deep that cradle guilt.

But I digress. Reviewers read the book. And I know this because I send (usually) 40+ advanced reading copies to reviewers *that request it* (at Pine State we’re not in the market of sending 100+ arcs to a random book room in Manhattan hoping we get discovered) and get back a handful of coverage, the 24 other folks either didn’t connect with the book, lost track of time, or ghosted. Likely, they didn’t read the book.

And if they read enough that they formed an opinion, they’ll do an interview, which is definitely lower stakes than a review (at least on the part of the reader and puts the onus of work back on the writer). You’ll see that publicity coverage has shifted (I believe) to books having more interviews than they do reviews, which is interesting because presses haven’t figured out how to include interviews in metadata (like … the Amazon listing for the book where they shove all the blurbs and praise into bite size quotes with the goal of making it look like a lot of coverage on the Amazon page), so those interviews technically don’t live as long for the author as a review might. They’re fun, and often overwhelming when everyone wants to interview you in a Google doc and no one wants to review, right at the week before publication), but they aren’t serving time.

And let’s be clear—a book review is a byline. If you’re in a college creative writing program right now hoping to publish a book traditionally some day, my best advice to you is to write book reviews, with voice, with the same energy you would write an essay or a poem—hell, include the personal, that’s even better. I love when a reviewer situates the book (Brandon Taylor says in that interview above in The Point that Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake made him feel like had Lyme disease. Make reviews contagious again!).

Side note: An agent looking at your query letter isn’t going to search for you in Esquire, but they’re going to see you've written for Esquire—it doesn’t matter if that’s a reported essay or book criticism, it’s the byline. It’s a marker. You want a way in to the bigger publications, that slide is through book reviews.

How many of you saw that viral AI list of FAKE summer reading books from the Chicago Sun Times which was syndicated to several other newspapers. I will not link to it because it doesn’t need more clicks. Imagine if we shared ACTUAL criticism with that level of ferocity. If we supported our own community by sharing reviews that moved us. If we read reviews at all. It’s why I’ll always say that a negative review isn’t actually negative. That’s going to be shared and shared and shared and shared and sent in the group chats and talked about at publicity meetings. Might it suck for a little bit for the writer? Sure. But it’s bringing attention to the book. And if a review is scathing enough, sometimes I want to read the book myself for proof. (Should we call this the Lauren Oyler effect?) Unfortunately this is a symptom of how well negativity does online and how much more traction it gets. I have no remedy or recourse for that, and I don’t want to feed the machine, but I do think more folks read Molly by Blake Butler than would have if it weren’t for the hubbub, and at the very least more readers have a reference point for who Blake Butler is as a writer. Thank your haters, I guess.

But to get back to the main point, that folks writing book reviews aren’t reading the book. My flabbers are gasted and I’m sweaty behind the knees. And this quote is coming from someone who only writes reviews of books that are going to be big anyway—that have the financial backing or the celebrity author (I say celebrity lightly) to bring in clicks. So, are they reading reviews at say—Cleveland Review of Books, which is publishing some of the most interesting criticism at the moment. (Also, the website is aesthetically pleasing). One of the arguments I always make on behalf of Pine State is that we are working to get coverage for books that are typically not coming to us with bells and whistles. It’s easy to pitch Melissa Febos. It’s easy to pitch Sally Rooney. It’s easy to pitch the third book by critically acclaimed (insert author here). It’s the debuts that are hard, it’s the people with no name recognition, the people whose platform you are building while you’re convincing folks that their voice matters too. And your major newspaper reviewers (which I’m guessing is what Manov is pointing to here) are often getting assigned or choosing books that are backed by big money (big marketing?), or big name. So, it doesn’t matter so much the substance of the review, just that the headline has the name of a writer who garners clicks. We live in the click age, look around—it sucks here. I guarantee somewhere in a newsroom someone made the comment about how much propulsion the Sun Times got from the AI mistakes, your click IS worth something.

But my job is quite literally to get people to open the damn book. Does this mean that sometimes I’m picking out the spiciest thing I can find? Sure! Does this mean I’m trying to speak nitty gritty connection points between critic and book? Yes! Does this mean I will write 37 pitch iterations for one book? Yes. I don’t want you to open my email and request a copy for it to lay on your floor, I want you to be enamored enough that you open the damn book. So, excuse me, if I’m not reading criticism of Sally Rooney because Manov is right, it does all sound the same (unless it’s an essay!) and I’m going to read the book for myself anyway.

I read a comment in that thread from BDM about critics taking on the marketing spin of the book, and then writing a review to that framing. I roll over in my flu-grave at that thought. Yes, this is written with flu-brain.

(Though I immediately think of how we had a conversation this week about the way questions are framing more and more book coverage. We talked about Rachel Richardson’s SMOTHER as an example, in which her publicity team must have sent the question “How do we raise children in a world that is burning?” because it is the central question of so much of the publicity. It’s a good question, tbh, and I hope she likes it because it introduced the book. (My thoughts are yes, love questions, and also who is this question leaving out that would love the book—though does that matter if they’re sitting in traffic listening to KQED, and so they get the benefit of the whole conversation not just the question. It’s the headline of the High Country News piece too. It’s skirted by in this LARB review, which focuses more on the book as an elegy to a friend).

How boring! GAH. To use the marketing copy as a box, not to break the book out of , but to keep it in. Bring back thought! We live in the time where everyone on social media has a hot take, a point to make, a quip, and you’re telling me that we don’t have the time or energy to take those points down their many rabbit holes. Bring back considering! Stewing! (I stopped myself before typing “meditating!”) Have we forgotten how fun it is to analyze? To untangle. To meddle. A good review is like gossip—it’s like tweedling through the brain folds. It’s why Brandon Taylor is so good at it. I get it, you might step in some shit when you’re writing criticism, but to quote Sam Franzini (a reviewer who reads the books) in Brooklyn Rail (a great place for book criticism, read Loré Yessuff’s review of Sheila Heti!), “…I prefer a bold writer over a scared one.”

I’m not reading reviews to come to some agreement, to come to a compromise, to feel some sort of familiarity, I want to be surprised when I read book criticism. I want it to have bite, not meaning negativity, but conversation. It’s true, book reviews can say nothing, much like blurbs. They can talk about formalities, or craft, or sentences, or sometimes even disagreements over how the book is written or structured (which tells me the reviewer wanted a different book than the one they’re reviewing, that’s not…criticism, that’s imagination), but good book reviews create conversation, with the reader of them and the book they’re discussing. They give me new reasons to pick up a book beyond the marketing copy. They point out something I hadn’t thought while reading.

I’ll die on the hill, book reviews should feel closer to fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, than they do anything else (namely op-eds or college essays). Of course they should have a point, but they should also have what all good writing has—voice, conviction, language play, surprise, craft, layers, depth of meaning, intrigue. It’s true, we don’t often get that from the big dawgs, and I wonder if that has something to do with the move towards newsrooms assigning writers-of-the-same-circles to write reviews. You’ll notice, for instance, that Margaret Renkl gets the eco-animal books at NYT. And that WSJ often finds reviewers that are writing in the same camp as the writer (not just genre, but topically). As if, familiarity should be the point of the review. You write about animals, Steve, so you should review this new book about Cats. No, run! I wish they took more pitches from regular schmegulars.

Before I go, this comment made me laugh so hard. Because I sent an email three days ago about a Kirkus review for one of our books and I said, “it’s so nice when they’re nice,” and my author followed-up with, but did they mean to say “fiction” in that last line when they’re reviewing a hybrid-biography? So, amen, “spiritual and aesthetically wrong too.”

I probably didn’t stew enough before I wrote this rash newsletter, but here we are. Sometimes I can’t help myself.

As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here, and you can buy our books here! You can also see what we’re working on and contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

ICYMI: Dr. Melody Glenn wrote a powerful op-ed about fentanyl and the border for Salon and her book Mother of Methadone got a beautiful early review in New Pages, Nicole Graev Lipson is on the JWA Summer Bookshelf and a review of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is in the newest issue of BUST, Jehanne Dubrow’s CIVILIANS was reviewed in Collateral, and Lisa Russ Spaar’s Paradise Close in Tupelo Quarterly, Daisy Atterbury was interviewed in Write or Die Tribe and their book The Kármán Line was reviewed in Foglifter, Rosa Castellano wrote about decentering whiteness in literary space for Literary Hub, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.

I’ve debated writing this as, of course, I want folks in the industry to love me and say yes about my authors, but why do we put so much stock into early industry praise? Well, for starters, that’s where librarians and booksellers (alongside sales presentations and publisher catalogs through distributors) find out about new (and often buzzy) books. They order books based on this trifecta of knowledge—sales team, sales presentation, early industry buzz. I mean early, early like “this book sold at auction!” in the Publishers Marketplace announcement and then a few months shy of publication got a Kirkus star. This is not why authors get so excited about stars (it’s a STAR!), but it’s why they probably should. It’s one way (at least previously) where a book could stand out to the people literally stocking shelves without having the backing of large sales teams and presentations. Media matters (duh! it’s my job!) but sales MATTER. Big M.

This all starts so early. I’ll give you an example. 2026 spring titles for a certain independent publisher need to have all their marketing materials to IPG (one of the major distributors) by early June for “front list season.” (Front list meaning the books that are given top space in a distributors catalogs—this is often decided well before marketing materials are due). They ask for very similar things that you might see in a book proposal—author bios, if they author is hiring a publicist (and who they are, in case you think that doesn’t matter), networks with numbers on their reach and membership, professional affiliations, who and where you’ll be reaching out to for media, what bookstores you might approach for events, and same sales pitches for you book (unique points, nationwide selling points). Most of the time, authors have nothing to do with this, it’s the publishing team that gathers all these materials and presents the book. Definitely this is what’s happening at the conglomerates, but it’s also what’s happening with independent presses that use a major distributor. Timelines vary, but you can see that prep for this kind of thing is a year out at least.

If you ever get an ARC (advanced reader copy) of a book, you might see it has a “Publicity and marketing plan” on the bottom, which is just bullet points with a general overview of plans for the book. Here’s a terrible screenshot of a simple one (still hopefully readable). This is not for your average freelance writer who is pitching magazines, but for trade professionals and major media to see what kind of leverage the book is pulling from the publisher—what stock they’ve put in the book, to then tell them what stock publications, booksellers, librarians, should put in that book. It’s like an insider tell.

Now for the harder to swallow part, book clubs like Jenna’s Book Club are booked … well, right now, through this year. (Not all of them!). But the major, make you an overnight bestseller book clubs are booked up. Those teams are reading new books in word doc format—books that haven’t even been put through copyediting yet. They’re reading Publishers Marketplace announcements, eyeing major auctions (you know the ones that have sold to seventeen foreign countries already) and requesting manuscripts then and there. So, that’s almost two years out from publication, maybe more. They’re hearing from scouts early, they’re hearing from publishers early, they’re hearing from folks way before I would ever begin a campaign with an author unless we’re doing some sort of platform building situation. Here’s an example of an obvious Jenna’s Book Club choice (I wish I could find the PM announcement because it was truly wild—Michelle Brower, I bow down). Can you hear the chiming of an “11-way auction” to studio execs?

So, independent publishers are often simply not meeting those timelines. Where do those playing fields get leveled? Well, it used to be in early industry reviews. And then they got really slow. Publishers Weekly was putting out reviews months after pub date, and my good dudes—where is the help in that? The point of the early industry review is to generate early buzz. I used to love using those little ditties for follow-up to folks who I had already pitched. “Hey remember me! The book is in fact “magnificent” to someone else too!” We say, as publicists, we want everything to land around pub date (that short and sweet window of about six weeks), but we do need some early traction—something ANYTHING to cause a little commotion in someone’s inbox.

But now, now you’re telling me that you can’t keep up (which we knew from the slowness) and you’re asking publishers to pay $25 a title without the guarantee for a review. Who does this serve? Well, it does serve PW if they’re getting nothing but AI slop submissions to weed those folks out, and it of course serves them financially, but I’m wondering about those finances too. Because wasn’t it y’all that bought The Millions a year or two ago and suddenly it’s on a kind-of hiatus? There’s been some recent movement, but four pieces were published in January and then … nothing. Arguably one of the best spaces for complex author interviews and essays about literature. Did you think we would just let that one go quietly? Hopefully some of the galley submission cash will go to the revitalization of The Millions (I’ll be watching).

And now, after (potentially) crushing The Millions, we’re looking at fees per title across the board with an opportunity to opt-in to a bundling if we need to submit unlimited books (at a price that we are all aware mostly only the conglomerates can afford). So, here we are: Netgalley is expensive (another early buzz generator—if you’re not requesting books for review on Netgalley, let me change your life!), Edelweiss is reasonable (we still have her!), industry reviews are slow and now pricey (I worry that the Publishers Weekly pricing is going to encourage the same across the board for places like Library Journal, Shelf Awareness, Kirkus, Booklist). So, what do you do?

Well, first you decide if you want to pay to play. Then, you talk with your people about how to generate early buzz that doesn’t take away from launch media, but does have teeth. You don’t want to go in hard too early (as in, people don’t know what action to take with the book—it’s like going to AWP without a retail link for your book. If people can’t order it, there’s no point in telling them other than for your own glee). Early industry reviews aren’t a sure thing at all, and they aren’t sure to be good either. Kirkus is notoriously snarky (no offense, Kirkus, I enjoy reading them and yapping with Alisha and Zoe about the particular burns).

I’ve had campaigns where we wrote letters and did outreach specifically to librarians, book clubs, organizations, groups. I’ve had authors who hand wrote individual letters to booksellers (thank you, Indie Next!). Though these are obvious choices, they are action. And sometimes action is all an author needs. An assignment, a doable task, a place to put those tendrils of anxiety. Another way is publishing essays that are adjacent to the book topic.

Since so little is confirmed early (we are sometimes following-up in the final seconds, sending those Hail Mary emails), it’s hard to say “a ____ will appear in _____” though sometimes I hedge my bets there. The political climate is unstable (at best) and of course that takes space from book coverage. Something timely could happen FOR your book or AGAINST your book, we truly can’t know until we get there. It’s all about framing.

You really can’t be sure about anything until the thing appears or the contract is signed (and even then!). I had a whole face-to-face meeting last year with the head of design at a major newspaper that you can probably guess, about a graphic nonfiction piece, zoomed into his perfect little living room with his green couch, and we agreed on timeline, deadline, expectations, sizing, and then…he ghosted four days out from publication. The piece was done! It’s a nail biter every time, I love it.

Anyway, this is all to say—the game is rigged, it’s been rigged, and yet we still play it. You always get to decide what matters to you and where you spend your money (or not). Is it worth it to you to spend $25 on a Publishers Weekly maybe? Is it worth it to you to spend $500 on ad space on Facebook or in Mother Jones or through a Goodreads giveaway? All up to you (or your publisher, depending!)

My kid (he's three) is currently obsessed with being first. Sometimes it’s grand, like when I ask them who wants to brush their teeth first and they both volunteer. But cause and affect, my second born has started saying, “Me! First!” (he’s 1.5). Now, whichever one isn’t first and if it’s something I can’t manage to do at the same time while singing “round and round” (Wheels on the bus) or “tinkle tinkle” (you can guess), I say, “but can you be first in my heart?” And so, I say to you, good and noble book people, what is first in your heart when it comes to putting a book out into the world? And what can you, in the words of Elsa, “Let it Go.” (Though she does sort of let it go so much that she builds an entire gleaming frozen castle at the top of a mountain—so maybe we should start framing publicity as more of a surrender to surprise and magic than, “if I don’t get reviewed in the New York Times my life is over.” Is it though, Jan?

As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here, and you can buy our books here! You can also see what we’re working on and contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

ICYMI: Lauren k. Watel was interviewed by Emma Bolden for The Rumpus, Keetje Kuipers’ Lonely Women Make Good Lovers is in the Alta April booklist, poems appeared in BOMB, she also had a recent essay in Romper on being “sort of a single mother” and was interviewed on Poetry Off the Shelf, Nicole Graev Lispon got another fabulous review in The Rumpus with a side of interview in MUTHA Magazine, Erica Stern’s debut memoir made its first anticipated list in the OC Register, Gabriel Fried was reviewed in Southern Review of Books and Columbia Daily Tribune, plus this truly intellectual interview in Chicago Review of Books, Iris Dunkle talked Sanora Babb on Colorado Public Radio, Lisa Russ Spaar’s Paradise Close was reviewed in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and she’ll be at the Montclair Literary Festival (don’t miss her!) and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.

Here is the Publishers Lunch announcement. I am especially interested in the language of “Zando’s own robust publishing infrastructure to enhance sales, marketing, and distribution efficiencies…” I don’t know that Zando’s model is working quite as efficiently as Tin House’s model (yet), they’re only three years old. I’ve seen them have successful books and unsuccessful books. They look and feel (to me) like a big press that does the same thing. I think The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi was a pretty big book, but there are tons of books on the list I’ve never seen. Just like any big press. Not that I always see everything or I am looking for something specific, but we know the books that get big coverage and the books that don't. Their Instagram feed is full of good publicity, maybe I’m being an asshole when I say I don’t love this news. Maybe I’m just in a wait-and-see period.

The first thing you should know about this situation is mid-size presses basically don’t exist. It’s kind of a problem in publishing for the last few decades, once small presses get big enough, they’re bought out by the bigger presses. Which keeps the tiers quite stratified, where small presses have a bit of a range and big presses are big presses, but middle-range presses (think your Algonquin before they were bought out) get bought. So, I think of middle presses as Tin House, Catapult, Softskull, Graywolf, university presses (depending), and larger, university-associated or endowed presses. These are the folks fighting the good independent fight, but who have gotten large enough to compete with the bigger presses across marketing, sales, publicity—essentially, publishing outcomes. The range of small/independent presses is a RANGE, because it’s essentially small presses and then conglomerate, with not a lot in-between.

Tin House being bought is a travesty to me. It could have been bought by anyone and I would probably be down in the dumps about it, so I am not especially sad about Zando, but I am sad in general about another true independent press being acquired. NOW, for fairness sakes, Zando touts itself as an independent press, and it is independent from the conglomerates, but it is run by folks who left (or were left by) the conglomerates, and it is owned (in-part) by Rupert Murdoch’s daughter. See bios here.

Zando functions independently on the expertise (and … logistics) of the big four. So, it isn’t, to me, necessarily a true independent where a bunch of scrappy editors are coming together to build some sort of funky new press that wants to foster space where they see gaps in the market. I loved the recent interview in Literary Hub about Jackson Howard at FSG (who is an INCREDIBLE editor) about him having an “uncanny knack for discovering exceptional talent” when truly he has an uncanny knack for reading indie press books and knowing how to poach them for the big leagues. No judgment, he truly is exceptional, but let’s nod to the presses who published a ton of his list first.

I guess I am always on the side of giving independent presses their due. And of course I want rich people to generously fund the arts like we’re in the Great Gatsby green light but with the perception box debacle of Elizabeth Koch at Catapult, I am always feeling hairy about rich people starting presses, or funding presses. HAS ANYTHING COME OF THIS? Is the perception box a thing AT ALL since she shuttered one of the best magazines and fired amazing editors and publicists?

The whole schtick of Zando is that they use public figures as imprint-leaders and as ways to bring books to market. Here’s a good overview from the LA Times. Alongside Elisabeth Murdoch is a former CEO of 20th Century Fox, Stacey Snider, so someone very well connected in the film industry. And also Jane Featherstone who works television producing. You can imagine then, that film-adaptation would be a big part of Zando’s buying conversations. And this isn’t to say Claire Fuller’s Bitter Orange or Emma Seckel’s The Wild Hunt or Morgan Talty’s books from Tin House’s list shouldn’t be a film (my god, could you imagine—so good) but that’s not Tin House’s … well, they’re just not that commercial.

Also, what will happen to the Tin House poetry backlist, or poetry acquisitions at Zando, which does not buy poetry (right now)? All of those film connections could be great for the new Tin House imprint at Zando, but my fear is that … Tin House will be the one reimagined, not Zando, and not their expectations of what constitutes a Zando (film-adaption-ready?) project.

It’s actually very curious to me that they’re housed in New York and not LA as I feel like they could be an interestingly competitive west coast publishing house with the NYC houses. They could expand the regionality of big publishing, but here we are again, stuck in New York.

To give you an idea of other imprints: Sarah Jessica Parker has an imprint (we love her, queen of reading and wondering at her laptop), Gillian Flynn has an imprint, Lena Waithe has an imprint called “Hillman Grad Books,” and Crooked Media (the podcasting company—mostly) has an imprint. You might recognize Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility, which was published through the Zando / Crooked Media partnership.

Nothing wrong with any of these folks, but it goes to show the sort of book they might be interested in elevating. I love Riesling and I think she’s a deep thinker, and I believe she went this route for good reasons. So, to me, this is definitely a plus on the Zando side. But again, where does Tin House fit into all of this? Actually come to think of it Kiesling and Tin House are both Portland staples, so perhaps her publishing journey was a part of the considerations here. Honestly, it was probably money, but who knows.

I worry too about Tin House workshops (we have so few big workshops anymore that aren’t … weird?), David Naimon’s Between the Covers (my favorite podcast), and all other tentacles of Tin House Books. Though I do think they are quite separate, but still … still Tin House? We already lost the magazine, a real one, and now the imprint is being housed under what is arguably a highly-commercial house. Maybe the most commercial of houses? The … celebrity-house? John Legend having a book imprint, I just … all I can think about is that man pressing the button to turn his chair around on The Voice.

I’m also not sure these celebrity-endorsements are really working their sales. I wonder if it’s just the name behind the imprint that they expect to move the needle or if the celebrity is actually doing work behind the scenes to blow up the books. There isn’t really evidence of that for me, and I don’t believe name (of really anyone?) makes people buy books. Are we headed back into the blurb conversation here, let me U-turn. I guess I wonder if anyone really even understands that Lena Waithe is behind a book when they see it on a bookstore shelf, unless they’re already familiar with Zando and what they do. I truly did not know who had imprints there until I looked at the website for this very newsletter. So, what is the celebrity … doing? I think this is a question for larger publishing actually—what is ACTION and what is simply … labeling? performance? reliance on face and name?

Books are such a weird cultural object. No one knows how to sell them. Most of the ways we decide how to put money into them is all estimation and bet. And so we’re all out here sort of flailing around trying to build a perfect storm—the problem is we don’t really know what storm will work for what book, and it’s a big game—a game I love. A game I live for and pay my bills by. When I think I know something, I’m always surprised by what I don’t know. And maybe I know nothing here but a hot take.

But one thing I do know is that the publicity at Tin House was unmatched. Where I look for books at least, I saw Tin House books. What my friends are reading is Tin House books. The descriptions, the blitz of publicity, the careers of writers who started there or went there at some point are kind of unmatched and unparalleled. So, it would surprise me if it was for financial reasons that they needed to be bought out. It does not surprise me that another mid-size press, another good run (great run!) midsize press is being bought out. And who’s coming along? We don’t know. All it says is editorial director Maisie Cochran will remain (a genius, no doubt), but what does that mean for everyone else who has quite literally run one of my favorite presses of the last decade. Time will tell.

I wish I could say I felt like Zando was doing something different than what the big presses already do. But I haven’t seen the freshness of the celebrity-connection book really take off in a different way than say, a Flatiron or a Knopf. And I’d be sad if those imprints bought Tin House too. I want the haven for literary weirdos to stay weird, what can I say? I want the haven for weirdos to not just be another book imprint with a range of books that share neoclassical portrait covers and highlighter-colored, bold font for a title.

Maybe this just means there’s room for a new Tin-House-esque publisher. A new haven with new weirdos. Nothing I could want more.

As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here, and you can buy our books here! You can also see what we’re working on and contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

ICYMI: Nicole Graev Lipson is on fire (again) and you can see reviews in River Teeth and Hippocampus, and interviews in LA Review of Books (done by my friend Acree!) and What Fresh Hell, Keetje Kuipers Lonely Women Make Good Lovers got a starred review in Publishers Weekly, Against the Current reviewed Iris Jamahl’ Dunkle’s Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb & the book is a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award, Catherine Weiss’ Big Money Porno Mommy got a shout out on the Pleasure Reading podcast, Jehanne Dubrow wrote about Ovid’s Metamorphosis and military marriage for Literary Hub, Lauren k. Watel is on WABE talking about Book of Potions, Diamond Forde interviews Rosa Castellano for Honey Literary, Margaret Ross’s Saturday is reviewed in Brooklyn Rail, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.

Publishing loves (LOVES—big sign Amsterdam style) tradition. But the ask for twenty “publicity” blurbs has gotten more than out of hand. I don’t even know what to do with that many blurbs and I am a publicist (other than pitch ANYONE who loved those writers and exhaust myself and my inbox), and the marketing folks in charge of making the little (NO LONGER SQUARE, I’m looking at you, MARK—selling out over and over and now no square???) graphics for your instagram accounts of each singular blurb, do not have the time to create all those mostly meaningless graphics. They do feel good to post, I’m sure. So, feeling good isn’t meaningless.

And then, THEN, writers (and editors) don’t even use them to the advantage of stretching audience. If you’re writing a hybrid memoir that involves medicine + personal history + a history of a movement, there (I’m arguing) would ideally be blurbs from medical professionals, memoirists, activists within the movement, historians, etc—the blurbs would not be four memoir authors from the last year. Let’s mix it up, people—broaden our audiences and our horizons. We are not using the space wisely, and there are other things that could be done here.

Imagine if we lived in a world with options on back cover copy (or the space above the title on the front cover where a blurb normally goes) instead of blurbs … imagine if it was another way to have a weird little, singular, exciting marketing moment. This may or may not also be an assignment (several assignments) you could do for your book that would give you more insight into how to market the book.

• you use the Karla Strand National Poetry Month effect and you put three big bold words about the book like a billboard, in that blurb space.

• you put a list of alternative titles

• you had an “inspired by” section with a little personal canon

• you wrote how many years the book took to write, edit, and get published

• you had a little yearbook message

• you awarded the book superlatives (or your editorial team did)

• you put your favorite sentence in BOLD

• there were fun facts about this book

• there were weird facts about this book

• a warning label

• a list of ingredients

• a saturated fat percentage

• you got blurbs from your neighbor, from the post man, from your tarot reader

• you made up blurbs, “If Cher read this she would never have written …,” “if the three witches from Hocus Pocus found this book …”

• you had a weird little book-related “where’s Waldo?” Extra points for folks who find the metaphor about Bunnicula

• you got to give your book a slogan—can you imagine how many people would have to be sued by Nike because they put “Just Read It.”

• you put a little comic, a little drawing, a little family photo, a little setting photo, a little symbol, a little glyph, an image of the book characters as Sims, setting as Mine Craft world, a series of emoji (ouuuu even better, the book written in the form of emojis—try it with your fav books, it’s so fun).

• a little note to readers, librarians, your favorite barista

• begging, no one is above begging

• an announcement that a percentage of the royalty proceeds are going somewhere (and that announcement could be, these proceeds are going in my pocket because I’m a person who needs to eat!)

• you included a short list of the titles of your word documents as you were working on the book (I would … this would make me so happy)

• you included a friend’s email note when they read the first six pages and spent a year pretending they read the whole thing.

• you included legal concerns or questions from the legal read (okay, this one might actually be … dangerous, so maybe not).

• you included the first line of your MFA personal statement (if you graduated with an MFA), the last line, some line!

• a little list of writing superstitions that made you write the book

• you included a note from your MFA director’s comments on your first draft of your thesis, or what they said at the end of your defense.

• you put a short erasure poem from the novel’s first page, last page, page 78.

• you included a mysterious message that’s like, “turn to pg 82, 8 lines down, and you’ll find ….”

• you included three people living or dead that would cause you to giggle uncontrollably if you knew they read your work.

• a little “no thanks to …” section / a little revenge

• a little list of five songs you listened to on repeat while you worked / your comfort show

• baby, you could have a scratch and sniff at the back of your book—CAN YOU IMAGINE

What I’m saying is, I wish there were more choices towards innovation in publishing rather than an either/or approach.

You can choose to obtain blurbs or not, okay but if I don’t—what would go in that space? What are my options? I’ve worked on books without blurbs and let me tell you, it makes no difference except to the people who have read and loved those blurbers and/or if the blurber is Carmen Maria Machado, and/or whether the blurber blurbs a lot of books. I have seen a few folks on every. single. book. I pick up to the point, I stopped trusting books blurbed by that writer. We forget that blurbs can also be a TURN OFF. What if the blurb says nothing? What if the blurber doesn’t “get” the book? What if the writer doesn’t like what the blurber said about the book? What if a reader gets the ick from a blurb?

Publishing is like, “You can choose from these three covers that are all either slightly different or wildly different, even though you have no background in design and the publisher has provided no marketing research on how colors impact readers’ buying choices, there are no provided successful covers that they’re using as proof of marketability, no covers that influenced the designer or line of thinking that influenced the designer, no references, or any other info about the designer’s choices.” You may not even know the designer’s name until you see it in the book, if you see it in the book. Love this little breakdown of making her cover from Martha Park today.

“You can have one epigraph, two if you’ve sold more than three books.” Me, personally—I would need a few pages. I have an inability to narrow when it comes to epigraphing.

I realize that there are templates for how we print books, for what distribution needs in order to load books onto retail sites, but let’s be real—we’re out of status quo’s. Barnes & Noble is going to stick a sticker on your book over your favorite part of the cover, and so is Target. And those stickers are going to be impossible to get off even if you watch Youtube videos on how to unstick them with a certain kind of soap. What I’m saying is let’s deconstruct the blurb industry complex even more, until it’s something else altogether—something strange and unique to each project, each writer. Same space, using words, it’s not going to cause a printer to lose their mind.

I remember to this day when Miranda July’s first story collection came out and they published it in four different highlighter colors. Expensive? Yes. Did I need to own all four colors at twenty-two years old? Also, yes. Yes, I did. I still have a yellow and a pink one. Let’s get back to MARKETING books instead of using some beautiful, intimidating, and (often times) reminiscent of a popularity contest blurb cocktail that really only serves a certain subset of writers.

And while we’re at it—let’s mix-up anticipated lists too. Funniest acknowledgements! Best opening line! Reads like this song! weirdest plot twist! made me cry more than three times! most stains because I couldn’t even put it down to eat my Cheetos!

In an ideal world, your book is going to be destroyed with love. It’s going to be annotated, thrown into several bags, read on a boat, corners will be dog-eared, pencil ends will be bitten due to the tension of reading it (or the lust, meow!), post it notes will be stuck throughout, it will be hugged to someone’s chest, placed on the prominent shelf in someone’s bonus room, under four other books in the next to the bed TBR pile (without vacuuming around it regularly), thrown in the back of a car on a road trip, brought camping, colored-in by a toddler (ask me how I know), held up for an Instagram photo shoot or set next to a stylized cappuccino. The goal, at the end of a good book for me, is that I loved it like my baby cousin loved his Elmo as a child—to within a shred of Elmo, to the very red string of him.

As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here, and you can buy our books here! You can also see what we’re working on and contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

ICYMI: Nicole Graev Lipson’s Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is Hey Alma’s" “Excited About in 2025” list, Sanora Babb has a new biography at Academy of American Poets thanks to Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Lauren K. Watel is this month’s ONE STORY #321 with “Trampoline,” and she received a stunning first review for BOOK OF POTIONS in Arts ATL, Jehanne Dubrow’s Civilians is recommended by Military Family, Connor Fisher reviews Greater Ghost by Christian J. Collier for Ballast Journal, Lisa Russ Spaar’s Paradise Close is reviewed by Ron Slate in On the Seawall, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.

And I hear this from writers all the time—”I’m just hoping to go viral.” But I’ve never really, except in the case of Sabrina Orah Mark’s “Fuck the Bread. The Bread is Over.” in Paris Review, actually seen a viral essay serve a writer beyond the illustrious book deal. Which is the goal, so maybe it’s not that bad. (If you haven’t read Happily, I urge you to get a copy). In fact, it seems like critics and readers alike, go into books by viral essayists looking for a flaw.

Side note: I admitted in a Tiktok comment recently that I believe (now, after being a few years out) as a literary agent, as much as I said aloud this wasn’t the case, I was reading for a reason to say no, rather than a reason to say yes. Maybe I’ll have more to say about that. This is the same deal that (I think!) faces a viral essayist when their book hits shelves. Will it live up to the OG material?

I’m not sure if it’s jealousy, or the peak of expectations reigning down from the tippy top of virality, but from “Cat Person” to “The Crane Wife,” “Bad Art Friend” (court outcome detailed here) to “The Protagonist Is Never in Control”—it’s like there’s a bonfire, and it feels great standing near it for a while, but eventually (either by the author’s doing or the turn of the masses) it burns the entire forest down. Sure, CJ Hauser got a book deal for The Crane Wife (at auction, but she had sold a novel already—so another book was likely), and “Cat Person” published the collection of stories, and then I believe, a novel.

… But CJ Hauser’s collection got mixed reviews (really loved it or really hated it) and I don’t know anyone that bought Kristen Roupenian’s story collection, or actually knew her name after she went viral (Including me, I’m going to leave that I called her “Cat Person” up there because it’s the truest evidence). Let’s not forget that the Slate piece “Cat Person and Me” by Alexis Nowicki, which also went viral for the controversy, and even Natalie Beach’s “I Was Caroline Calloway” in The Cut didn’t lead to book sales or glowing reviews. What they did all get though, is a book deal—so maybe we’re living in the halfway house of the dream. The promise is a book deal, not praise or sales or love. That part is a harder get.

There have been viral essays that I’ve never seen result in anything. “Scenes from an Open Marriage” by Jean Garnett for example. But most, tides turn.

The latest viral essay to sweep the social media wastelands got … almost no praise? Even though most of the arguments against the piece (aside from McCarthy’s death year date which was wrong when originally printed) are about writing style and taste. Here’s one kind post I saw on Blue Sky earlier today.

Yes, I’m talking about the Vanity Fair piece by Vincenzo Barney on Cormac McCarthy’s longtime muse, Augusta Britt. Called “the greatest literary scoop” by Dan Kois of Slate (in an interview I’ll talk about below), Vincenzo Barney got a mysterious comment on his Substack after reviewing The Passenger and Stella Maris, and the opportunity of a lifetime unfolded for him. (The fact that Britt’s comment arrived in his inbox on April Fools is just icing on the cake here).

These are the current stats just on the initial Vanity Fair post on Twitter. It’s been crowding my feed, and everyone who is everyone has a (mostly salty) opinion.

I was mildly distressed to see some of my favorite writers in Barney’s mentions telling him what a horrible writer he is, among other terrible things about his Twitter profile photo, and definitely his moral stances on a situation in which he (I’m reading into this from interviews) felt very obliged to the narrative of his source, Augusta Britt. It seems to me, Barney did not fray (or argue against) that narrative in the slightest, a choice, but one that does honor Augusta Britt’s telling of her own story.

I guess I was surprised by the amount of vile things said about someone who is, if we would be defining him for a grant application or a Tin House scholarship, an emerging, un-bylined writer. He has a BFA from Bennington and writes a Substack. He is someone’s student, a son, a person, offline. I realize that he got paid by the word for this profile and it’s published in a dream magazine for many, about a writer who is so beloved (Cormac McCarthy), he’s practically untouchable, but what was Barney’s other option? Recommend Britt to someone else, when his dream was right there?

All of the above comes with tinges of jealousy, anger (of course) from McCarthy scholars who have made studying him their life’s work, and blowback from the stakes of the story’s framing, but it all made me wonder how someone else might write the piece having spent a year with Augusta Britt, trying to tell her secret-for-a-lifetime story in some sort of “right” way, when nothing about the story fits the narrative of “right” or “good.” Barney made a choice, and he stuck by it.

I can’t defend the writing style, the moral nuances (if they exist) and any framing / structural choices, because they weren’t mine to make, but I do want to talk about what Vincenzo Barney did next from a publicity standpoint.

Dan Kois of Slate, “scored the scoop” (Forrest Wickman) of interviewing Barney after the Vanity Fair piece. Kois does nothing to attempt to hide his own feelings in the introduction of the interview saying, “However, that serious criticism has been somewhat drowned out by the gleeful clamor of people quoting their favorite Vincenzo Barney lines. Because, when the greatest literary scoop he was likely to get in his lifetime landed in his lap, Vincenzo Barney did not phone it in. He spent nearly a year living in Arizona, talking to Britt basically every day, and when he filed to Vanity Fair, he did not file a careful, journalistic report. No, he really went for it, delivering the weirdest, most frequently nonsensical, most floridly overwritten story to appear in a legitimate magazine since … maybe since the heights of New Journalism in the 1970s.” And finished that introduction with, “And while the publicists may well have edited some of Barney’s responses, they sure didn’t edit out his personality. In this email Q&A, he addresses the criticism he’s received, reveals that he thinks his style is less McCarthyan than influenced by another writer, defends his characterization of Britt and McCarthy’s relationship, and playfully deflects any number of questions, while straight up ignoring one. All that is to say, he responded with the bluff bravado of someone whose dreams have come true, though I think that someday he’ll regret viewing these events in that way. His answers are presented as he wrote them.”

The questions are quite pointed. They are pressing, yet full of assumptions. I’m especially curious about the question of finances, as we live in a culture that both wants writers to stop viewing themselves as “starving artists,” but doesn’t want them to be rich with an easy avenue into Vanity Fair either. Best to be middle class, but definitely not live in suburbia. Best to be supported, but only on the level of failing to launch or returning to your childhood bedroom after graduating college, and not financially spending nine months in the desert with your favorite writer’s favorite character swatch. Best to not write personal essays, but must believe in a “writer brand” built from a writer’s own social media channels. There’s no “right” avenue, other than honesty.

I can never help thinking about Didion’s wealth when I think about the way we dissect writerly finances. In my head, I think of her as a sort of classy Dorit Kemsley—is that far-fetched, maybe? But did you see the scene this week in RHOBH with Dorit being chased by paparazzi and smoking? Because you can’t tell me that wasn’t Didion-esque).

What I’m trying to say is Kois wasn’t pulling any punches—he set out with a mission to find the cracks in Vincenzo Barney, to perhaps prove Barney as unfit for the profile. As if Twitter hadn’t already done that and more.

And, at least from my perspective, that isn’t at all what happened. Instead, Barney is silly, oddly charming, intriguing (I read the interview from start to finish without turning away—this is my Cocomelon, it seems). He’s interesting, a character himself. And while Kois mentions the flourish of personality in his answers, I found them to be exactly how I would want a client of mine in the same position to answer these questions.

Where he succeeds: Barney is airy, light. The heaviness of Twitter’s takedowns on his low-buttoned-button-up, his very-Vincenzo hair, the calls that he is guilty of the same behavior as McCarthy because of the way the piece is written—none of it has fazed him in this interview.

Now, this was a written interview in which his publicist could have intervened on his behalf, but I have this gut feeling (could be inaccurate) that Barney is actively choosing to lower his shoulders here, and if he was ever carrying a shield, it isn’t evident.

Even when Kois asks directly about the response to the piece, “I can see from your Twitter that you’re definitely aware of how people are responding. Readers are really coming at you for purple prose. Is that annoying?,” Barney says, “As for my style and the profile itself, Augusta loves it, and she has great taste. McCarthy also liked my writing. I’ve received just as many complimentary and thoughtful responses from readers. Most of them have taken place, if you can believe it, not in the cesspool of X. I do want to apologize, though, for having a personality and writing the way I like to. I’ve talked to doctors about it and there’s really not much I can do. My next piece is going to be so purple, so hyacinth, so ultraviolet—whoops, there I go again.”

It’s sarcasm, obviously, but without the edge. It’s goofy.

My favorite exchange:

Dan: What was your editorial process like? Did you wrestle over style questions at all? Or was Daniel Kile, who edited the piece, receptive to your choices?

“Wrestle? At dawn Daniel and I would square off on a mat and grapple over commas, question marks. I was most receptive to Daniel’s rear-naked choke. In fact, he’s editing this interview as we speak. The bell is about to go off for the next round. I haven’t much time.”

*

I would not handle myself with such levity. My therapist would have had to deactivate all my accounts and take my mobile devices, sending me off into the woods for the next several months. Though that might be precisely where Barney is coming from—horses and carrots and steel toed boots, Britt’s ranch, the mountain ranges burning in the afternoon.

It’s as if, and this is in one of the answers I shared above, the love from Augusta Britt for the piece was enough to sail Barney through the bullshit of social media. Either that, or I need some lessons from his family on how to raise someone who can so easily roll with, not just punches, but what feels like a social media K.O.

And one more thing I do want to note from the interview is this line from Barney, “with my daringly bad style absorbing most of the controversy and opinion columns.”

He’s right. He’s taking so much heat that Augusta Britt isn’t receiving much, if any. (I haven’t seen any). Now, it could be argued this isn’t a great thing when the profiler is getting more attention than the person profiled, but Augusta Britt is firm in a story that folks oppose, are disgusted by, is illegal, corrupts their idea of a beloved literary figure, and she could rather easily be turned on in another scenario. (Particularly in a world that so often wants to invalidate women and their experience whether it’s labeled “victim,” or “muse”).

What I want to say is that Barney is funny in this Slate interview, without a hint of bitterness. It’s a 12/10 publicity performance, and the best part is that it caused even more talk about the piece, which I wasn’t sure was possible. It’s not quite a turnaround, but it is a pivoting of the conversation—something new to look at and inspect by the crocodiles—so hungry, waiting for their meat. He’s extended his five minutes to fifteen. I will revel in the curiosity of seeing who acquires his future book.

As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here, and you can buy our books here! You can also see what we’re working on and contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

ICYMI: Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb and Barrie Miskin’s Hell Gate Bridge have both been named as 50 Notable Nonfiction Books of 2024 by Washington Post, Jesse Lee Kercheval’s French Girl is one of ten best graphic novels in Washington Post, Christian J. Collier’s Greater Ghost named a best poetry collection of 2024 by Debutiful, Jessica E. Johnson was interviewed by Brianna Avenia-Tapper for Writing Stories, Ruben Quesada was interviewed by Gabrielle Grace Hogan for The Rumpus, Darren Demaree was interviewed for Matter News on his new collection So Much More, Lisa Russ Spaar wrote about Margaret Ross’s Saturday for Adroit, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.

I read The Cut piece on “a voice my generation could be proud of…” And of course, in the sea of hate-clicks and quote tweets, there was the magazine who shall not be named (a magazine editor who once posted a collage photo of three freelance publicists and one stock image of a woman none of us know to complain about the fact that outside publicity costs money)—being a typical “devil’s advocate” to say “i mean, it’s a style like any other and isn’t this how publishing and publicity work? am i missing something? i don’t get the *boring* part. have you read the book?”

And let me tell you what’s boring about it, to someone like me. It’s boring because ten bucks says a person in New York who names a few streets, a few intersections, approximately two restaurants, and maybe a quick subliminal message about one specific theater department where everyone went to school in their novel is going to have a higher chance of selling said novel (whether it’s the “voice of a generation” or not) because it’s familiar (and maybe aspirational depending on career-length) to every editor working in big four (re: New York City) publishing.

Is this the part of the newsletter where I tell you that I have no idea where or what Dimes Square is, and to me Lower East Side is a three word phrase I heard a lot when I was trying to figure out who was behind “xoxo Gossip Girl”—it’s synonymous in my brain with plaid school girl skirts and white button-ups, thick velvet headbands, and concrete steps.

And maybe an MFA from Columbia will guarantee you a book deal (I’d love the numbers on this one, alongside how much the books sold for), but most writers can’t afford the 100k a year price tag even with the 30k fellowships.

And there are even enjoyable forms of New York City privilege, take Walk It Off with Issac Fitzgerald. He mostly walks with writers in New York City because that’s where he is, so although he’s not meaning to perpetuate that what is “literary” is “New York City,” the narrative remains—the best writers reside in the city, are made by the city, and thus the city celebrates.

That’s boring. That’s limiting. That garners a Dwight Garner New York Times book review when quite literally the rest of the world exists. We can say all day that it’s the *New York Times,* thus it supports *New York* authors, but we all know that The New York Times sees itself as the bastion of both national and international news, and so it could expand its page space beyond the expected.

If a metaphor was needed I would say, in a game of Chutes and Ladders, New York City writers would be chutes all day, and the rest of the world would be ladders.

Here’s why: there’s an easier case for an in-house team (an acquiring editor) to be made for a writer who lives in New York City. A few reasons: an editor can have lunch with the author and their agent, the author is likely to have agent connections (even run in the same circles) as said-agents, the editors also live in the city so they’re familiar with the landscape—they might have a nostalgia for the places in the book even (Think: Cordelia Street by Taylor Swift), the publicity machine is easier if you’re mingling with Nylon’s book editor at Drift parties (which The New York Times can’t stop covering), it’s easier to make the connections necessary to get into editorial roles at said publishers (almost always built on networking—they call it an apprenticeship business), obviously, they’re easier to get when you know somebody (somebody in New York is the underlying messaging here)—overall, authors in the city can connect easier with each other—be in conversation, support one another’s work, share writing groups, attend similar workshops, and all other forms of the mingle. Authors in the city are more likely to get space for events at the New York City bookstores, and they’re better attended because they have an actual audience in the city (so fair point there). Imagine a popularity contest, that’s the vibe.

But I’m going to be real with you, usually if a book mentions New York City in the copy, I don’t read it. Most of your favorites, lost on me. (Shout out to Lilly Dancyger’s First Love though because I would never miss a Lilly Dancyger essay, let alone book).

But I’m kind of tired of the trope, yes, I said it TROPE, of New York City as the “stalwart” of all culture, and I’m really tired of the conglomerates not offering remote internships and jobs in the age of the fucking internet. Book designers need to be in-house, but almost every other role in publishing can be done remotely. (It’s the buildings though, Jack, never let go of the buildings. What would Flatiron be without The Flatiron Building). And I understand camaraderie, I miss it—the woman who cut my hair a few weeks ago was saying how jealous she was that I worked from home, and it is such a gift especially while my children are small, but I miss talking about our stupid little shared shows, and gossip that has nothing to do with me, and eating a yogurt at the speed of light between meetings (though sometimes I still just spoon peanut butter into my mouth or throw back a handful of popcorn and slather on some tinted lip balm instead of showering).

As much as an MFA is a privilege, I don’t hear enough talk about the privilege of location. The conglomerates keep their job applications high and their salaries low by not offering accessibility, by requiring the expense of the city. The idea of the impoverished artist continues to proliferate because people think they need to live in a city that often impoverishes. They keep their books mid (I’m a millennial, am I using it right?) by continuing to publish the same Brooklyn sisters story, and they miss books that are “diverse” simply by deploying regional stereotypes as a merit of whether a book is good or not. This is how we get stuck with Hillbilly Elegy as the face of a region, read these instead (PLEASE) and definitely this one:

Not purposefully attempting to expand books you publish based on location threatens a single-story narrative of place that New York City will never be bereft of. And it’s lucrative, substantial, satisfying, successful to imagine place (in and of books) beyond the major cities, Hanif Abdurraqib could tell you so. Being specific about where you are and who you’re writing for produces sales. It’s inherently an intersectional buying practice. Place sells, and sells well.

(AND HERE IS THE BLARING REASON WE NEED SMALL PRESSES TO EXIST BECAUSE THEY DO THE WORK OF PUBLISHING REGIONAL AUTHORS, AND UNDERSTANDING PLACES BEYOND THE CITIES).

The other side of this narrative, which is also a part of the New York City narrative (subculture / subculture / subculture) is the appeal of the “Literary It Girl,” (yes I’m still talking about it because it continues to proliferate online)—the consensus on the model seems to be Joan Didion, but my girl TRAVELED. She had day notes. She left the place that felt safe in order to look at it anew from a road trip, from leaving.

It’s true anyway that we see more of a place sometimes when we visit rather than exploring the pieces we live daily—we’re routined creatures. Didon’s appeal is that she left. Woolf’s appeal is that she walked. They got into the honey between themselves and the place. Sometimes I wonder, like Tyra Banks often did on America’s Next Top Model, if the model is wearing the dress or the dress is wearing the model. Is New York City truly where the greatest living writers reside, or are the writers just stuck in the garment—reiterating and reiterating, turning New York City on spin because it’s what they know, so it’s what they like. New York City is choosing itself over and over and over again at the expanse of literary expansion. I get it, it’s where tradition lives, but isn’t the world so tired of tradition yet—when will tradition be boring? Just because something starts somewhere doesn’t mean it has to end there too.

(Queue all the agents saying, “I just couldn’t connect enough with the book to bring it to market”—connect is doing a lot of work here).

Didion remained unknown beyond what she put on the page and so people applied their ideas to her, they still do. Our current incarnation is the opposite, author branding—the character who speaks for the book rather than the book speaking for the writer.

The labels, the categories, have become more important for the book publicity machine than the writing itself (I can’t say this word without thinking of the diving board game where someone treading water yells a category as you jump and you must yell something that fits. Ice cream! Mint chocolate chip!). The tropification of book publicity (the campus novel, enemies to lovers, dark academia, a #metoo book)—it’s like commercial fishing vs. standing at the edge in waders for hours hoping something bites. It’s the fast fashion of book publishing. It’s the itemization and clearance bin of ideas. It, too, is boring—and I’m going to be honest, the shrinking down to tropisms makes a reader just as likely to turn down a book they could love as they would pick it up.

My favorite books, the books that last (and not every book needs to last, the book in The Cut seems to be specifically made for Gen Z which is an interesting endeavor in itself, and I do wonder if the author will continue the schtick and have the next book be, My Second Book), but not everything can be a schtick, and not fitting the brand (to me) is far more interesting than minimizing the human experience to do it. We can’t live in the schtick forever without losing the pulse.

You must know this by now, but I’m always choosing the box-less books. I’m always choosing the books made like little safes for unlocking—what it does / what it does / what it does?

I’d rather tell you what it doesn’t. Not this, babe. Not this.

As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here, and you can buy our books here! You can also see what we’re working on and contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

ICYMI: View the exclusive cover reveal of Christian J. Collier’s Greater Ghost in Electric Literature, read Jason K. Friedman on Cormac McCarthy in Literary Hub and checkout his interview with Savannah Morning News, a long tail review of Bianca by Eugenia Leigh in Massachusetts Review, a review of Jessica Jacobs’ unalone in Tablet Mag, two new reviews of Lady Wing Shot by Sara Moore Wagner—one in Rhino Poetry and one in Harbor Review, Jessica E. Johnson was on KBOO talking all things Mettlework, Susan Ito is up for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, Kristine Langley Mahler was interviewed in Full Stop about A Calendar is a Snakeskin, Kelly McMaster’s The Leaving Season reviewed in MER Literary, Tatiana Boria-Johnson and Rosanna Young Oh were both on the Ms. Magazine National Poetry Month list, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.

(Before I go further, shout out to Mila’s newsletter Black Lipstick, which you should subscribe to if you are not already).

Okay, I’m not going to lie. I read this essay in Nylon and I was an immediate HATER. So, let me get the angst out and then I’ll get to why it’s so successful. And my two cents is that we have to acknowledge literary friendships and “It Girl” status collapses outside of NYC (unless your Gabrielle Bates, all love to her too!)—Props to Zoe for some of the language in this paragraph, my go-to editor!

The NYC literary scene is arguably more capable of granting someone a novel in the current big four publishing landscape than the MFA literary scene. I SAID IT, no TAKE BACKS. Publishing is still very much a “who you know” type of endeavor. Good books sell everyday without those networks, but good books also get shelved everyday because there’s a lack of network. Sigh. (Platform, platform, platform, but it’s different than network, network, network, and further different from community, community, community, which I think is the word and testament of the Nylon piece).

It’s why (community! networks! locals!) you’ll see more books from the NYC MFA programs than anywhere else (this isn’t to say they didn’t earn it because those books are great!), and of course there are cons to living (and costs) in NYC.

But these lines, “Publications like Forever Magazine, The Drift, and Copy are publishing newer writers and hosting events that feel accessible to people outside of the MFA circuit. It’s a change led by a new class of literary It Girls: savvy writers who are redefining what it means to market a book — and in doing so, tackling the challenges of self-presentation that every artist faces.” While I support The Drift and Forever Mag (totally, both are great), I do think they represent a sort of NYC literati that isn’t available widely, and while it’s an alternate to the MFA circuit—it’s a VERY viable alternate. (Do people think that all MFA writers know each other because I left my MFA with a new best friend and a lot of publishing cred, but not a tight little band of other writers?).

Then, we get to the part about books as objects. It’s something that’s unique to the book industry that books are both objects (beauty, culture, class, decoration, etc) AND art that we engage with longer than most other forms of art. So, we purchase books both for aesthetic reasons + what they say about us as individuals, but also to consume LITERAL ART. This is ~very~ present in the Nylon essay with the fact that these authors are creating merch, swag, perfumes, cookies, keychains, stickers, magnets, book trailers, interesting book launch spaces (not bookstores but fun, community establishments), etc. But none of this is … new, or created by the (l)it girl, it’s simply a *scene.*

(Though I would argue here that we do have to support bookstores as a part of the publicity journey because that relationship should be two-sided and community-driven ESPECIALLY celebrities launching books who could do so much for their local booksellers).

Are Allie Rowbottom’s ideas for book publicity cool? Yes. Would any other author throw a party with name-power & have it co-hosted by a literary entity if they could afford to? Also, yes. Can every writer afford Etsy book miniatures and L.L. Bean totes? No. I immediately thought about the cost of L.L. Bean backpacks for my two kids when I read that.

And in the same breath to have this quote from Madeline Cash (whose book IS stellar, stellar, stellar, and the rest of her writing is too), “You have to sell yourself. I taught at Sarah Lawrence recently and the kids were like, ‘How do you become a writer?’ and I was like, ‘Have generational wealth,’” says Cash. “If you don't rich parents, being a writer is one part talent and two parts networking. Being a writer in 2023 is also being an agent and editor and PR girl” in the same line-up with all these bought-marketing tactics is something. I DO agree that marketing AND talent help boost a book though (arguably a magic concoction of both).

It’s like the advice is be-rich, hot, or buy time. Because networking and publicity are TIME jobs. You don’t necessarily need CASH but you do need TIME. And working writers simply don’t have that and publishers are giving less and less of it.

While Allie Robottom did a great job culling the social media (re: instagram) audience for the launch of Aesthetica, she’s also in what I’m going to call a LITERARY COVEN. As is everyone quoted in this Nylon essay. Which I’m going to define as a group of writers who have come together as friends and community members to support one another as literary entrepreneurs. I use this term rather than writers because I think the idea is that these women are “doing it all” in a way that makes them not only writers, but sales people. (See the Cash quote above). This coven is what you hope to get from an MFA but most of us leave an MFA like this tweet from Erin below).

They support the success of each project through ACTUAL, TANGIBLE literary work and community.

I’m going to be really creepy here, this is your warning. Like seventh grade trying to find out your chatroom boyfriend’s real face on Ask Jeeves creepy.

Going through the reviews of Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom. Samantha Leach of Bustle reviewed it, she liked Sophia’s tweet about the essay and is in this friend group. Nada Alic, blurbed Allie’s book—she’s named in the essay. Marlowe Granados blurbed the book, she’s in the essay. Delia Cai who recently wrote about “reaching peak it girl” for Vanity Fair, interviewed Allie (thematically aligned—good publicity), Astra Mag printed a review (RIP, but Nadja Speigelman was the editor there and she’s a Sackett alum, same for Rowbottom), Emmeliene Cline wrote about Aesthetica for Cleveland Review of Books, wrote an essay “On It Girls” for Catapult last year (and I’m so sad it’s gone because it’s a great essay), Shelby Hinte (a brilliant editor at Write or Die, a cool girl adjacent magazine for sure) interviewed Rowbottom for Electric Literature, Genevieve Hudson shares an agent with Emmeliene Cline (and Chelsea Hodson and many literary cool girls) and wrote about Aesthetica for LARB, Brock Colyar interviewed Rowbottom for The Cut, they are friends on Instagram and Brock profiled Cory Kennedy NY MAG the “literary it girl” previously photographed by Cobrasnake (as mentioned in June’s Nylon piece as the photographer at one of the parties hosted by Forever Mag), and Madeline Cash (founder of Forever Mag—also profiled by June in February for Nylon) interviewed Rowbottom for BOMB, they all did a Guerrilla Reading in LA together, they all read together for Stories at Echo Park, and Sophia chose Madeline’s book as a “21 Books We’re Most Excited About in 2023” (again, for Nylon), while Nada and Chelsea blurbed the book.

What I’m saying is … the “It Girl” is really an “It Coven.” A group of writers supporting one another from their various platforms over and over, for every one of their books or through their media jobs, in a way that helps those books reach readers—and tells readers, I am in this crowd / coven / scene, and my book is in conversation with these other books that you loved. In fact, I, the author, am literally in conversation with these other writers. These connections are honestly a publicist’s dream. But I wish we were more honest about them existing?

It’s what we *should* all be doing as writers, right? Networking, connections, the big freshwater pond of “literary ecosystem,” but they’re doing it at a level that is arguably more successful because of connections, REAL connections and friendships, good agents and industry professionals that can make those connections, and support (and let’s be honest, because of NYC).

What it isn’t, I guess I want to say, is some secret sauce, or even necessarily $CASHOLA$ (though the parties have to be so much fun, and I’m sure they were covered by big media, and I’m sure they were expensive). The essay is a little bit girl bossy, BUT that’s kind of the point? Except the new generation of girl bosses isn’t some Glossier lone wolf (I haven’t read the book yet, but I want to), it’s a girl group.

And that, my friends, can be created in so many ways. Just look at the Spice Girls. My advice: start building yours.

As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here. Request books for review & interview & feature here, add yourself to our reviewer list here, and buy our books here! You can also contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

ICYMI: Watch & listen Jehanne Dubrow and Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach in conversation about Circling History: What Carries the Body on Brown Bag Lit, Kate Doyle was in Zibby’s podcast this weekend and published this essay on young women’s stories in Chicago Review of Books, listen to Susan Kiyo Ito reading from the opening of her memoir in Poets & Writers, an awesome essay on body autonomy for children by Margo Steines and her partner Nic in Slate, Donna Spruijt-Metz is a 5 Over 50 in Poets & Writers, Beth Kephart’s My Life in Paper was reviewed by Foreword Books, Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Dear Outsiders was reviewed in The Rumpus, Sean Enfield, author of Holy American Burnout! was on Talk of the School, Holly M. Wendt, author of Heading North, was profiled in Lebtown, and more can be found on our Instagram and Twitter.

And I would have thrown myself on the floor like my toddler mid-tantrum, but I was old and bitter and MFA-level insecure and instead I went back home and deleted my whole account, never to be heard from again.

I still kick myself for quitting bookstagram, especially now that I’m a publicist and I had 10k followers there. But I quit before it overtook me completely, before I became a needy influencer (though once I did get a black bar of soap from Simon & Schuster to go along with an Alice Hoffman prequel to Practical Magic, which left my apartment’s astronaut-sized shower with a cool black drip for months—so punk rock for a Bookstagrammer). I had already become someone who sat in front of the same bookshelf with that orange sepia tone filter I paid for on VSCO and took pictures of books I never planned on reading for aesthetic purposes. I was already in several instagram pods to try to trick the algorithm. If I told you now who was in some of those groups (big time book influencers, and two of them work in different publishing sectors), you would laugh.

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Who did I want to be at that time? None other than Caroline Calloway herself.

Caroline Calloway and Kate Baer are the two influencers I think of as being writers first and influencers second, or people who somehow use their aesthetic-appeal to boost writing that they would have eventually turned to anyway. The writing is the center.

What I loved about Caroline Calloway was the fearlessness. She has NEVER feared a pivot. A full delete. A disappearance. A transformation. An enclave. She’s chosen when to appear, and when to stay hidden behind a reception desk in Sarasota. She’s done cerebral porn (her words), had an Orlean level obsession with wearing orchids in her hair, sold grape seed oil as facial magic to thousands calling it “Snake Oil,” had an essay by her ex-bestfriend go viral two days after her dad’s death, partied in what I imagine is the underneath of a long wooden table full of President residue in one of Harvard’s secret societies, stopped paying rent to “live in luxury” and then sublet her painted apartment (all white, including the microwave and except for the royal blue bookshelves) to Rachel Rabbit White and Nico Walker, and made a cat into an adult babydoll. She really deserves a TLC show.

The thing is, we’ve watched her be able to (with a cat in hats), make relevant the stories of young woman, make people care about what they have always told us is trivial or depthless, by taking a platform no one really knew how to use, and making it into her thing. She’s admitted to buying bots early on, I get it. Book people pay for a lot of advertising, you can’t hate the game. Instagram, an aesthetic platform, changed in Caroline Calloway’s use (if you don’t know, Caroline would write these winding captions from her time at Oxford about love, gowns & balls, and affairs). She was doing Sally Rooney before Sally Rooney. Am I allowed to say that Caroline Calloway walked so Sally Rooney could run? (Have you watched the Sally Rooney debates on Youtube? or read this essay on being a debate star?)

And in the middle of all this she got a book deal (the story goes that she tricked an agent into a meeting and then sold him on the idea. I love this alternative Mad Men universe she lives in). And then she cancelled the book deal. And then she owed Flatiron a couple hundred thousand dollars.

But last week, we got a book, not the original “School Girl” manuscript which may or may not have been ghostwritten in proposal by her ex-bestfriend Natalie Beach, but a book by Calloway, titled Scammer, that she’s been promising for years. YEARS.

I have not read the book because I haven’t figured out a reason to justify the $65 yet, but I laughed when she was sending to critics a few days (maybe even two days—a whole weekend) before she was sending to everyone who ordered a copy. I thought, “doesn’t she know how publicity works?”

Duh.

It’s genius. She’s been everywhere writers tell me they want to be: Vogue, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New Statesman, VICE. Giving critics little time makes it a race. it also makes every piece about the book say something along the lines of, “I stayed up all night to finish this” or “truly a book you could read in one sitting.” Because, if you want to compete with other outlets who are surely going to cover the book, you have to … read through the night.

She not only controlled the narrative, the timing, but the reading experience. Now, she’s already infamous so this wouldn’t work for a normie, BUT it reveals something to me about publicity. It’s really easy (across ALL publishing roles) to get stuck in the routine. It’s easy to do the expected and hope it lands. It’s easy to check a box and say “I pitched this person,” without really thinking about much beyond “fingers crossed!” It’s easy to play inside the game.

But Caroline has never, except maybe her NYC apartment, been a fan of the box. She’s an ask forgiveness, not permission gal. It’s the way I like to look at book publicity too.

A tangent: Caroline also released Scammer a few days before her … rival (?) Natalie Beach—they have competing narratives of ghostwriting Caroline’s Instagram and book proposal, both have signed movie rights over to their story (Calloway’s going to Lena Dunham and Beach’s to Netflix), and Beach has written about Calloway’s callousness, which Calloway has (in a pretty gross way about sexual assault) continued to dig into. Natalie’s debut Adult Drama, sold after the viral Cut essay “I was Caroline Calloway.” Genius. By both of them. Natalie got her dream of a book deal, which hasn’t been squandered by Caroline’s release (it had a write up in Elle, Memoirland published an essay, WaPo reviewed it next to Scammer with obvious bias toward Calloway, but it was fun to learn that Becca Rothfield is a Calloway fangirl). A little bit of publishing revenge on both sides, Calloway biding her time to steal Beach’s release thunder and Beach writing a viral essay about a friendship breakup. (They’re the worst kind of breakup, so I get it. Honor it).

I surprisingly haven’t heard Twitter talk much about the timing of the book releases or the obvious publishing duel that’s happening, but the whole story makes me wonder about book publicity and sensationalism. Has the goal AND is the goal, at its highest success rate, to create a sensation? Has the goal AND is the goal, to make your publisher design a bucket hat around your next novel, convince you to book a stay at Hotel Termush (shout out to Kat Howard who remembered this exactly).

Earlier today, I was reading the Goodreads review-bombing interview in New York Times, and Cecilia Rabess says something really interesting. When she faced a review-bomb of her debut book Everything’s Fine six months pre-publication, she said, “I was concerned about the risk of contagion,” and I had a moment like … isn’t contagion exactly what we want in publicity?

And this is fueled by the internet and algorithms, but rings a little true for the “no publicity is bad publicity” folks, don’t we love a little contagion in our book publicity?

We (the internet) loved this scathing take-down of the phrase “boy mom” in Washington Post, it went viral with the speed of light, moms banning together to say, “not me, not that.” Contagion. Natalie Beach got a book deal due to proximity and the obsession that is Caroline Calloway, “Cat Person” had the slimy guy & central question on sexual line-crossing, Fuck the Bread had the pandemic exhaustion, and Bad Art Friend, the cruelty of catty writing groups. At the center of all of these, now that I think about it, is a sprinkle (or a dousing) of spite. There’s a grudge, a thorn, a snag.

It’s how Caroline Calloway is selling Scammer. She’s leaning into the contagion. I’m not saying it’s right, all of this is a question of a writer’s boundaries within and around their work, especially once it moves from writing to publishing, and out of their hands. I mean this in the nicest way possible—but from cover to copy to reader’s expectations and responses, it is no longer the writer’s book once a contract is signed, at least never again completely. (Melissa Febos has a great essay on writing boundaries in Body Work & Lilly Dancyger wrote a thread recently about it here).

And I find myself thinking about that red line a lot in book publicity—how juicy, how unpredictable, what question, what kernel, what tiny & twisted hint could I slip into a pitch about a book that makes it, at least, a must open. A need to know. A need to find out. A scavenger hunt. A discovery. It doesn't have to be a thorny-something, but it has to be a little uncomfortable, a little wanton, a little unsaid, a little vulnerable, a little dirt under the fingernail. A secret trap, if you will.

I’d love to know:

What’s an automatic pick-up for you? (Word, cover, phrasing, theme, topic, blurber, copy, trope, etc?) What makes you say yes to one book in a bookstore instead of just carrying it around and ultimately putting it back? What conversation around a book makes you want to read it?

Maggie Smith was already famous when this short excerpt of her memoir came out in The Cut, but didn’t it make you want to read more? Didn’t it feel like a little taste and you wanted the whole meal? THAT is what makes me grab a book. When I can tell, if I scratch a little bit, it’ll open me up like the earth’s core.

—

As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here. Request books for review & interview & feature here, add yourself to our reviewer list here, and buy our books here! You can also contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

ICYMI: I’ve been doing backlogged prompts in Nancy Reddy’s Write More, Be Less Careful (highly recommend!), Ross White is going on tour, Jen Funk’s Fantasy of Loving the Fantasy was reviewed in Boston Globe (this is the SEXIEST poetry collection I’ve read in a long, long time), Jane Kuo’s In The Beautiful Country was selected for the First Partner’s Summer Book Club, Jenny Sadre-Orafai was interviewed in Creative Independent, Kate Doyle and Margo Steines are both on Debutiful’s Most Anticipated of 2023 Part 2 list, KB Brookins wrote a sonic bibliography for Freedom House in Oxford American, and more!

Maybe long form journalism is back, and we’ll return to an attention span that dare I say, feels luxurious.

[I’ve been reading Booth by Karen Joy Fowler for about a month (thank you library renewals), but finally got a physical copy of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and my librarian so gently said, “a little bit, a little bit” getting quieter the second time, when I asked her if I should be nervous about the potential for tears.]

Maybe instead of scrolling before bed we’ll pick up a novel that’s been called “a tomb” in one blurb or another.

Maybe there’s actually no void to shout into? Tell me why the antonym of void is fulfillment? Maybe we’ll be fulfilled.

Maybe in the used bookstore, when we play bookshelf roulette—close your eyes and point, close your eyes and skim the spines with a finger, close your eyes and have a friend walk you around the store until you say stop, to pull out the first book you touch—we won’t worry that we haven’t seen a publishers marketplace announcement, a cover reveal, or a too-humble-it’s-gotta-be-a-performance-we’re-not-all-that-shy, “I’m not great at talking about my work, but if y’all might consider preordering…”

Maybe the fact that we never got an edit button will make us less likely to judge everyone for grammatical errors (ugh, grammar).

Maybe this means the hand-sell will reign once again. (And if the hand-sell becomes *the sell* maybe we’ll get more independent bookstores in bookstore deserts).

Maybe someone will create a newsletter just like this one that we all read that’s titled, “the best things I’ve read this week.”

[See also: maybe we’ll actually read the essays in Memoir Monday, or LZ Sunday Paper, or The Sunday Long Read, or I’ll finally subscribe to Griefbacon]

Maybe we’ll return to having favorite literary magazines. Are we firing up those subscriptions? Is that the sound like a neighborhood of generators I hear, or is that just my anxiety humming along?

Maybe we’ll value our librarians recommendations, or our teachers, or our professors.

Maybe we’ll fight MORE for each other in “real life,” alongside on the internet. (Have you pledged to HCPUnion yet?) Same for accountability, generosity, transparency.

Maybe we’ll have to shitpost in our group chats.

Maybe I’ll miss all the tweets I bookmarked for crowdsourcing books about a certain topic or theme, bookstores with the best poetry sections, syllabus creation, or anything created & shared with community in mind.

And maybe I’ll miss the ones with prompts too.

Maybe bookstagram will have another boom, though the bust I feel when I look at how hard I worked to make my page aesthetically pleasing and hazy orange in 2017 burns in my chest.

Maybe someone (me? no, not me) will create a Tumblr for those “staff recommendation” notes in bookstores and they’ll take submissions.

Maybe we’re not free because everyone tries Mastadon, or Tumblr, or makes a LiveJournal joke.

Maybe you read this.

Maybe we’ll recognize people outside of the tiny circle of their profile image. (Are we all MySpace Tom’s to one another?)

(While incredibly dry) Maybe more of us should read Merchants of Culture and look at publishing before the big blue bird. Though it was mostly singular (white) men following their singular (white man) tastes, so, not great. And agents, for all the tweeting about them being the literary gatekeepers, have only really been actors in the publishing playing field for fifty or so years in the capacity and role they currently play. Lots of players will be making adjustments, and probably need to. BUT still, the books everyone wants to publish, are books that become backlist. Books that live a long shelf-life for a long period of time. And I’m going to be honest, our current publicity cycles do not cater to this hope. So, perhaps without the big bird and his musk (and with the changes that losing Twitter would create in “content” and “copy,”) publicity would (and could!) become something altogether different. Maybe media outlets worry less about content (pithy shopping lists! galleries! quizzes!) and turn back to making space for saying something.

Maybe print magazines will gain the traction they’ve lost over the last few years because the ability to share on Twitter is less of a push to publish, publish, publish online.

Maybe there will be a “quiet book” boom because not everything will have to be broken into a bite size, Tweetable, idea or concept or line. (Though I don’t want to lose the flash boom we’re in right now either).

Maybe we summon in a golden age of meaning making, harkening through a golden age of essay collections by meaning-makers, and then ~a writing renaissance~

Maybe we lose access to everyday human history—something that has been mostly inaccessible to the everyman at every other point in history. (sigh).

Maybe we give people time (& nuance! complexity! everyone’s favorite MFA synonyms of these two words!) to make, to mean.

Maybe I, as a publicist, lose access to quickly seeing who’s where and doing what based on their Twitter bio, and maybe we all lose access to “calls for pitches” or submission openings or the beautiful transparency of examples (put them on your websites!). Lately, for example, I’ve been collecting freelancing guides. Here are a few: Chelsea’s, Freelancing with Tim pitching guides, & Aidan Moher’s pitch & sell freelance features.

[And here is Siân Griffith’s list of online writing workshops too.]

Maybe some writers will get breathing room to work on a larger project because they’re not consumed with a ceaseless need to constantly share new shorter work to feel relevant.

Maybe virality dies. (And then we can’t use that to bet on book deals three years out either. How will we survive it? You mean to tell me there would be no … “Cat Person” … book deal? After I explained the WHOLE phenomenon and the accompanying “Cat Person draws specific details from my life” to my non-Twitter-having best friend who STILL does not get it. I’ll give up Cat Person, but you can never take Crane Wife from me, over my cold, dead Twitter form. Anyway Cat Person was published in The New Yorker y’all, it wouldn’t have suffered a loss if Twitter never discovered it).

Maybe publishers will stop asking about platform when they really mean follower count, even though engagement is what matters.

Maybe I’ll have anxiety about how to bring in new clients without a flashy 10k next to my name. (I do). Maybe though I’ll ride on the hope that I’ve built something that stands on its own already.

Maybe engagement is something we stop talking about anyway, especially as a reason to offer someone a book deal.

Maybe I’ll miss tagging one of my clients in a thread and seeing a comic appear a few hours later.

Maybe we do more groundwork for our books. And I don’t mean send more emails. I mean we (publishing) actually stops betting with our little P&L sheets based on competitive titles. And we stop seeing success as a metric we determine by looking at what books parented-in a space for the one we’re considering. And instead we acknowledge the web is a wide world and audience is a word that we’ve flattened into the idea of performer, then spectator, when really a reading audience (and my closest friend Tory Tarpley would kill me if I talked shit about cinema, so throw in theater goers, and film goers, and museum goers, and concert goers) is one person seeking out a form of art to feel (whether we know what to expect or not), and that is so often what marketing and sales and publicity misses. I won’t even say we look to art for connection because some of us have been handed over and over and over again, art that refuses to see us. We simply want to feel. And where, where is feeling in your excel spreadsheet? And how often have you seen a tweet (a thread!) that hit some thumping part of you, only to wish you could read more?

Maybe we’re reminded that the relationship between writer and reader isn’t one-sided but reciprocal.

Maybe there will be something like The Grind, but for sharing books & work.

Maybe someone will teach the class: How to take what you wanted to write in a Twitter thread and make it into a book proposal.

Maybe we’ll have another boom in books about taking walks.

Maybe we won’t have a place to complain about the think pieces about the demise of “big bird.”

Maybe, maybe, maybe we stop gauging the power of what we’re saying by the number of likes it has. (There is in fact no algorithm to determine how well a book sold based on Goodreads reviews or mentions on social media—so many readers aren’t on Goodreads, aren’t on Twitter, have never made a social media profile at all. Though, truth be told, my dad is asking for the new Colleen Hoover for Christmas (& my mom cannot get her hands on a copy, but Colleen Hoover shares an editor with Emme Lund so I’ve been tempted to ask Emme’s editor Mel, but then that’s weird, so I haven’t—publishing is such a small world, y’all), my cousin told my dad about Hoover and she also has no Twitter, no TikTok, only a Super Target).

Maybe Target will open its big red bullseye shelves to independent presses if a publicist can convince them. (New 2023 goal unlocked).

Alas, Reels will still just be uploaded TikToks, but entire Instagram tweet-meme accounts will have to actually become funny.

Maybe Taco Bell Quarterly starts mailing custom sauce packets with what they would have tweeted.

Maybe I’ll write that book I’ve been talking about. Maybe you will too.

—

I said something to a class last week that I had never actually said aloud previously. I said I spent ten years trying to be “discovered” by the publishing industry. After I graduated from state school with my English degree, I was blogging, I started a Bookstagram, and eventually—say 2014, I had garnered enough followers and engagement on both Wordpress and Instagram (about 10k) that big four publishers started sending me books and PR packages. I got personalized notes on company letterhead, and so I reviewed their books, featured them on my pages, etc. I thought each new publicist in my email was a step closer to getting into this industry I so desperately wanted to be a part of without moving to New York City. I expected them to eventually be like, “wow, she’s good, let’s hire her.” That, of course, didn’t happen. Instead, I cold emailed and became a thirty-something intern and apprenticed my way up.

By the time I got my first paying job in big publishing, I had edited on a literary magazine, ran social media for a lit mag, audited MFA classes in my undergraduate program, had a book blog for ten years, had such a successful Bookstagram that someone in my MFA program started calling me “Bookstagram” instead of my name so I deleted my account. (Yes, I could kick myself for that decision now), I was studying in an MFA program, I had taught high school English for six years, had lived in Australia and worked in a bookstore there—I had done arguably every publishing-adjacent job I could think of, and no one came calling.

And I think (from the DMs I’ve gotten the last few days), that the big question on a lot of writerly minds is, how will I get my work in front of people (discoverability!) without the ability to share it on Twitter? And friends, I don’t know yet. What I do know is that writers are agile. We’re great at rerouting, revising, reenvisioning.

I love being told something is impossible. In the way of Alice, I eat that bull before breakfast. Everything is sellable. People want these to come back in stock. What we’re not going to do in this newsletter is conflate, “we published this” meaning “we printed it on paper and made it available for people to buy at a link” with selling. That is not selling. That is making available. That is a contractual obligation. That is (let's be honest if you’re using print-on-demand) dropshipping. That is not selling a book.

Here’s what I know to be true about pitching (debut!) collections—essays, stories, and poetry—if you don’t know where it lives, and therefore don’t know its communities, it will not sell. Reaching an expected community, the author’s community, will help you broaden that reach later, publicity is both a long and short game. If you treat a collection like an extended literary magazine, it will not sell. If your collection has no hook, it will not sell. If you don’t reach out to people about the book, it will not magically reach its audience.

Collections are a greater ask on an editor and reader because where a novel has one entrance and exit, collections have several. Collections are a Sarah Winchester house (I am so happy I get to link to this Joni Tevis essay here which is one of my favorite openings I’ve ever read). With a story collection, while you’re asking someone to spend less time in a certain world, or the stories can be read in one sitting, you’re also asking for more emotional investment at the same time. You’re asking readers to connect with more characters, to buy into more places, to get to an emotion quicker and leave it quicker too. I would argue story and poetry collections ask for more trust and buy-in. And essay collections ask that you invest in equal measure (sometimes more) in thought & emotional tenor.

While this isn’t always true for essay collections because they’re often more topically concrete, they are usually asking readers for the burden of thought. (oh no!) As in, essay collections are not an escape, they are not entertainment either, so you’re knocking off two reasons lots of readers read. Essay collections seek readers who want to think, who read for exploration, meditation, reflection, object permanence, history, intellect, musing—it’s a far different reading experience than most anything else we ask of readers. Essay collections also tend to take longer to read because they’re a study, not a immersion.

Think about it like you’re choosing a restaurant, (sorry novelists), a novel is fast-food. A memoir is a home-cooked meal. An essay collection is fine-dining (I hate that this description makes them feel less accessible, because this is an argument of big publishing that I disagree with, but for the sake of the metaphor I’ll go with it). A story collection is tapas, or a trip to the State Fair where you eat way too much and everything is “the main meal” (not to be confused with appetizers or sides, story collections are not short because they want to be a novel, they are short with purpose). A poetry collection is your after dinner mint, or coffee, or drinks, a delicate dessert or maybe even a lava cake, perhaps a palette cleanser throughout.

Anyway, I digress. So, let’s digress more. I love a tangent.

I love Tim Gunn, and therefore I watch Making the Cut on Amazon Prime. That man’s dressing down is a turtleneck and ironed soft khakis. Couldn’t be me. My mother-in-law said yesterday “you even put makeup on!” for a meeting I had. But on Making the Cut, Jeremy Scott (head designer, and kind of an asshole, of Moschino) always says that collections, even a capsule collection, must have cohesion. He says the word “cohesive” every. single. episode. I found this write-up in Vogue about his Fall 2022 collection interesting from a publishing perspective because in order to introduce the slideshow images of the collection—the writer used a historical (timely) event (“the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine”) to introduce what Jeremy Scott was trying to do and how he aligned or didn’t with other designers that season. Something a good publicist is trying to do: create an event around a book, notice and insert a writer into a trend, understand the cyclical nature of history and news, plant stories, follow a current, and link to buzz.

This example of COHESION is true for a story collection as well. And it has to be more than “Author A wrote this story collection so the stories resonate together.” Okay, but how? How do they harmonize? These questions don’t matter so much about structure of stories or essays (unless how they harmonize is through being experimental in structure, using diagrams, being a collection of hermit crab somethings, all written like a bike spoke, you get the idea … ), but what matters is the MATTER. What’s the unifying factor. (I will say if you want to publish a collection with big four, you need to have cohesion in structure—they’re unlikely to publish any collection with flash & novella & a list & a script).

I’ve been working on some incredible books on the agenting side and the publicity side. Here’s some language from each.

Here’s a part of what I sent to editors when I pitched Erin Slaughter’s story collection, A Manual For How To Love Us (forthcoming March 2023 from Harper Perennial):

If A Manual for How to Love Us got an HBO special it would be filmed in all bisexual lighting. Reminiscent of Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls and Samantha Hunt’s The Dark Dark, Slaughter proves when a poet takes on prose (yes, she’s already two collections deep), what results is a mastery of subtle brutality amidst the fantastic. Here you’ll find Florida women forced to turn inward to that small basal ganglia, or what pop science calls their “lizard brain” to gain control of their lives. Set mostly in America’s armpit, these are women living on the edge. Fight, fly, feed, freeze, fornicate—you name it, they’ll raise you one. In this weird and unpredictable collection Erin Slaughter dissects the Florida woman trope by queering the domestic, and honoring the feral in every body.

The harmony I was going for is queer & animalistic women, grieving. It’s also the perfect road trip book, so place is important (though it’s more Gulf Coast and drive-by Southern towns than Florida—we were in Florida Man times when I was pitching). But I was hoping some of the words and lines felt like a little electric shock.

Here’s part of my pitch for Erin Langner’s essay collection, Souvenirs from Paradise (Zone 3 Press, October 3, 2022).

Souvenirs from Paradise deals with secrets and nods to writers of the American West, but it's also a book of aesthetics, the length of meaning between semi-permanent and forever, and what's blurry between entertainment and reality.

As the particular brand of Vegas excess and perpetual youth rubs up against the devastation of the last few years, Langner circles mortality by revealing how escape through art, architecture, pop culture, and Vegas all maintain their gloss. This is a book of hope equivalent to finding a keychain with your name on it at a rest stop convenience store. 

The harmony I am going for is this collection uses nostalgia of a shared place most of us at least know of, to look at the mortality in her own life and which currently frames all our lives.

We can’t publicize every story or essay in the collection, so instead we choose three(ish) standout stories to highlight that *represent* the larger collection. This is why essay collections are often sold on proposal—the idea & the aboutness matters to the publicity of the book (plus, the platform for essayists, but I’m ignoring this part for now).

In a meeting last week, I heard an editor say that they didn’t want to use a specific story in a collection as an excerpted publicity piece because it’s the most speculative of the collection and so doesn’t quite represent the whole. What they’re really saying is: will readers who aren’t into speculative stories read this story and then disregard the whole collection because its beyond their boundaries?

So, we choose three pieces that show some sort of movement within the larger whole. Or we choose three pieces that speak to three audiences for the collection but could be rubbed together and leave a similar residue. Or we choose three pieces that speak to the largest theme (often the theme that coincides with what the title is telling readers).

Rather than describing pieces or using a sentence-synopsis, sometimes I use pitch space to talk about specific emotional moments within a collection.

Sometimes I try to connect to our current time and place (again that big question of all publicity: why this book & why now?)

Here’s one of my pitches for Kristine Langley Mahler’s essay collection, Curing Season: Artifacts (WVU Press, October 1, 2022).

Curing Season is a personal story of trying to belong during childhood and the grief of losing a best friend, combined with the history of a place (in this case Eastern NC), and the longing for elsewhere. As an adult, Kristine is still baffled by her desire to be accepted into the cultural community of Eastern North Carolina when it feels both at odds and parallel to her pioneer-like upbringing in Oregon, and her current life in the middle American plains. All three have long histories, all three are rural, but each means living within different levels of exclusivity. There are so many books about assimilation, but Curing Season feels especially apt as we dissect what it means to have "settled traditions" and "settled beliefs," particularly in our current news cycle. Langley Mahler untangles, beside her own close friendships, what might seem unsettling within small towns that still act and feel settled, steeped in tradition.

Notice that I didn’t talk about Kristine’s expert use of essay forms in this pitch. I wasn’t pitching writer-readers here, so the way she played with structure wasn’t important. But Holly M. Wendt wrote an incredible review of the collection’s forms in Ploughshares Blog.

Sometimes I go for vibes. (What’s the academic/writerly/fancy word for vibes, someone help me out in the comments).

I’m going to be honest, I’ve pitched Alice Kaltman’s collection in several different ways the last few months. I felt like I couldn’t get right how hilarious and surprising this book is. At first I was pitching: if Diane Keaton (and all her characters) became a book, it would be Almost Deadly, Almost Good. Then, I was focused on how it’s a linked story collection and it’s built with a similar ladder format to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas—I love the game of clue that is a linked story collection. Zoe said it was the book equivalent to Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” so I used that for a while. I used the phrase “whiplash humor” a few times (and then hated myself). I used Alice’s background as a psychotherapist to prove her prowess for characterization. What I’m saying is that Alice Kaltman is the definition of fun storytelling, and although the book has the (loose!) hook of the seven deadly sins and seven heavenly virtues, the idea of that seemed to steer people to a religious/spiritual/philosophical state of mind, which is … not what I wanted.

The pitch that really landed was Real Housewives:

I'm reaching out about writer and psychotherapist, Alice Kaltman, who has a new book forthcoming that is the literary equivalent of a Real Housewives of New Jersey finale.

Kaltman’s newest collection, Almost Deadly, Almost Good (Word West Press, November 22, 2022) is a linked story collection for fans of reality tv, bad mothers, bad boys & baddies, and messy, meaty, mirror-selfie characters. With a combination of Christine Schutt and Bud Smith, you’ll find yourself in Kaltman territory—a wicked escape, all without commercials!

And sometimes, like here, what you see for Alice’s pitch is my whole pitch (+ what line about man camps and Teresa’s boyfriend, now husband). People are tired, an email full of blurbs isn’t going to get read. What do you want and why do you want it, get to the point.

I do find that the opposite is true for poetry collections though, you can be all breathy and breadthy with a poetry collection pitch. Poets, and poetry reviewers, want all your little words of why, and they want them to feel similarly atmospheric of the collection. They’re my favorite because I get to be lush.

Something I love/hate about pitching poetry collections is that there’s this strange belief about poetry that you need a special badge to read and review it. A local NPR book critic told me (this week) that the poetry collection I pitched sounded so interesting, but they “aren’t qualified to review poetry.” I would love to see the qualifications on that list.

There’s this idea that poetry is insular, poets review poetry, poets read poetry, but no one outside of the community does so, or at least no non-writers are reading poetry. Bleh! One of my big goals at Pine State is to broaden the reach of poets and poetry, (and other “unsellable” books), and try to crack the “mainstream” code. I’ll keep y’all updated.

Where do I start this newsletter? I think I’ll start with the fact that as we enter red scarf “all too well” season, when quite literally, nothing is well, a lot of us are looking for comfort. My client Daniel Dockery (his book Monster Kids is out October 4th!) has a specific day where he breaks out the pumpkin spice cold brew creamer. Great British Baking Show has returned with a new crumble of homebakers (two episodes in and I’m rooting for Sandro, but I think Syabira can BAKE), and we’re thinking about the movies we’re going to rewatch during the on-again-off-again holiday season. In my family, it’s a Nora Ephron jam like You’ve Got Mail, and in spooky season it’s the dueling witch classics Hocus Pocus and Practical Magic.

Turns out for comfort, patterns are incredible self-soothing. But we knew this right? (all the doomed to repeat quotes). Archetypes exist for a reason. Vonnegut created his eight story shapes. Fifth grade teachers are talking to students about four types of conflict. See the pattern? Typecasting. Archetype. Stereotype. In her book, Body Work, Melissa Febos grapples with archetypes and fighting against the narrative we’ve been told about ourselves (and we believe about ourselves) to find new meanings. Here she is chatting with Sarah Appleton Pine for Ploughshares talking about the comfort of grafting.

Not only is it comforting to rewatch things we’ve loved in the past. There are other reasons why we turn to familiar stories: nostalgia, choice and decision fatigue, familiar escape, emotional expression, the bubble of safety, and psychological payoff. The books that are most successful on Tiktok, are also accessible, familiar narratives. And they are usually successful anyway because of this. I’m not sure why we’re writing about Booktok being this great equalizer in the New York Times. It is, in my opinion, yet another mechanism of big publishing.

Madeline Miller, a scholar of Greek, twists Greek myths—something, I would argue, the American school system has held up over other types of stories. The Song of Achilles is a book about Achilles and Patroclus. It’s beautiful, intimate, heartbreaking, has every element of a good drama (I loved it & it has unexpected plot elements), but at center, it’s a story we know well. Colleen Hoover is arguably writing what Grey’s Anatomy and Friends are to television, but with books. She has a formula (again, not a bad thing) and it works. It’s highly dramatic, romantic, full of tension, and they’re entertaining romps. Same with Emily Henry—one of her books is literally titled Beach Read, a trope in trope packaging (happy! bright! beach!). Sally Rooney also falls into this camp (I don’t need to hear the arguments that she’s more literary), she’s THE drama.

This side of Tiktok is also really white. It’s part of the self-fulfilling publishing prophecy about what sells. It’s why every editor is telling me they’re looking for book club and upmarket reads. It’s not a booktok machine, it’s a trope machine, it’s a convention machine, it’s a tradition machine.

Booktok is broken-up in a similar way to all of publishing. It’s mass audience / commercial (romance / thrillers / mysteries) + “traditional” book club readers and then … the rest. BUT Booktok isn’t just these already-bestsellers becoming even larger, there are niches to Booktok.

There is Literarytok (where Carmen Maria Machado reigns) and other forms of genre-driven booktok, Classics Booktok is HUGE, spicy Booktok, LibraryTok, YA Booktok, Leigh Bardugo has a new book out Booktok, identity-driven booktoks, my personal favorite is Sapphic Booktok, and there’s Nathan who is holding nonfiction booktok up on his shoulders.

That’s not totally true about Nathan—the girlies are all reading Atomic Habits and The Body Keeps Score because if we have one thing, it’s anxiety. These books also do really well on Tiktok: your organization books, your books for bullet journal babes, for 75 Hard Tiktok, your books on manifestation, books for tarot and witches and alternative spiritual lives, books for girls who go on Hot Girl Walks (the new it girl narrative?). What I mean to say is that Booktok is, like a bookstore, a categorical system of finding books. Where your ideals live, what your personal narrative says, who and what you connect with, is where you’ll be finding and buying books.

I have also started to see Booktok infiltrate publishing. In three ways, one that I have an opinion on, and another that I’m in wait-and-see mode, and a third that I’m watching happen in my job.

The first is that agents are looking for folks on Booktok who want to write books. Plain and simple. If you have a big platform, you’re being poached by agents. The number for Instagram that publishers told me a few years ago was 300k followers, but that’s before we were looking closer at engagement, so who knows what the successful booktok-to-book-deal numbers are.

The second thing I’ve seen change since Booktok gained speed is the way we’re describing books in both synopsis and publicity pitch. Publishers are turning toward using more trope language to sell readers on a book. And by trope language I mean, “enemies to lovers.” We’ve seen these in Twitter pitch contests, but we’re starting to see them as part of the book’s sales package, which is interesting. It’s another way to categorize, sure, but it means we’re reading within a mold smaller than genre. We want to know that the story (the plot) will fit an expectation.

I don’t think most of us are thinking about why we read, it’s more of a subconscious brew, but I wonder what it might look like if we really sat down and tried to figure it out. If it might read like a compass through our personal histories, if it might point to who we are, what we believe, the narratives we’re telling ourselves about ourselves and the world. I’m curious how the why we read question answers our own patterns.

How does, for instance, the why at our core and the sales packaging of books we read, match up?

The third way that Booktok is influencing the publicity market is through what big four publishers are calling “blog tours.” Now blog tours have been around for a while and they used to require an actual blog post about a book—as in we’ll send you the book, you read it, and you give your personal opinion in writing. As a book blogger originally (2010 baby!), it was my greatest thrill to get a PR package from publishers. Some Booktokers charge equivalent to other influencers for a post (in the thousands).

(I swing back and forth on the pendulum of whether bookstagram and booktok should be paid. Today, I’m not sure where I land. In an ideal world, of course. But also some people have to do art for art’s sake. Some people will never make money on their writing. Does that mean they shouldn’t write? What does it mean to build an audience as an “influencer” of books / how much does one bookstagram post influence sales—I don’t know. Charging for promotion, beyond the actual book or swag I mean, cuts out independent publishers completely, so that makes me wary. But also, people should be paid! AH!).

Lately, I’ve been seeing blog tours where the actual reading of the book isn’t necessary. It’s not an organic, hand-selling technique, it’s an aesthetic tour. The game is this: HarperCollins paid fifty bookstagrammers or booktokers to take an aesthetically pleasing photo of [insert book] with a caption “blog tour!” (in a series of dates—one a day for a month or two) and that will fit the “Rule of 7.” The game is no longer personal storytelling and personal connection, but aesthetics.

I’m going to be real with you (and maybe I’m old), I don’t like this at all. It’s a money grab that’s only available to big publishers, it removes all conversation between writer and reader, and it returns books to cultural objects rather than a means of cultural conversation. It’s just … gross to me. Any form of social media advertising is going to be about a book’s design and aesthetic—Booktok, at least, is a video, but this blog tour business capitalizes on the fact that we’ve reached an era of social media where we can’t even be bothered to read a caption on a photo. It must be worth it for sales because I’ve seen it in every book marketing packet from the Big Four lately.

You might think that this would push publishers to pay designers more and YET I haven’t seen that conversation anywhere. With Bookstagram and Booktok, the cover appeal of a book becomes just as important as what’s in those pages, which means it is also, you guessed it, important to a marketing eye to “brand authors” starting with their debut. (Branding as in fonts, colors, font size of name, etc). Patterns, patterns, patterns.

Of course this is also a conversation around who big publishing is trying to reach. But if I’m being real with you, no matter the house I’ve sold to, I’ve seen the same marketing plan again and again. (I wish I could share it with you but I don’t want to be sued).

What patterns don’t usually account for is freshness, originality, (in some ways authenticity), divergence. It’s the same conversation around comps. If everything we sell must rely on something that came before it, what does that mean for marginalized writers? For translations? For writers writing about their identity outside of “expected narratives?” For writers outside certain class structures?

I was speaking to a class a few weeks ago, and the very last question a student asked was, “if we’re just reading our own genre for comp titles and to see what’s out there, doesn’t that encouraging mimicking and tamper originality.” And readers, I’m still thinking about it.

If we tell writers, read WIDE, what do we really mean? If we tell writers, they must convince us their book has merit because of what’s sold well before, what do we really mean? I love this tweet from Matt Bell describing a quote from Alexander Chee last week. It makes me wonder WHAT parts of me I’ve been feeding with what I read. And what books truly light me up. Lately, I don’t want to read lyric essays, but that is what I write. A conundrum for sure, a little scary too.

These are questions I’m still figuring out as I look for new books to represent, new books to publicize, and attempt to sell what I believe are fresh narratives to an audience of publishing (big four typically on the agenting side) that really just wants what’s familiar. (I should say if you’re not a debut, you have more wiggle room here). But also, rest assured, the big four is discovering what does well at the independent and smaller press level, and then copying it and calling it fresh. (Your acquiring editors are NOT to blame for this, they are not the ones who determine money!).

Anyway, we live on a big rock rotating in space—it must be damn hard to write something that lives outside the cycles of that. I can’t wait to read it though!

Toni Morrison, and Sula, would like to have a word about porches. But I digress. What I want to talk about here is a few things: the Targét audience, one hit (publicity) wonders, and finding your fellow weirdos.

Let’s start with how Crawdad’s became a mega-hit, and that is the move of one woman. Undoubtedly a woman everyone thinks of as quintessentially southern (and because of a good ol’ movie that I still love, but does not age well), Sweet Home Alabama. That woman is (drums!) Reese Witherspoon. (I suppose I am also fueling publicity with this newsletter, alas).

While I appreciate Reese’s support of books & literature, scrolling through the full list of book picks does feel like she has an ideal shopper in mind, and that ideal shopper is the woman who calls Target “Targét,” and maybe, possibly, buys pattern kitchen utensils, enjoys the newest Magnolia release, knows when Target collabs drop, and her activewear more-often-than-not matches. To be totally fair, I have been this woman—she is almost always white. My point is that this book club serves a reading audience that publishing already knows exists (why? because they’ve been marketing to only this audience for a long, long time). What then, can we do, to reach reading audiences that go beyond this?

This is the BIG question of publishing. So much of pre-#publishingpaidme (and very much still) was CEOs (and certain others) claiming that diverse books don’t sell because they don’t have a reading audience. What’s missing in the fine print here is that publishing has only recently been asked (and not yet held accountable) to reach more diverse reading audiences, which very much do exist and want books, as Rudine Sims Bishop says, that act as “mirror, window, and sliding glass door.”

To acquire those books, without doing the back end publicity work of reaching their broader audiences, is a self-fulfilling prophecy—one that proves the CEO correct. Except … no work has been done on the consumer end to find and widen those audiences beyond the usual. If we treat publicity as it has always been treated traditionally, we will only ever reach the white woman book club, which is either Belletrist (cool, glitter girl) or Reese (Targét mom).

Last week, Sophia Stewart of Publisher’s Weekly, published a recap of book publicity and the changes in the landscape, “Getting the Word Out: 25 Years of Changes to Book Publicity”. While celebrity book clubs are here to stay and are a sure-fire way to boost book sales, she did sort out the breadth of the landscape for today’s book publicity engines, and noted a unique change to who exactly could put a book on a map with good promotion. And that is through the individual (several individuals), better defined in social media as the *branded* individual. Someone who has created a sort of character offshoot of themselves (not necessarily in a performative way), who creates content specific to a niche audience, which then grows.

Glennon Doyle and Brené Brown both sell books this way, by packaging and bumper-stickering the meaning of those books for an audience they’ve already managed to target by, you got it, branding themselves. (I am not asking anyone to go to that level, please don’t—it’s too much, it feels fools gold at a certain point).

We still (of course) have the surprise celebrity publicity, for instance Kendall Jenner reads the same essay collection for an entire summer—Chelsea Hodson’s Tonight I’m Someone Else, which caused a cluster at Holt. They could not keep up supply with the demand after this photo of Kendall hit press. Because all of publishing is a game, and publisher’s bet on how a book might do, determined by a P&L, they simply didn’t have enough copies printed. And that P&L determines the next set of dominos for everything: the advance, number of copies, the publicity dollars and reach, the team. So much rests on that initial bet.

Can you imagine this scenario today in an economy where printing schedules are constantly shifting, books are being lost at sea, and (paper) costs are up, up, up. (Anne Trubek has a great newsletter on this in Notes From a Small Press). But what I want you to know is that those bursts of publicity, while incredible for any author but especially a debut, aren’t always sustainable. And sustainable, earn-out publicity, is what we should all be after.

So, how do you get there? You go to where your people are, and you create enough of a brand so your people find you.

I have seen an agent on a book that got so much publicity, they were able to put together a six page package for film agents. Major newspapers mentioned and reviewed, it made anticipated lists, the author placed essays in bookish outlets—truly, the book got all the publicity a debut author might want. For all intents and purposes, it seemed golden. Large print run, lots of publicity, surely this equals more sales. Not quite.

What I learned from this is two-fold. One: we need books to have a longer life than publication day news, and Two: the book hadn’t reached its audience yet. It’s reached a reading audience, but perhaps not its ideal reading audience.

When someone asks on Twitter, tell me who I should read to learn more about ____, tell me who’s writing your favorite coming of age essays, tell me who your favorite form poets are, tell me who writes the best dialogue, you want to be tagged and mentioned, because … well, because you’ve created the writerly brand that says you are that thing. It’s not a popularity contest, it’s good branding, which is simply, good storytelling of your story.

Shout out here to Kathy Fish, the queen of flash fiction. Shout out to my favorite final girl, Meghan Phillips, shout out to Alina Stefanescu, our philosophical poet, shout out to Cora Harrington who teaches me about intimacy style, shout out to Hanif Abdurraqib (& Wendy) two humble hometowners, and shout out to Matt Bell, everyone’s writing best friend, holding all of our hands through revision. Each of these people has a defined brand and I bet most of them aren’t even trying—they’re just naturally these people; telling the story of you and your writing should come naturally, but does take effort.

I hear from a lot of authors who say to me, “but do I have to have TikTok to be relevant? Must I be on social media? Must I have a website? Must I write a newsletter? Must I be a character in the liminal state (yes, I did get an MFA) of online life?” And the answer today is mostly yes. But in publicity we have to think less about ourselves as writer, and more about our ideal readership because—

So, that is what I’m proposing with this week’s exercise.

It turns out, as evidenced by publisher’s weekly man at SIBA, we have to tell publishers and industry professionals what they don’t know. We have to know our own audience often-times better than they do. And part of that is being able to define what we’re doing and the other part is knowing who our people are & what they love.

For this exercise, we’re going to talk about branding ourselves, I’m sending you to TikTok, specifically to stylist Allison Bornstein. In the first video of five, she says to find three adjectives that describe your current style, and/or the style that you aspire to have. She says in order to find this out, go look at your “regulars”—not necessarily the clothing items you love, but the things that you wear all the time. Then, look at them and ask yourself, “how would I describe these pieces, what words would I use?” Think of the similarities between them and pull out some adjectives.

Now, this exercise can be done as a mood board if you’re into that sort of thing, but I’m much better at visualizing through words. What you’re going to do is instead of clothes, you’re going to visualize your writerly brand, so that you can determine what sort of person is going to love the book you wrote. First, write out all the things that you think are the strongest elements of your work. And be honest with yourself—what are you really good at?

For me, that would be lyricism, turning towards ancient stories and texts, the unfortunate lack of personal boundaries, concern with the south, sentence rhythm, transitions & leaping, and my infusion of research using the same voice as the personal. So, my ideal reader is probably going to read and care about poetry and poetic form, they’re probably going to like fairy tales, myths, and history, and they’ve probably read a Sarah Manguso, Heather Christie, or Jo Ann Beard. My three adjectives: lyrical, genuine, slipstream.

The most important of these, to me, across all my roles in publishing is the genuine one. I hope that when people think of me, they think genuine and transparent.

Now, once I have an idea of what I do well, and therefore what my ideal reader likes—I need to go (& talk about), or my work needs to go, where people who are into those things will be able to find it. And this can start well before your book is written. It should influence:

• What magazines and websites am I submitting my work to?

• What agents are representing similar work?

• Who am I following on social media that does similar work and where are they submitting or being featured?

• What are my comp books & authors?

• How is what I’m talking about online, posting online, and promoting online pointing back towards the community I want to foster?

• Who do I find myself in conversation with (figurative and literally—who’s responding well to me)?

• What writers are coming up with me (or in my peer group) who are doing work that overlaps with mine, or work that I can celebrate?

• What keywords should I search across websites and social media to find resources and interest for my work?

• What panels should I suggest for conferences?

• What could I teach?

• What could I talk about?

• What interview questions might I want to be asked about these strengths?

A lot of us stiffen up at the word “brand” because it feels so prepackaged. It feels like we’re no longer people. But the best writers, the writers who we keep coming back to and keep seeing, have a distinct brand that they’ve cultivated by marketing themselves as an expected thing to an ideal reader. And that brand can be influenced by a lot of factors. For instance, Cormac McCarthy’s brand is influenced by place, the southwest, and time, post-apocalyptic or stuck. Kelly Link’s brand is short stories and weird magic. Sandra Cisneros’ brand is both cutting and breathtaking, driven by a young voice, by home. Jacqueline Woodson’s brand is about young people, community, and urgency.

Let’s use Moshfegh as a brand example since she’s not online.

If I had to brand Moshfegh, which she has more than successfully done without an online presence and with very few interviews, I would say her work is concerned with: first-person POV, an unsettling feeling, self-deception, loneliness, mental health, driven from a very singular what if question (what if I just continued to sleep? what if that person loved me?) and completely motivated by interior characterization (to the point of reclusiveness) and not traditional “plot.”

Who are her people then?

• Well, for one, people in MFA-land. People who use words like “liminal” and think that the less there’s plot in a book, the more stirring, the more artful. (This is in the traditional sense of these programs, they are not all like this, and not all of us believe this about lit-er-a-ture).

• Fence Magazine, Granta, Vice Paris Review, The Baffler, The Believer—a little bit quirky, a little bit dark, very much literary-serious but in most cases with flavor. Bustle wrote about her in 2015 and most of what they say has to do with her being pretty establishment (and academic / award-winning) in terms of her career trajectory, but also very not online, which creates a mystique. Someone winning all of these awards, and yet, who are they? If you’re reading this, you’re probably already too-online to suddenly become a Moshfegh in this sense, but even her covers give off a similar cool detachment.

• What I love about what Moshfegh publishes is that her books are always morally gray. There’s no judgment within them even though, as a reader, you’re like whaaaaat the fuuuck. James Sullivan wrote about the feeling for The Boston Globe. So, her readers usually don’t need a bow, or a feel-good. Her readers have this energy:

So, she’s capitalizing on a sort of aesthetic. The girls who love Heathers, the girls who love Jawbreaker, the arteests, the high literary meleiu. Millenial and Gen-Z cool girls. You would be seen as cool & smart on public transport reading Moshfegh, you would be giving off the vibe, “don’t talk or even look at me.”

And her books are marketed to this same aesthetic from cover to coverage. If you know your narrative (literally and figuratively), then you can control it a little more. If you know your brand, then you can find your people (and they can find you!).

I can see some of y’all rolling your eyes, that you just want to be online and say whatever you want, and that’s fine. But what about having a niche newsletter? What about having a thing that you regularly talk about—Dungeons and Dragons, video games, crocheting, finding the best pair of jeans, climate change. What about editing a few anthologies with topics that overlap with those things? What about mentioning books (reviewing!) that overlap your interests with your audience’s interests? One of my best tweets was about what planner I was buying heading into 2022. My audience, I suppose, wants to be organized but we’re flailing.

A lot of this is just about being a good and active member of your community.

A press that’s really good at this branding & community thing is CLASH books. They have a punk & defiant vibe, and they stoke the flame of it. Their brand is clear from every single angle, and you should follow them and buy their books because CLASH is publishing all 🔥🔥🔥.

So, ask yourself: who’s your audience, and where are they? Like Where’s Waldo, but with a book deal at the end.

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Buy the books I’m working on this season. Here is a lovely little list (in order of pub date) with three adjectives for each one:

• A Boy in the City by S. Yarberry (intimate, queer, philosophy)

• Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas (longing, self, road)

• Taste: A Book of Small Bites by Jehanne Dubrow (sensual, storytelling, bittersweet)

• The Mean$ by Amy Fusselman (funny, Twix, money)

• Swan Wife by Sara Moore Wagner (fairy tale, transform, embodied)

• Curing Season: Artifacts by Kristine Langley Mahler (belonging, excavation, place)