BUT IS IT WORTH THE MONEY?

on how I pay my bills & what the job looks like on a random week in June

I haven’t had any juice to write this newsletter in weeks. I’m sorry this is one of the things I feel behind about.

But I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately with folks about money. Not just querying writers, but friends who have nudged me about raising rates because of the state of our query inbox, figuring out book publication timelines and how much work I can feasibly take on and still make sure each author gets the best work from me, and an on-going discussion with my husband about “letting people pay me if they want to” even if I feel like I no longer have the level of work to continue at those rates and refuse an hourly structure (I am not keeping up with the three minutes it takes me to send a quick little email, I simply cannot).

When I started Pine State, I woefully undercharged (I did not realize the top firm was charging around 30-40k a campaign, and now I know—respect the game!). And then I read a brilliant piece in Jeanna Kaldec’s newsletter “astrology for writers” about how she manages as a freelancer, and I got to where I couldn’t charge what I was and be the “breadwinner” of our family, so I upped our rates, which have steadily increased over the last three years, but are a far cry from 30k. I like to think most folks would call us reasonable, but truly “reasonable” is totally up to the beholder.

Money is complicated, and I’m constantly trying to figure out how to put a price on intangible things: brainstorming, ideation, even the graphics we make with no “social media manager.” That’s just us, and it isn’t currently figured into our pricing even though we’re out here making these beautiful tour graphics. That’s not … “normal publicity,” but it does give us a space on the internet to reveal what we’re up to, show off our authors and our work, and engage with readers in a way that keeps us less behind-the-scenes. (The same goes for this newsletter—it’s a marketing tool, for the business and our books). But is it all feasible?

A little about my current money situation: I am a freelancer. I have to save 30% of every dollar for taxes. No one is matching my 401k. My health insurance (+ dental and vision) is through my husband’s work—he’s a public high school teacher in NC, and I have children too young for free schooling. Our family is our childcare which means if grandma is sick, it’s me (on those days I tend to work after bedtime from the treadmill), and our oldest goes to a morning preschool (that we love!) and our middle will go there in the fall too, so I tend to work 10-4pm M-TH, and half days on Friday because the grandparents don’t pick up the kids until 1pm-ish. I used to work weekends, I put the boundaries up on that mostly. Sometimes I’ll put on a meaningless show after bedtime and do some researching. I have a blocker on my phone for email, and a box where I put my phone when I keep “taking a break” on the blocker.

Some gorgeous camp creations from “Creepy Crawlers” week by my three year old, feast your eyes on that spin art snail!

I should say here that I am GRATEFUL and LUCKY to live a life that allows me to feed small children from my body (I just weened my second), see my kids to school and camp every day, not rush them or myself in the mornings, not pay for full-time childcare because we have very active extended family, and that I can work from home which is such a wildly different flexibility than when I was a high school teacher (WILDLY, WILDLY!). I can sometimes take a walk mid-day which is life-changing. While my kids are small especially, I could not be more grateful for this schedule and lifestyle.

My whole life right now is publicity and motherhood, and I can’t complain because I do love both, but I’m actively choosing work in almost every spare minute when I could be writing (haven’t done much of that since I graduated from my MFA in 2021), because it’s too hard for me (at the moment, not forever) to navigate choosing something that isn’t going to pay me. I know many parents do it, manage it, and find it helps them be better in every arena of their life (people deserve life that isn’t part of the hustle, I know!), but scarcity mindset from childhood + an intense level of ambition towards career (mingled with my dad’s death, the man drilled into me this level of ambition), and the early years of both children + launching myself into a whole new career trajectory have made my choices stricter.

And while I’m not here to defend or convince folks that book publicity is worth the fee (we work on a monthly retainer)—I, too, would check myself if someone asked me to spend thousands of dollars promoting my book—on the other side of it, I work hard to give authors and their careers the best possible shot at momentum, which is 40% tangible, visible work, and 60% ideation, and also, I have bills. So, is it worth it? That’s what every writer wants to know.

I could give you bullets of questions to guide you through a pro/con list on whether hiring an outside publicist is the choice for you, I could talk you through how we differ from what an inside publicist will do (from my experience working across the board with publishers), I could tell you where our strategies match traditional publicity and where they break from traditional approaches, and I could tell you where we really excel as a publicity firm—different folks are good at different things and so you have to find your right fit in a publicist (I know so many great ones!), but what I’m going to do instead is break down my week, so that you can see what I do (actually), and whether you want that kind of collaborator on your book launch team.

(And if you can’t afford it, I hope our work is transparent enough in this newsletter, on social media and our website, and through speaking channels, that you can build your own DIY publicity campaign with some of what we share!)

Here’s a breakdown of things I did this week:

• Sent seven essays to national magazine editors (got an author paid 1k for an excerpt, took two authors through editorial feedback from an editor, landed a longform feature in a print magazine, and brainstormed ideas for a new essay ending based on editorial feedback from a women’s magazine). To do this, I had to have ideas for editors who might like those essays, write the pitches for each essay either by myself or with the author collaboratively, research whether they’ve published something similar in the past few years, figured out if someone else has already approached the angle elsewhere and if the author is saying something different here, edited headline ideas to sound more like the publication’s usual format, given feedback on those essays in multiple rounds, formatted the essays in ways best for those editors, etc, etc).

• Read eight essays and offered editorial feedback to prime them for pitching

• Wrote an initial pitch for a new poetry collection coming out this fall (got four requests in one day of pitching, so woo, we’re off to a good start).

• Started working on a press kit with a cover in progress (the colors are SO good)

• Navigated a missing galleys debacle with a publisher

• Worked through cover feedback with an author

• Pushed back on a pub date with a publisher based on what’s in the book and what happened on that date in recent history

• Met with two authors I’d like to work with next year

• Met with one of my current authors to talk through strategy for our next season together

• Asked a client for a website testimonial

• Forgot to update our website for next season’s book (one day I’ll get to this).

• Sent notes on an author’s book proposal who I’m not working with yet (but hope to!)

• Read through a poet’s next collection (not the one I’m working on) to see if there were poems we could batch and pitch to help with promotion of the current collection

• Read and gave feedback for a contract for audio rights (agenting hat, I suppose).

• Signed my kid up for swim lessons (it was during work hours)

• Reached out to three folks about being event conversation partners for my clients (& landed an AWP panel submission for one of them based on the connection, fun!)

• Made “girl lunch” practically every day and ate at my desk because I didn’t prep anything which mostly consisted of cheese and crackers, green pepper with spinach dip, dried mango slices, and yogurt.

• Asked a press for their desired copyright language for a forthcoming excerpt, and then invented language when they didn’t have any directly.

• Wrote author bylines to make sure they featured the book

• Read through a presses marketing questionnaire to prepare for a call, and gather more notes + mine for the book

• Followed-up with ghosts, and folks who had requested a galley of a book that comes out next month

• Asked about a million folks if they prefer a digital or physical galley and then organized addresses into a spreadsheet

• Made seven graphics for our social media based on hits this week and loaded them into our Buffer for scheduling

• Made a flier for a book event with five sponsors (!!) in Culver City

• Shared a hit list with a client who is off-boarding

• Organized logistics for three upcoming interviews for authors

• Reached out about nine events for our authors

• Requested two 2026 books to read based on inbox queries (have not started them)

• Onboarded an author into our invoicing system

• Read two stories in a collection I’m hoping to work on next year, and finished a spring poetry collection for a meeting with that author next week

• Read through a client’s feature essay proposal and gave feedback (unrelated to their book project, but related to them and their career)

• Sent updates to publishers and authors on Tuesday

• Figured out timing for a client’s paperback launch and how we could strategize that looking different than the hardcover (the hardcover was really successful, so I’ll definitely be writing about how we mix it up for the paperback).

• Organized four brainstorming meetings for next week with clients

• Read and gave feedback on a client’s pitch about interviewing another author for national magazines (she’ll pitch the pitch though because of personal connections between their stories).

• Sent 181 emails including pitching my current titles

• Looked at three months of Atlantic poems to catch the current vibe

• Researched comp titles for two books

• Researched critics and writers writing on certain beats and within certain spaces to pitch them books we’re working on

• Wrote to an author about how the current genre of her book was moving, and why I think we should capitalize on how she’s doing the sort of opposite within the mold of x, y, z book.

• Chatted with Zoe about [redacted], [redacted], [redacted]. Read a Zoe pitch and found some folks who might be interested in her titles (and vice versa, we do this for each other).

• Went into the trenches of the Substack, Tiktok, and Instagram search features / key words for a children’s book angle we were thinking about (80s pop stars baby! There’s an Instagram for everything!).

• Said “don’t apologize!” to three different editors. Because we’re in a shit show and everything is awful so I’m never mad if someone misses an email.

• Went to two doctor’s appointments, got a Covid vaccine (separate to the appointment), drove my kid to camp every morning and picked him up on Thursday (my mom got him the other days), walked with my other kid in the morning to the playground, listened to approximately 234 hours of the Paw Patrol Pawdcast (there are only eight episodes), had my kid’s friends from school over on Thursday at 3pm to play in the sprinkler—we’ve been doing this Thursday open house thing where his whole class is invited otherwise he would miss them all summer!, cooked dinner twice (BJ did it twice), and only worked from the treadmill twice this week too. A good week for me on the work / life balance front.

• Wrote this newsletter (& just realized I forgot to pay my estimated taxes so I’m going to go do that now, ugh).

And there you have it. A week at my desk. It’s not glamorous (truly if I don’t have a meeting, I might look like a skunk behind the screen), but it is a job that makes me feel productive, driven, excited, curious, interested, and like my brain is firing. I have the ability to go with my gut about what I work on, which is invaluable, and this job saved me in my postpartum periods, being able to think and mother at once—plus working in books is exactly what I wanted to do at every stage of my life. I’m a lucky one.

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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: Amie Souza Reilly’s HUMAN/ANIMAL was reviewed in Washington Independent Review of Books, Hippocampus, Maudlin House, and she was interviewed in Brevity, an excerpt of Erica Stern’s FRONTIER was in Literary Hub and she was interviewed in Chicago Review of Books, Rosa Castellano’s All Is the Telling was reviewed in Southern Review of Books, Dr. Melody Glenn had an op-ed in Salon, Lauren K. Watel was interviewed on Poetry Off the Shelf, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson was reviewed in BUST, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.