BOTH/AND

on the conundrum from a literary agent and a publicist (from Zoe Howard)

To quote Whitman (which I should really defer to Rosanna Young Oh for), or Dylan, or honestly that Twitter format from a few years ago, my favorite books contain multitudes. Books like M Train, or A Horse At Night, and more recently, Holly M. Wendt’s forthcoming Heading North (the Brokeback Mountain of professional ice hockey, hit me up for a review copy), Sean Enfield’s Holy American Burnout! (which you’ll want to read based on the title alone–let me know!), and my wonderful client on the literary agent side, Lauren Haddad’s Fireweed. 

And while I do approach book publicity as a conversation, I’ve seen as both a literary agent and a publicist that a Both/And Book is not always an easy sell. A book can be both plot and character-driven; be both critical of late-stage capitalism and wickedly funny (and pop-culturally sound–I’m thinking of Sean’s book here, but Brian Allen Carr’s Bad Foundations fits this bill too); both celebrate genre and target a literary audience. Two things can be true. Unfortunately, when we get down to business, as it were, it feels like we can’t talk about all of it at once. As in, media needs a package: a pitch needs to be ONE thing. 

I’ve cataloged a few recent case studies: books that I love, that I’d do anything to get on your desk, and that are definitively both/and. Welcome to the both/and conundrum. 

HOLLY M. WENDT - HEADING NORTH (Braddock Avenue Books, November 7, 2023)

When the biggest book on TikTok is a hockey romance, but the actual emotional-smearing is a small press Art of Fielding meets Boys of Alabama that took ten years to write… how do you capitalize on that? 

Heading North’s depiction of a discreet romance between two professional ice hockey players is both subtly steamy (I’m looking at you, Pride and Prejudice hand flex), and a realistic portrayal of the life queer athletes navigate, especially right now. It’s a reach for romance reviewers as a literary book, and it’s rare that sports magazines do book coverage. So, how do we pitch it? To whom? 

Our answer: give everyone we pitch ONE thing to talk about. 

For Heading North, our primary pitch set the stage for a conversation, right at the center of the both/and conundrum. And we did so using ONE thing, which isn’t even directly addressed in the book: a news item. 

When Luke Prokop came out in 2021, he became the NHL's first openly queer prospect player. Two years later, it’s Prokop who is still pointing to the league’s “step back for inclusion.” Teams refuse to wear Pride jerseys, and won't take the ice on Pride nights. This is the stage for Holly M. Wendt’s debut novel, HEADING NORTH. 

Without packing the pitch with everything that Holly has accomplished in their debut–I haven’t even mentioned their tackling the isolation that the novel’s female General Manager carries, as the only woman professional in the building, or their active role in allyship (while launching this book, Holly biked 375 miles as part of the Friends for Life Bike Rally)–we can establish the conversation, the ONE thing. Every reader, from the socially-minded, to the high-brow literary, to the queer readers looking for a book with all the heat of this TikTok, can connect with the current culture landscape, one that largely excludes queer athletes. It’s given readers something to talk about; and it’s especially given podcast hosts something to ask Holly about. 

SEAN ENFIELD - HOLY AMERICAN BURNOUT! (Split/Lip Press, December 5, 2023

I’m notoriously neurotic in my reading, and I’d average my annotations as outside of respectable numbers, but for me, one of the sheer pleasures of an essay collection like Sean’s is their mixed-gem-bucket quality. To beat my dead horse metaphor here, Holy American Burnout! is a two-gallon bucket (at least), a sieve collecting stones (cross-genre music references: Prince, Three Days Grace, Frank Ocean), and fossils (the varied classrooms of Sean’s and his students’ lives: literal classrooms, Christian moshpits, freeways, basketball courts), and precious metals (the experiences of Black and bi-racial Americans). 

To summarize my notes, HAB! is a book about music, pop culture, the crumbling American education system, Black and bi-racial identity, the experiences of minority students, Texas, the abstractions of teaching poetry, the craft of teaching, late-stage capitalism, what counts as literature, hush-hush material culture, and, and, and… Easy. 

There’s an audience for each of these. BUT critics, like readers (and editors!) have a niche. Music journalists aren’t often writing about the struggles that first-year educators face. Poets, honestly, aren’t usually writing about essayists. But at the intersection of all these subjects is Sean, who experienced burnout in his own education, and later, as an educator. Sean has an incredible perspective on the classroom as a story that pervades the burnout-intersections where each of these threads meet, and this was the defining characteristic of our primary pitch for his book. We aren’t pitching a collection of essays on disparate subjects–nor is that how the book reads–but rather, we’re pitching the collected stories of Sean’s burnout in the American education system. 

LAUREN HADDAD - FIREWEED (Astra House, 2025)

Pitching a reader is critically different from pitching an industry insider. Publicity is often about reaching every possible audience for a book–as an agent, I find that I’m more often trying to position a book as, again, both filling a gap in the market and easily categorizable, while simultaneously trying to show editors it fits into what’s sold before, and sold well. Be fresh, take risks, but also–realistically, we’re all thinking about “positioning.” 

I requested the full manuscript for Fireweed after reading two paragraphs of Lauren’s sample (cue Lana, when you know, you know), but from my initial call offering representation, we’ve talked equally about manuscript edits and how to pitch the book. (Note: this isn’t the standard, and was a conversation we had based on feedback she’d received from other agents, who were unsure about positioning. Lauren came to me with a clear vision for her book as a necessary diversion from most contemporary fiction, and was able to summarize the multitude-both/ands into a singular pitch, off which I built my own.) 

Per our announcement, Fireweed both subverts the missing woman plot and embraces the genre framework, to explore our draw to public tragedies and the benevolent mirror that contemporary fiction seems to uphold. The novel both acknowledges our draw to genres like true crime and complicates the issue with a literary meditation on character, asking why someone would be drawn to a public tragedy in the first place. It is a page turner, and it is intensely contemplative. The plot holds the tension, but the lens holds to the character.

There is no easy answer to positioning a book that breaks boundaries for traditional publishing, but there is an answer I find it’s healthy for writers to hear: sometimes, the industry doesn’t want multitudes.

What I’ve found, working on these both/and titles, is that the book as an art object is a box of spools, a bucket of gemstones, a story within a story within a subverted framework. As a creative work, a book should (to me, at least) contain multitudes. But a book is it’s own both/and. A book is both a work of art, and–if you’re planning to publish it–a product. They aren’t mutually exclusive. The key for me has been finding that singular pitch that sells the book as one thing: the novel answer to queer exclusion in sports, the story of an American educator’s burnout, or a book club’s Trojan horse (which is how I pitched Fireweed over the phone and in subject lines). 

And the thing is, we can both/and the industry, too. We can both understand the need for comp titles, elevator pitches, loud hooks, high-concepts, genre, positioning–and we can be true to the work that the book is doing. Packaging, positioning, pitching, they’re just an invitation. You’ll hear that querying kills the book, distills it down until it’s a nuance-starved hook–that doesn’t have to be true. You just have to take a step back, and think about your book in terms of the singular (both the ONE thing, and the UNIQUE thing) pitch that cracks the conundrum. 

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: Margo Steines was interviewed by Rachel Léon for Brooklyn Rail and Brutalities: A Love Story was reviewed in the New York Times, Kate Doyle read for First Taste at Debutiful, Ross White’s Charm Offensive was reviewed by Alex Gurtis in Barrelhouse, Gayle Brandeis was interviewed by Megan Vered for Bridge Eight, an excerpt of My Life in Paper by Beth Kephart appeared in Image Journal and Beth wrote a beautiful little essay about endpapers for Fine Books, as did Kathleen B. Jones on “Touch as the Gateway to Rare Books Research,” Kristine Langley Mahler’s Calendar is a Snakeskin is a “can’t wait” read at Write or Die, Jessica E. Johnson is teaching a bunch of fun classes at Poets House and Notebooks Collective, Jehanne Dubrow was on Utah Public Radio and will be giving a talk with Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach at Brown Bag Lit (COMING UP!) on Circling History: Writing What the Body Carries