BEHIND A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

on the depth renaissance, and Nicole Graev Lipson's luminous (can't be mad at the word it if it's true) memoir-in-essays MOTHERS AND OTHER FICTIONAL CHARACTERS

I have a secret (is it a secret if it’s kind of in every publicity contract you might sign?). I rarely know what book is going to standout in a season. We don’t work on celebrity memoir or very commercial books, and in independent publishing there’s a sort of anything goes opportunity. I have a gut feeling about books I should work on, but I would have a hard time predicting how they will be perceived by media. That potion of timing, luck, genre, style, atmosphere isn’t formulaic. I can know that a book is great, and I have a great pitch, and no one will answer the first twenty pitches. It’s deflating, in case you’re wondering. I can feel confident that a book has an audience and that we can reach that audience, but the strategy behind reaching that audience looks different every time. When I read a book for publicity, I work on it because I think it’s a good book that has a place in the market. Sometimes I get to work on a real gem of personal and professional goodness—where the book is something I want to study as a writer, AND I get the honor of presenting it to an audience. That’s what happened with Nicole Graev Lipson’s Mothers and Other Fictional Characters.

I’m constantly learning on this job, I’m constantly turning over new ideas, and so is my team—Zoe wrote a record number of pitches for a poetry collection she worked on this spring. It got great coverage, but the amount of brain work I watched her display, the amount of tinkering, and brand new ideas to get the right angles to the right folks, blew my mind. What I mean to say is there’s no template. When I first started working in publicity and I was scarping together knowledge anywhere I could find it, someone told me that what you do is you get an op-ed in the New York Times and then that unlocks NPR. As if it’s some sort of Legend of the Hidden Temple (iykyk). To me the op-ed section of the NYT is like the chastity belt of gatekeepers. If it’s not political, it’s a contributor writing what likely wouldn’t get by the pitching stage anywhere else. (No offense! I loved this piece on bellies! I just think that’s the exception.)

The truth is that we are simply no longer writing in a media environment where a template serves a book, where reaching out to the same folks, using the same formula, or hoping one thing leads to another without a robust amount of momentum, serves books at all.

A writer told me recently that they, “of course, would link all the publicity on their website, but who is looking at their website anyway?” It’s true. (Side note: this is why I tell writers that a really simple, navigable website is enough). Getting an essay in Oprah Daily (for example) means—what? Who is reading it? A nice byline for sure. There always has to be (at the very least) a second step in that equation.

Oprah Daily stats from their Hearst Brand guide.

An essay in Oprah Daily AND THEN it’s shared on socials (it doesn’t look like they’re doing a lot of content-sharing on socials), AND THEN it’s shared in their weekly newsletter, AND THEN, AND THEN, AND THEN—the question is no longer, can you get writing in a certain outlet; the question is, how is that writing being shared (networked? Feels to business-y for what I want to say, but that’s the gist)? It’s the same premise for a book, just landing a certain media outlet isn’t going to equate to book sales (unless it’s Fresh Air, I’ll give you that), it’s about the (pep) rally after that. This is why network and “platform” are important—who is willing to care enough to share you? It’s why losing Twitter is such a blow to books, why authors newest question is “should I get on Tiktok?” and why Substack is such a great, growing place for book coverage. Substack converts. An instagram post, one instagram post, does not convert a consumer (usually).

A few weeks ago we learned Nicole Graev Lipson’s blazing, astute, clever memoir-in-essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is a national bestseller. It went into a second printing days after it came out too—a testament to its writing, no doubt.

And it got a great satellite of coverage, it built its own universe, and while that is 98.2% due to it being exquisitely crafted—the sentences (I could read them aloud to you all night!), could only have been written by Nicole, the essays are pristine and nuanced and thoughtful and full of literary criticism.

I read it the first time and felt very seen (before this book, you would often hear me say I don’t read “motherhood” books, misogyny for sure, but Nicole’s essay collection opened the flood gates for me)—in fact, it was the first time I really thought about my relationship to the idea that mothers are thinkers, why did I grow up without imagining my mom was a “thinker”—an intellectual. She reads the newspaper daily, I watched her flip the pages with her dry cereal every morning of my life. Her and my Faj debating the news. She could deeply analyze a country song that sounded like ol’ twang to me. She makes celebratory cakes that are works of art and relative strangers at my nephew’s birthday party will exclaim right before the cake is cut, “I wait for this day every year, Ms. Bea’s cake.” My son is obsessed with this broken brick at school, constantly making up stories about how it got broken (bears, fallen trees, trucks, thunder)—you know who taught him that? My mom. She’s a genius is what I’m saying.

Just LOOK at how the light finds her!

And let’s be real, Lipson’s book is an essay collection, so “big publishing” will immediately tell you that it won’t amount to much. But when you write a great book, a great book stands out. It was published by Chronicle, a bigger independent press, but not a big four—known mostly for their design and cookbooks, not their literary work. And here’s the other secret, she wasn’t on NPR, and wasn’t reviewed in the NYT (yet…). You might be thinking I suck after I say that, but what happened during this campaign (I think) is four-fold: Nicole’s book is good (duh), we found the right places to get coverage that really aligned with where her audience interacted with media, we created a sort of propaganda machine of buzz, and all of the book’s coverage is deeply engaged and excessively flattering. It’s easy to engage with a book that engages so profoundly with its questions, and without any easy answers.

Okay, first spoke is obvious. I couldn’t recommend the book to more people. I texted friends while I read it. I bought a copy for one of of my best friends.

Second spoke: coverage aligned. The book was covered in (I will definitely miss some): Boston Globe (x3), Boston Globe Magazine, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, San Francisco Chronicle, Jewish Review of Books, Hadassah, Slate, Poets & Writers (Nicole wrote an essay that came out slightly before the book published), Chicago Review of Books, Debutiful, Electric Literature, Brookline.News, Hippocampus, River Teeth, Emerson Today, Jewish Rhode Island, Literary Hub, New Orleans Magazine, The Millions, West Side Spirit, Business Times, Mother Mag, BUST, Jewish Women’s Archive, Jewish Book World, Moment Magazine, Hey Alma, Lilith, Mother Tongue, Assay, MUTHA, Brevity, and many, many, many memoir, writing, motherhood, feminist, and celebrity podcasts. If I named them all it would overwhelm this paragraph. Plus, it got a Kirkus star. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the newsletters that also talked to Nicole or wrote about Mothers and Other Fictional Characters (I think Substack is crucial in today’s book publicity landscape.) She also did book clubs, reading series, a twenty-stop+ tour with tons of fantastic writers, and the tour was a wild success—crowds of folks, CROWDS, came out to her events (her launch event had over 200 folks at the Coolidge Theater). Now THAT is community support.

If you look at Nicole’s Instagram, it looks like the book is everywhere (it is) and she shares everything. No risk, no reward. She’s sharing the instagram captions, the event photos, her favorite lines from reviews, quotes from her podcasts, etc, etc. And it wasn’t annoying in any way. So many people said to me throughout this campaign, “Wow, she’s doing so much.” Yep, and she’s also doing the performance of doing so much on social media. An important aspect to a successful campaign at this moment in time. Not only that but behind the scenes, she wrote bookseller letters, she reached out to her network, she connected with folks through mutual networks that could help.

But that’s not all, the reviews and conversations were so full of depth (truly, meaningful each time—which I realize with listicles we’ve gotten far, far away from, but turns out, meaning matters!). When I went to a publicity talk recently with TIME editors, one of the main book folks said that one of their most clicked links of the year is their “best of” list. This makes sense to me from a self-fulfilling prophecy angle. If you post a link that includes multiple people and their books, then those multiple people will share to their networks, who share to their networks, who turtles all the way down.

The traffic is because you’re bringing more people together who can (you guessed it) bring more people to the link. People also love to scroll, it’s tangible. It’s one of the only tangible things we get to do on the internet—click the link, scroll the page. For me, I miss turning pages. None of that means people are turning away from depth. We’re about to be in a depth renaissance, just watch. The obsession with algorithms is already tuning towards “slow living,” many folks are starting to bake bread, make, garden, and turn away from their online personas towards the care of real life. It’s coming, mark my words, depth renaissance. Fine art, high literature, the return of cultural criticism that isn’t also a hot take, we’re going to see it flourish.

Depth is when the review in The Rumpus introduced me to a whole other way to read the book, and a totally new angle for pitching. The River Teeth review gets an award for best title of the year, “A Mind I’d Like to F—.” Mothers and Other Fictional Characters never got a surface review, or a bite-size breakdown. No one was looking to distill the ideas in the book into some list or takeaway. People approached the complication with their own complication. The latest review to come out in Hadassah Magazine expressed the conflict between historical precedent and maternal protection when it comes to traditions. This level of thoughtful engagement with the book, makes it feel how it is: dynamic, surprising, like anyone could find a trap door into the essays who needed one. The reviews were inviting. The best reviews aren’t the ones that have an easy pull quote for metadata, actually. Maybe if we brought depth back, folks would read reviews again.

To sum myself up to the bite size, what I want you to know when you go into book publicity based on this campaign is this:

1. Rigorousness always beats superficiality.

2. Selling books and book publicity are two different goals (they do overlap, but it takes lots of purposeful strategy to make them build off one another).

3. It is exhausting when you do it right, but it should feel good-tired.

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If you made it this far you should know that I wrote this post while blasting the Paw Patrol theme song from my computer speakers so my three year old could break dance (he has a mat he lays out and everything). If you see errors, that’s the whole vibe. We’re dancing.

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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: Keetje Kuipers was on Between the Covers, reviewed in RHINO, Daisy Atterbury was interviewed in Write or Die, Lauren K. Watel’s Book of Potions was reviewed in Full Stop, Nin Andrews wrote a piece about SON OF A BIRD for Literary Hub and she was interviewed in The Mackinaw, Margot Kahn’s “Beforetimes” was in last week’s New Yorker, an excerpt of Free Piano (Not Haunted) by Whitney Gardner was in SOLRAD, Amie Souza Reilly’s HUMAN/ANIMAL was in Christian Century’s “trending topics,” Jehanne Dubrow’s Civilians was reviewed in Washington Independent Review of Books, Mother of Methadone by Melody Glenn was reviewed in Publishers Weekly, Business Times and Mother Mag say buy Mothers and Other Fictional Characters for Mother’s Day, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.