enTITLEment
on possibility over expectation (plus a footnote rant on why we all can't be Leslie Jamison or ... can we?)
It’s (news flash news flash news flash!) an (unfortunately unprecedented) election year. Book publicity looks a little different already. Colleagues were getting cancellations on scheduled author interviews in February (NPR) because of “breaking news” (Trump said something inflammatory), the media landscape (like ALL of it) is laying off a shocking percentage of journalists, personalities, and producers, and there are more books coming out in September than I think are printing-possible to avoid the dreaded election-creep. Fingers are crossed for you, October books. November, there’s simply no way that publication date remains the same if your press loves you.
That means book publicity isn’t the same right now as it was four months ago, let alone two years ago.
And lately I’ve been rankled by what seems like an uptick in author entitlement (let me be clear, NEVER Pine State authors. I think this is because after agenting for a few years, I learned how to acknowledge the kind of people that I best collaborate with, so I can almost tell from an initial email query (and definitely a call) whether someone and I might jive in a working relationship.
But through the grapevine, I’ve heard authors saying things like “so and so had a similar book come out six months ago and it got (insert coverage)” or “a marketability case can be made for my memoir in the midst of (insert crisis),” or why is (insert author) getting all the coverage on (insert topic?), or (insert author) could not possibly write the way I write on (insert shared topic), how come they’re getting all the press?
Or the below earnest thread about a book launch event (truly no shame or fault to this writer at all, I GET IT) but this use of the phrase, “even bookstores are …” as if bookstores have an expectation to celebrate every author (though it is a reciprocal relationship when it works best!) and aren’t businesses trying to pay rent too—pay employees for their time, utilize their space, and often do the sole marketing for the event.
And I can’t say this loud enough, or kind enough, but in book publishing writers are (unfortunately) entitled to nothing but the words in their contract. (Terrible, yes). It’s why contract language is so, so, so important, why turning something down could be a better career move than accepting something dubious or strange or working with someone (or a team) that feels mild about your work. It’s why you want to get it all in writing: you want to know your timelines, you want to have access to the people you’re choosing to work with, and to know about turnover and bandwidth, and where you stand in their line-up of books, even just seasonally. It’s why a bad agent is worse than no agent, a bad deal is worse than no deal. It’s why our proposals and contracts say we can’t guarantee anything to the folks who choose to work with us.
Now would I bend over backwards for every book we work on? Yes. I would become Regan McNeil in The Exorcist, but I can’t ever say, “we’ll be able to do a. b. and c. though I can always be transparent about how I’m approaching a. b. and c.
It doesn’t matter who your publisher is, it doesn’t matter if you’re a HOT! TOPIC! BOOK!, it doesn’t matter if a comp got a stack of praise a few years ago (let’s be honest, those that do it first or do it with the bigger platform & network are going to get more usually), and it doesn’t matter if you are lucky enough to publish in the thick of a flourishing era on (insert topic), actually that can (sometimes even) make it harder, though timing can be lucky too.
It does matter how much money a press puts behind a book (they can send galleys more willy-nilly! they can get early interest from the publishers marketplace announcement! they can get higher profile blurbs! they can hire a this-will-cost-your-first-born-child PR team to work alongside in-house).
But there is so much that is simply dogged persistence, simply landing something good early, simply momentum, simply having enough time (runway! leeway!) simply how the book is marketed and by who, simply what is and isn’t peaking people’s interests and how in-tune the publicity team is with that audience and those angles. Simply, genre! I’m going to have a harder time landing your poetry collection traditional national coverage than a nonfiction book. Simply, name and accolades and relationships and connections matter. Leslie Jamison was not made in a day, and now she’s MOTHER Leslie Jamison, so yea—wherever her publicist sends something, it’s landing.1 Don’t get me started on networks, connections, trust and faith.
I think about this a lot because Pine State books are (most often) published by indie presses, which automatically gives us a wee bit of uphill from the start. We sometimes aren’t even working with an in-house team (they might not exist!), or we are pitching bookstores on consignment because there isn’t necessarily a distributor, or we are requesting blurbs behind on timeline, or we don't have a single print galley to send out. And that’s … the game. We know it, we play it, we mold it in our hands best as we can, and we work it out.
And I love a challenge. I love an author with big dreams and wild ideas. I love trying something new (and I love even more when it lands). Did I ever think I would be pitching Major League Baseball about an author throwing a first pitch this summer? I did not. Was it thrilling to learn baseball-speak and go back and forth with the comms team about “VIP treatment” for said author? Goosebumps!
But the best part about doing that work is an author being wide open to possibility. Excitement, anticipation, brewhaha, but not entitlement. Not “I’m owed this.”
It’s true what they say—the author writes the book, and then they send it out into the world through a publisher (& that publisher, with a few decisions about publicity and marketing effort will determine whether it succeeds) and after that, it becomes the reader’s to do with how they will. This isn’t to say an author can’t be a rad collaborator on the publicity side of things. The best books I work on usually go one of two ways: 1. an author sits back and trusts me to do my thing OR 2. we scheme regularly and go back and forth on ideas—two minds!
If it’s eggshells or passive aggression or constant pings, I’m answering those communications (worrying over them) and not pitching your book. It never pays to make anyone you work with uncomfortable, on edge, or in a corner. If that’s how you have to approach your team, they’re not the team for you or you’re not the client for them. What you want is honesty and thoughtfulness and persistence.
But it irks me when an author can’t see all the goodness happening for their book because they had a singular goal for publicity that isn’t coming to fruition (at least not on their timeline). Don’t miss the forest for ONE tree. Don't turn down an opportunity because it’s not on your level. (I’ve heard this phrase three times in this calendar year and it never hits). You never know what opportunity garners the next, you never know who you could be in community with, you never know what could be long-run important.
One of my favorite poets, Christian J. Collier, (in fact, his chapbook from Bull City Press titled Gleaming of the Blade is the first book I did publicity for solo) has a new book coming out (cover reveal on May 2!) in September. I won’t spill any secrets about it YET, but when I got my grubby little hands on it for publicity purposes, Christian had almost 40 pages of unpublished poetry from the book for me to pitch out (beautiful! chef’s kiss! including my FAVORITE poem from the book!). You know why he had so many available poems? A few years ago he was doing a local reading and his future publisher happened to be in the audience, heard him read, and asked if he had a manuscript. ARE YOU KIDDING. Christian said the collection might not have seen the light of day if not for that reading. And you’re telling me you can’t … blah blah blah?
Opportunity comes from the seemingly smallest of places.
Having published essays does not a Leslie Jamison make. Leslie Jamison seems to be the hot spot this month that I keep hearing about—in ways that boil down to, “how come everyone wants to talk to Leslie Jamison?” And I’m sure everyone is not following the careers of writers in the same way that I am consciously analyzing the moves that they’re making, but I think it must be said, you are not (insert beloved writer) because you’ve published work in that genre, you are writing on similar themes, you also fit that identity. Leslie Jamison, love her or hater, has made a CAREER, baby! Flashing lights! Exclusive Rights!
Her book about her divorce or her book about motherhood or her book about whatever-she-wants-to-write-about-next is not the same as any other writer writing on those topics. She can switch lanes and her readership will turn their blinkers on. She’s built a career on her Writing, as a Writer. She has reached that elusive point of being outside the topical bubble—yes we are in the “divorce era” of publishing, the “mom era”—not made or founded by Jamison, and indirectly related to what she chose to turn her focus toward, but she is beyond the moment. And that is work of years, of a career, and of moving from an independent publisher to a bigger more established conglomerate.
Her first book, The Gin Closet, was published in 2010 by the Free Press. As far as I can tell, the biggest media attention it received was Bookforum (insular) and SF Gate (regional, though also syndicated). It did, as is representative of Leslie Jamison’s writing talent, get a starred review in Publishers Weekly. The top review of the book as far as Google results is The Iowa Review.
It was not superstardom from the gate with Jamison. It was not even a novel that unfurled her literary red carpet, but Empathy Exams published four years later (and ten years ago), which came out swinging with two Best American Essays in the collection, and was published when it won The Graywolf Prize (again, an independent press). It became a bestseller, and was reviewed arguably “everywhere.” At that point, she was publishing regularly in Harpers, Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American—all magazines that get anthology and award nods more than other magazines. It was no fluke that, that culminated in the success of the book, she was doing the work, and had been doing the work. But this work that made her a star, was her *second* book, and a new genre, which she has not left since the publication of Empathy Exams.
With The Recovering, she moved to Little Brown, and continued with them for Splinters—both receiving critical acclaim, though I would argue I’ve seen more of Splinters because it happened to be (luck of the draw!) published at the right literary time (mom/divorce era), though please feast your eyes on this “Editorial Reviews” section of Amazon for The Recovering.
Jamison has been publishing a book every few years since that first novel, we’re five books in and it’s been fourteen years. What I’m trying to say here is that she’s not some new darling getting all the big magazine placements that other writers inevitably want, it’s a consistent pattern of putting herself out there in order to gain a trusted audience. Leslie Jamison probably doesn’t even need to publish essays in conjunction with new books because she’s already proven that her books are worth reading to those that love her—regardless of the topic she chooses.
Sloane Crosley is another career-writer who is seeing the success pay off. She published her first book in 2008 and has been writing a book every few years since then. Sloane was a publicist (she knew the game!) when her first book (an essay collection) came out, I Was Told There’d Be Cake. It went straight to paperback, it was not reviewed in the New York Times but briefly noted as a nonfiction paperback, which says a little about the extent of the bet that Penguin Random House thought they made with this book (no hardcover!)—and which also made it incredibly accessible to college-age, twenty-something readers (her *ideal* audience at the time!). And Riverhead is a trusted imprint, before I knew about imprints I was reading a lot of Riverhead without connecting the dots on who was buying books there. I read I Was Told There’d Be Cake in college because my roommate was reading it (shoutout to Christine who has zero to do with my literary life, but I trust her reading taste x5873%). Then, when The Clasp came out, we book-clubbed it in her living room because we loved reading Cake together.
Now, it needs to be said that both of these writers are white women who have been afforded a long publishing career, which is something publishing desperately needs to work on, on both ends (acquiring and publicizing).
This could also be said for writers like Ross Gay, Amy Tan, Bryan Washington, Jacqueline Woodson, Sandra Cisneros, Hanif Abdurraqib, Miranda July, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Karen Russell, Anne Carson, Melissa Febos, and on and on. They can write anything, I’m buying it. I would say this list of writers has reached household name status in a way, or at least writers and readers are six degrees of separation from their work, they’ve heard their name before.
And what I’m getting at with both of these examples is just because you see splashy things happening for a certain author, or some sort of public endurance for a certain author’s writing does not mean that it hasn’t been built on a longer career. And if it’s a debut—FOLLOW the money. FOLLOW THE MONEY. Yes, many people are lucky, yes, even more people have lots of money put behind their books, but your book not getting Leslie Jamison attention has much more context than “this is unfair.” The news flash might very well be, it’s all unfair, it’s built that way. But until we start investing in each other’s non-capitalistic artistic practices, this is what we have.
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: Jenny Irish wrote about “looking like an artist” (in higher education) for Salon, America Magazine said Jessica Jacobs unalone, “the beauty and brokenness this world effortlessly flow together, bleeding and blending like watercolors and the book was also reviewed in Trampoline this week, Lady Wing Shot by Sara Moore Wagner got its first review in UAC Voice, Curing Season by Kristine Langley Mahler and Charm Offensive by Ross White were both reviewed in the newest issue of North Carolina Literary Review, both Kate Doyle’s I Meant It Once and Eugenia Leigh’s BIANCA were chosen for the 2024 PEN America Literary Awards longlist the awards longlist (Leigh has withdrawn alongside those protesting), Jehanne Dubrow was interviewed about Exhibitions for New Books Network, Brooke Kinsley spoke with Margo Steines about Brutalities for Brevity Blog, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.
Loved it! A good read and so helpful and inspiring for the authors. Good luck to all of them.
Thank you so much for writing this. It taught me so much and I am still learning every day about publishing and marketing and my day job is in marketing!! I am grateful for all of the knowledge you shared and for your tenacity on my book.