NOTES FROM DRY SEASON

on the idea of "why not us?," are my emails going to spam, and the sad state of affairs in my inbox

I’ve been writing opening paragraphs of this newsletter for several days while on the vacation from hell.

Don’t get me wrong, I watched my first child—in the only shoes he really wears, rain boots that light up—jump in puddles at the top of a mile high mountain, discovered that my baby has a simple palate for cheese dip and salad dressing rather than mushed up carrots and pears, and along the way they both made friends with a very fluffy black garden cat, two swans, and two ducks. My two year old kept yelling, “butt in the air!” whenever the swan dove. It was beautiful, yet humbling. Anything with children seems to be that combo. I have an on-going eye twitch.

All you need to know about the hell part is that we have a baby, a toddler, it rained, a wallet was lost, and at one point on Tuesday BJ said, “I think something is trying to keep us in this room” (in the mountains of North Carolina) and on Wednesday I said, “whatever luck or guardian angel has been with me my whole life has since left.” It was that kind of vacation—filled with superstitious wrong turns.

I went on vacation (partly) in hopes of ending a months-long inbox dry-spell. Every time I do something for myself these days—not a child, not an author, not serving anything but my own “tummy button” as my son calls it, I imagine that that self-service, that supposedly restorative me-time, will let the universe know that I’m not taking work so seriously, not refreshing my inbox every ten minutes, revealing to the larger picture that I’m a TOTALLY balanced individual.

The speaker in my head says things like, “when you return from this walk, because you chose to leave your desk for a short period, surely you’ll have twenty yes-emails” or “Look at you, protecting your time.” Reader, there are never twenty emails, and I am making Pine State Instagram posts at 8:30pm, or scheduling emails, or shifting tiny text boxes on press kits, or making my next-day to-do list, or looking for the right person to pitch for this very specific piece of a book I’m working on. Sometimes when I shower, I leave the phone on the window ledge outside so that when the ideas come, I can type them, steaming, into my notes app. I tried to read for pleasure on the drive here, but read for work instead (which turned out to be a book that closed the shades on the rest of the world for a few blissful hours).

My work life balance is shit. More evidence, I wrote this from the town park wifi on vacation.

We had a great fall at Pine State—Susan Kiyo Ito’s I Would Meet You Anywhere was a finalist for the Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography, Margo Steines Brutalities: A Love Story is still everywhere I look, Kate Doyle, author of I Meant It Once, is still on tour for her debut story collection, Holly Wendt’s Heading North continues to garner intricate reviews, and people keep talking to me about Eugenia Leigh’s BIANCA and KB Brookins’ Freedom House (both spring books with long tails—poetry publicity is like the asteroid + the hole it makes, the shelf life is much longer than a novel. Three points and a cookie for poetry!).

And then spring began. I’m not saying nothing is happening (there is evidence to the contrary but I am harder on myself than anyone), but I do feel a less-than-familiar waiting for each book to have its EUREKA! moment. Some have confirmed, some are coming, some are nail-biters. It’s the waiting, the anticipation, the what if none of the maybes turn to yeses that’s causing the itching in me. That self-doubt creeps in, and then the Goldilocks question of how many responses to a pitch is too few that I need to start it over from scratch? (Am I writing a dozen iterations per book right now, maybe! MAYBE!). Is the pitch just right in that it’s landing with enthusiasm, or truly striking like a match—everyone wants a copy.

There was a moment in February where I thought, “are all my emails going to spam?” because I couldn’t get an answer on a certain book. AM I SPAM is not a question I thought I would ask in this lifetime, but I do jiggle. (Everyone needs this visual history of SPAM in their life from Insidehook).

To put it into a basketball metaphor, this March Madness my undergraduate alma mater and the team I root for rain or shine, the NCSU Wolfpack won the ACC tournament (a feat that hadn’t happened for us since I’ve been alive) and they’re still dancing strong to the sweet sixteen (please superstitions, do not come for my team because I’m writing this newsletter). What the team keeps repeating every week when a half court Hail Mary goes through into overtime and they come out with a win is, “Why not us?” And that is generally how I feel about book publicity. Why wouldn’t Vogue want to cover this? Why wouldn’t Access Hollywood crack open a director’s chair for this authors? Why not NPR? WHY NOT US?

Is this me admitting that I think of Pine State as the underdog? It’s probably true—I think of indie & small press publishing as the scrappy underdog. I’m rooting for all of us. The effort it takes for our books to do what the lead titles at conglomerates do (or even mid-list conglomerate titles) is a feat that I often complain about when I see in-house publicists move to freelance with a website full of their backed-by-a-house-sales-and-marketing-team work, or a beloved author’s fourth book gets every crumb of easy press while we scrape and scrounge for debuts, or the same editors keep choosing the same books for their book clubs (the numbers aren’t even that sizzling, but this was debatable a few years ago, I wonder if the sheen has worn off). Looking at all that, I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished in two-ish years. When I sit on my inbox, I’m always hoping for a Hail Mary.

And publicists will tell you (contractually and conversationally), there are no guarantees, and the job is the effort, but I am not the kind of person who has the ability to settle. This is probably true for most publicists. I have, on several occasions, cried at my desk when things that seemed likely didn’t come through for an author, and I have, in the middle of the street, done a Breakfast Club fist in the air when I’m alerted to a beautiful, sometimes surprising, yes.

While authors land in two camps, “I don’t really know what I want, I guess I need to think about it…” (and then become ravenous for more when things start landing) or “I want Good Morning America and the New York Times bestseller list.” The in-between is a rare bird. I’ve found, what authors really crave in the process of bringing a book into the world, is transparency and communication—to be a part of the conversation about their work, to know what’s happening, an openness that I don’t think is yet honeyed into the traditional publishing path (whether big press or independent). In this way, my job is one of schemers scheming together.

One of the great parts about book publicity is there are always more avenues, more angles, more podcasts, more Substacks and magazines, more corners of the internet fog, there is no such thing as a complete exhaustive media list (exhausting, yes, but exhaustive, no). There are contract dates with firm endings, and since I’m friendly with the trickster publicity gods, there are always perfect reviewers found after the fact for books that I worked on six months ago, two years ago, last week. A blessing and a curse. The tension of a rabbit’s foot—it’s a rabbit’s foot that someone dyed purple and hot-glued to a keychain, and believing in its luck, makes it lucky.

Why not us, why not you? Maybe it’ll come with the very next scheme up your sleeve. You truly never know what could happen.

(I won’t check my inbox tonight, but let this newsletter be the rubbed-sandpaper of a tiny flame growing there).

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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: Tatiana Johnson-Boria talks creative (and caring) relationships for Creative Independent, Jessica Jacobs unalone is reviewed in Poetry Foundation, Slant Books, Still Journal, Jewish Book Council, and she talks primordial, cosmic, etiological at Earth & Alter, Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s essay The Beast in Your Head is in The Sun, and talked being inside the ‘Exploding Head’ for Madison Magazine, Kasey Peters really sees Holly M. Wendt’s Heading North in Full Stop, Jenny Irish’ Hatch is reviewed, “exceptional and cutting” in the first issue of Atmospheric Quarterly, she hosts a round-table dedication at Literary Hub, and has a conversation in CHIRB where Hatch is called, “delightfully speculative as it is nightmarishly urgent,” by Elizabeth McNeill, and the first review of Jason K. Friedman’s “tantalizing” Liberty Street is live at Publishers Weekly, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.