A PERSONAL TOUCH

Is my brain working? not sure!

Pitching sucks right now. I wish I had better news, but obviously when there’s terrible, harrowing, devastating breaking news every six minutes, book coverage (and coverage of everything but what’s breaking) shrinks. It does sort of help that we (as a team) have based our strategies around freelancers and regular schmegular readers, critics, and writers too, but I would have to tell you that I—a girl who works in book publishing and has piles of books all over her house—find reading difficult at the moment. Even for work, I am slow. I’ve had The Most by Jessica Anthony on the library waiting list for months, and twice it has come up for me to borrow, and twice I have missed my five day window at the library to get the book. That’s the state of my reading life summed-up. So, I get it, especially when folks email me back and say, “I just don't have the bandwidth to take this on, please continue to pitch me though.”

I don’t work on a ton of “newsy” books or serious nonfiction, but I do have Google Alerts on for all of our books (shout out to Megan Posco, my queen of big idea books, for this one when I was feeling demoralized a few weeks ago) that might have a hot button issue in their pages. I have found innovative ways to pitch our books to the moment when needed (if publicists are great at something, it’s pivoting). And as always, weird luck is involved (weird luck dictated by dogged persistence). Most of the time, I’m trying (like everyone) to make our books stand out in a crowd of books, but also to stand out to very specific people. Pitching right now, that means having the time to dedicate to personalized pitching. Reading freelancers recent essays. Listening to how a podcast frames their episodes. Reading a number of headlines to see how magazines want their theses / arguments (for lack of better words) to earn clicks. Googling people to figure out if they have a beloved cat that they name in one of their twenty-seven transitional bios. (Shout out to Cat by Rebecca van Laer).

This is all to say, sometimes pitches need to embrace the moment, but most of the time, I’m trying to adjust the buzziness (or attempting to find new ways into describing “climate change” or “mental health” or ideas that are both too large, and too connotated (not a word, I’m making it up now) in the American (particularly) script. Maybe it’s a balance actually.

Everything in publishing has a sort of season (with outliers). Agents don’t go out on submission with a new book in the second half of December, and everyone is going out with a new book in January. Summer cools things, August is pretty much France. The academic year is surprisingly relevant to pitching. If I’m taking on an April release, then I am likely pitching that book through a holiday season, through the get-back-to-work of January, and then when academics are in the throes of ending their semester (full trains coming at them), I’m like “hey! about that book!” They’re also sometimes off in the summer, so I get all the OOO messages that wouldn’t help an academic-leaning book that comes out in say, August.

Now, I don’t really have a say in book release timelines. There are definitely factors present in deciding those timelines like sales conferences, international book conferences, editorial calendars at trade reviews, and I’m usually not a part of a book when those decisions are being made, but I am privy to the ~vibes~ of pitching a book within the current reality, and the speed at which magazines and newspapers move on. (For instance, I pitched a show-related pitch last week—two weeks after the show’s finale, (I know, I know, it was my bad) and it was loved by and also too late for both The Cut and New York Times opinion). Cue Ferris Bueller.

You know the email I AM opening every day when it hits my inbox—the “Your latest Recalls and Safety Alerts from the Government of Canada.”

In all honesty, it’s simply hard to plan for things at the moment. Where I used to be sure about bookstore events and finding ways to get folks in the door on a Wednesday evening, I’m feeling less sure at the moment. University funding is fighting for its life, and so much of the funding for nonprofits and schools is precarious at best (the trickle down effect will be dire), so are these places bringing poets who aren’t necessarily huge names in the door for visiting gigs? What do things like this mean for debut authors—hoping to launch a career and momentum off their first books (I’m thinking about this a lot, since we work with a ton of those authors). And we’re in one of those flux periods where if you were to ask me what people are going to want to read the next few months (years?), I usually might have a cheeky answer, lately I’m like, are books where we can find escape at the moment?

I’m actually really keeping an eye on the zine movement, and the movement back towards analog—people pursuing art (and other hobbies) with their physical hands. Not the coloring book craze necessarily, but the idea of simplicity seems to be the moment—minimalism, underconsumption, simple lives, quaint shit, (dare I say the trad wife stuff unfortunately). This makes me wonder about art books, about hobby books, about books that remind folks that they’re not reading a novel set in, well, the internet. I personally would love a move away from the snarky internet voice, but it really is hitting in literary fiction. I’m thinking maybe there’s going to be a swift turn back to re-reading (and classic adaptions, not that these ever went away, but perhaps we’ll get adaptions of something that isn’t Jane Austen). Maybe this also means we’re going to get a flush of feel-good novels and books, not necessarily romance, but definitely not A Little Life.

I guess this is all to say, that in the next several months (at least), what’s going to matter most in book pitching (in my opinion) is how quickly you can be both (truly) personable (& personalized), and intriguing in an email pitch (people are not reading pages of pitches). How you can get there is going to look different for everyone, but I think personal touches will matter more and more as space shrinks, life feels precarious, and design (and everything) also feels more homogenous (the new Burger King’s are SO depressing and what happened to play places—bring back the play place)!

The motto of the moment is from darling Katie Freeman of Cento Lit (and everything that’s fabulous). She sent me stickers a while back and one is on my water bottle right this moment alongside my WUNC sustainer sticker (sustain your local NPR stations, please!)—”Keep pitching weird!”

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 on Texas Public Radio (her Texas store starts next month—don’t miss it!), Jehanne Dubrow is writing Poets & Writers “craft capsules” this month on writing trauma, check the second one out here, Dubrow also has this stunning interview in The Common, Southern Review of Books reviewed Lauren K. Watel’s Book of Potions, Erica Stern was interviewed on New Books Network, Pine State had four poetry collections on the Ms. Magazine Best (feminist!) Poetry Collections of 2024-25, an excerpt from Amie Souza Reilly’s Human/Animal went up this week on Ms. Magazine too, Christian Collier was on Poetry Daily, Catherine Weiss has a new essay about phone sex up at Huff Post, Nicole Graev Lipson talked IVF on We Should Talk About That podcast, the first review of Christine Kalafus’ FLOOD is up at Synapsis. and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.