COOL SHAPES!

On rethinking the "traditional" book event. (Sorry this is late! Pretend it's Thursday! I have a four month old!)

I watch, or I scroll past, *a lot* of resume recommendations on Tiktok. There are people telling me to have bullets over long paragraphs, people complaining about having objective sentences at the top of the page, and a dude who makes fun of anyone who includes a picture of themselves like we're not all out here making it up or using a Word resume template.

And when I think about resumes, I think about how much we invest, as a culture, in “stock” versions of things—in having rote ways of doing something, in having a “traditional route”, in a “this is just how we’ve always done it” kind of way. And maybe that worked during the Industrial Revolution, and maybe it still works for assembly line situations like building cars or Campbell’s soups, but I would argue that anywhere you hear “we’ve always done it” has a cultural problem, and also has room to improve processes. Honestly, in a world that feels very tenuous, maybe this sort of thing makes most of us feel comforted. Dealing with the expected is comforting, but it’s not growth.

(I interrupt this newsletter to say: If Disney Princesses can have “cool shapes pasta” we can have weird book collaborations and events).

Maybe the plant parents out there get it. Only a certain methodology keeps a Fiddle Leaf Fig from pouting, and while following those rules of tried and true methods is key to keeping those sad p(l)ants alive, growth happens when we’ve catered to each individual part: soil, water, air, sun, bugs, time of day, time of year, critters, depth of pot or bed, and one of the parts that needs rethinking in publishing (metaphorically) is book events.

Book publicity happens through a weird potion of components—it’s not ever one thing, even if your book becomes a hit TikTok sensation. To look at the zoomed out view of a book’s success is to see all these little pieces come together to make sales. Yes, it comes down to money. And the one thing that I think doesn’t capitalize on making the sales that it could, whether in person or online, is book events. THIS IS NOT THE FAULT OF INDIE BOOKSTORES OR BOOKSELLERS, THEY ARE AMAZING.

BUT I’m here to tell you that the way we do book events, and the function of book events needs to grow. I mean to say here, very directly, that literary events in general do not work in their current form for more than our family and friends having an hour or two to behold our triumph of writing a book. I mean to say here, very directly, that this is true of both in-person book events and internet book events. And if the end-all-be-all of what you want for a book event is family and friend time (though, we could do that in our living room with charcuterie and Trader Joe’s wine, right?), by all means, continue on with your reading + q&a, but if you want to spend some time dreaming (and then doing—no dream works without the do part), let’s do it.

Let’s start with the most obvious part of it and work our way down the yellow brick road to the OZ of book events. You have to offer people something for doing anything. Literally anything. We are selfish little trolls. I love you, I do, but you are a selfish little troll. If you’re writing a newsletter with only updates about your book (or only updates about you) and it offers nothing else, people aren’t going to subscribe unless you’re already famous or already an influencer.

If you’re doing a book event that’s a reading & q&a in a series of book events that are readings and q&a’s to promote your book, you’re going to get a handful of people at each one and every event is going to feel the same to you—sure, you’ll sign some books, you might even have a fancy little book plate to sign on, and then you’ll go home and tuck yourself into your sheets and think, “did I answer that one question about that one character in a weird way?” and then you’ll do it again, hug some folks, get some praise, until you’ve done 4-6 events and your “tour” will be over.

And when I tell you everyone wants a little book tour, I mean to say I’ve never had a client on the agenting or publicity side that hasn’t wanted a little book tour. I think it’s because we love bookstores so much, they feel like our community even if we’re alone in one on a Tuesday, and I get that, believe me I do, but the only time those events sell books is when you’re doing an event at your local bookstore where your *already* beloved community can attend. So, in that case, you’re selling books to people who would buy the book anyway.

(Don’t get me started on trying to get a book tour around the country for a singular poet or a debut writer in places where you have zero connection—think to yourself, how does that serve the bookstore’s needs? You’re not the only party involved in planning these.)

So, now that I’ve gotten the blunt truth out of the way, how do we change the game?

Well, the easiest thing you can do, is get a little help from your friends and peers.

If you want to do a reading in a place that’s not your community, ask a few friends or peers from that community to join you for the event. Then have a conversation about something *specific* that you can *market* after the reading. (An easy way to think of this is like—what’s something you would want to hear at AWP, then say that in your reading promotion, “a reading with ____, ____, and ____, with a conversation after about ________.)

For instance, Caylin Capra-Thomas, author of a great! road trip! collection!, Iguana Iguana, has family in Ohio—I have two other brilliant clients near Cincinnati, so we set up an event at Joseph-Beth Books where they are, yes, meeting for the first time, and reading together. That means all three of their audiences will attend the event. Anyone interested in poetry is getting three poets for the price of one, including the first poet laureate of Cincinnati, Pauletta Hansel, and a reading from award-winning poet, Sara Moore Wagner’s debut collection, Swan Wife.

Two debuts + a career poet + three different family and friend audiences + a great local bookstore + a conversation between them after, it’s going to be fun! The event does look “traditional” but because the family and friends of all three will overlap that gives each poet a larger crowd, and afterwards we can post videos, pictures, clips from the conversation, and we could potentially even do a bundle with Joseph Beth Books of something like, “if you buy all three books together (or a two-for), you get THIS discount.” (Bookstores already get discounts on books, but that’s another newsletter—and if you think they’re stocking your book without distribution, think again, sometimes a local author can get around this, BUT ALAS).

Another time I’ve seen friends & peers used well to offer the most ultimate reading experience is when Marie-Helene Bertino did an event with Electric Literature (summer 2021) that was a Master Class in Disrupting Realism. You should watch the replay here. A follow-up book list accompanied this event. Here’s the description on the Crowd Cast, “While Bertino will focus on writing magic and the uncanny, stopping in Sesame Street-style will be some of her favorite disruptors, including Mira Jacob,  Mitchell S. Jackson, Kristiana Kahakauwila, Tracy O'Neill, and Helen Phillips, who will share how these themes manifest in their own writing practice. Meant to offer joy and inspiration, this class can be enjoyed by writers at any level. Bring your darlings and join us!”

I loved the Sesame Street-Style zoom-in, it felt like the disrupters were traveling through space and time to pop into our zoom boxes and then pop right out again. We got to hear from incredible writers, Helene offered writing advice that intersected with the skills she used to write all of her books, but especially the latest, Parakeet, and she offered writing prompts & ways to answer a CENTRAL question: disrupting realism. This feels key to the event, she had specificity to what she was going to talk about. If I wasn’t already obsessed with her, I would have bought her books after this event.

Other ways to use friends & peers:

• Look at your publisher, who else has published with them that you have something in common with? At Triangle House, we have three Softskull books coming out this fall: Emma Bolden’s The Tiger and The Cage (memoir), Chelsea Martin’s Tell Me I’m An Artist (novel), and Elisa Gabbert’s Normal Distance (poetry)—but we should absolutely coordinate an event with all three, right? It would be a missed opportunity not to do that.

• Who shares a publishing date with you? Who might you know (even through social media circles) that has a book being published on or around the same time as you. Could you team up for an event?—If not an event, could you team up for a conversation that you could then publish? For instance: are your books both concerned with the climate crisis, girlhood, migration, fairy tales, disorientation—how could you invent a conversation around those things?

• Reach out to a place you already frequent to host an event. We’ve planned an event for Sara Moore Wagner’s book launch at Northside Tavern in Ohio where she first met her husband (adorable!). We simply treated it like a band gig—would they be interested in having a poetry gig? Yep. Her best friend is MCing, and she’s brought a lot of friends along to read (who she choose specifically because they all write similar themes to her debut collection Swan Wife).

Another way I like to think about events is to think about audiences beyond traditional bookstore readers. I love a bookstore event, but if your book has other audiences, why not explore those options? Where you have an event and who you collaborate with can bring in new audiences, but also harness the power of another organization’s publicity machinery.

• My agency client Anna Gazmarian has a book coming out with Simon & Schuster in the next year about her coming of age in the evangelical church alongside discovering mental health diagnoses and trying to understand herself in the context of a doctrine that simply didn’t fit, so we would absolutely like to events in churches, with church groups, with mental health groups and organizations. We are looking at models who did the same thing (re: Kate Bowler). You should look at who & what came before you!

• Lilly Dancyger, author of the incredible memoir Negative Space, is a writer AND archivist. This might not be in her bio, but it sure is part of her book as she catalogs, curates, and details her father’s artistic legacy. So, it would make sense for her to talk about writing and family archival work in museum spaces, right? If you’re working on a nonfiction history book, does your city or state have a local history museum, historical site, or historical society (your librarians would know!) that might partner or collaborate with you on an event?

• Jehanne Dubrow’s intimate book Taste: A Book of Small Bites is a cultural and historical exploration of art, film, and storytelling through the lens of taste and tasting. It is delectable. While we have a bookstore launch on the schedule, how exciting would it be for us to collaborate with one of Jehanne’s favorite tea shops, or have a “tasting” event in association with Taste? Fans of food memoirs and cookbooks will love this book, my job is to find where those events happen. (There are also food museums!)

• Sara Moore Wagner has TWO books out this year, she’s prolific and a darling, and she let me know in my Pine State author questionnaire that she wrote quite a bit of the second book, Hillbilly Madonna, at a state park. Am I reaching out to the rangers and staff at the state park to see how we can celebrate poetry with them? You betcha. Have I looked at their calendar to see when they have some open days so I can come to them with suggestions for days, times, and ideas for how we can work together? Absolutely, we have to be prepared.

Now here’s where I was a bit harsh earlier. What you do at an event matters. If you don’t already have name recognition and star power (most debut authors) then you need another reason for folks to attend an event with you. Celebrity authors are few and far between, though I did respect the person who recently posted an airport selfie with Roxane Gay, (you go!) so you need to bring something else to the table. And I don’t mean swag boxes or free booze, but I do mean a sincere way that you can connect with folks who might love your work beyond signing copies and doing a traditional q&a.

I’ve seen some examples that felt really organic and special, but I’m always trying to come up with more.

• Diane Zinna’s Grief Writing Sundays. These are simply drop-in Sundays that Zinna hosts, but because her novel, The All-Night Sun, is partly about how powerful grief can be, every time she mentions a new Sunday on social media, I think of her book.

• Amy Fusselman, author of four books of inventive nonfiction, has a forthcoming novel debut The Mean$ and it’s about capitalism and art and money and longing and real estate and it’s hilarious, but what’s really fun about her book event for the launch is that she’s going to be in conversation with the artist who inspired the artist character in her book. (It’s at P&T Knitwear!) And they’ll talk about art and entertainment and capitalism and the world of art and literature will combust! And perhaps with partner with the artist coalition on the same block as the bookstore to add something else? Who knows! There’s always more!

• Reach out to reading series! Franklin Park Reading Series (for example) seems to be doing pretty rad events. Exhibit B is putting on a fair (they also do cool mixed-genre performances)! Carrie McGrath hosts a poetry reading series at City Lit Books in Chicago and two of my poets are reading in that.

Some thoughts I’ve had for events:

• raffle off some books at a local baseball game (would they put your cover on the green screen?)

• pitch your book to area book clubs who read in your genre or themes and offer to attend for a portion of the club

• pair your book event with a cause, ask the bookstore if they’ll bundle your book with something they already sell

• if there’s a bakery nearby, try to coordinate a pop-up bakery at your launch (one thing I’d love to do is partner with a local bakery to do a baked good & a book bundle—ONE DAY!)

• do a book trailer at a theater in town as part of the reading / event

• ask a local band if you can open for them with some poems

• commission an artist to do broadsides for you

• create an “instagram spot” for your events (you could even do this on zoom by having a breakout room that’s a “photo booth”)

• do some sort of Real Housewives confessionals reading where readers can’t hear each other but they talk about each other’s work and read (this is really just my secret dream AND it could be done on Zoom, how fun!)

• host a walk & talk

• do a dog or cat day if the place is dog or cat friendly

I guess what I’m saying is invest in your neighborhood and community when you’re thinking about events. Unless your book is on the bestseller list, it’s hard to get into independent bookstores without a connection, some friends, or a viable publicity plan that assures them you’re going to sell books. They have lights to keep on, too.

But you’ll be so surprised what you can do for free if you simply just ask. Or you can hire someone like me to do the asking, scheduling, and coordinating.

In one of the next few newsletters, I’ll talk about how to publicize an event so that people know it’s happening and you’re not reading alone in a room full of books, though would that really be that bad? If you believe, like me, that all in-person events moving forward should have an accessible interwebs component for those at a distance and those unable for whatever reason to attend, then you won’t be alone at all.

When I publish a book, I’m going to ask my local farm if they’ll let me do a prose & pick during strawberry or blueberry season. Because who doesn’t want a basket of berries and a book? I envision reading to a bunch of people in white rocking chairs and at picnic tables, getting one of my favorite food trucks (or four!) to pull-up, and convincing the farm to make a homemade ice cream flavor based on the book for the month of release. A girl can dream. (EXERCISE: You should be dreaming too … and then doing).