PUBLICITY FIRST, AGENTS SECOND

on why thinking about publicity before querying agents is a best practice & some fun with mad libs!

I get quite a few asks to talk about agenting with college students, which I’m always happy to do (hint hint!). But I am no longer an agent (though

Zoe-Aline Howard

is, so shouts to my girl!), and I would much rather talk to writers and students about publicity. The problem is that publicity seems to be the last thing on the mind of college professors and students—there are usually querying lectures in MFA programs, but very few creative writing programs ever cover marketing and publicity. I went to a program that does, but it is certainly not the norm.

I don’t know when agents became the top of the publishing food pyramid, maybe it’s because they’re the first line of defense with publishing a big four book, or agents feel like a coveted part of the publishing process, or it’s that all-consuming yes from someone who “actually knows what they’re talking about.” It feels like everyone wants to know the secret sauce to writing a query, and I could give 2734 talks on this and still not give you every ingredient). But somewhere along the line, the agent is what we’ve made pinnacle (and then perhaps that wonky screenshot from Publishers Marketplace after that).

But I would argue, far more important than thinking agents as soon as you finish a manuscript, is thinking about publicity—not searching a database of agents, not reading the 3798 Substacks on how to land an agent, but really sitting-in and stewing on publicity. This is not to say you should be researching publicists, this is to say thinking publicity FIRST will help you understand the ways to market your book to an agent or publisher.

I know there’s a whole conversation about how much work in marketing and publicity writers should be doing (I recommend the recent Lit Hub piece from Kevin Maloney), and whether I agree or disagree with the fact that writers are artists absent from the publicity machine (although storytelling is inherently marketing …), we still live in a time when publicity and marketing is partly up to the writer. I can run a whole campaign without a writer speaking to me about the book, but it won’t be as good as the collaborative campaign I do with a writer where we’re working in conjunction to hone our messaging and ideas.

I sent holiday cards this year, so I’m feeling all-powerful, and in my late-night-pre-birthday-doom-saving-efforts, I ordered myself this little snail mail mad lib from Pipsticks. (I, too, lose myself to an Instagram ad with the ease of Shop Pay sometimes).

And in looking at it again this morning, I thought to myself—what might a mad lib be like for someone who is trying to figure out a bit about their own books publicity BEFORE writing that query, SO THAT they can take a more holistic approach to approaching “the machine.” I also need to note here that publicity is a long game, please do reach out to publicists early, but not too early. I can’t in my brain carry a 2027 book right now, but I also can’t take on a March book—you’re already too late.

Here are a few things I would include:

But first a question: when you have finished a book, whatever genre, I want you to ask yourself if you’ve done everything in your power to make yourself intriguing to a publisher? We are, however you feel about it, in a time of platform. We can complain all day about publishers missing the mark, betting on the wrong books, etc, but if you’re coming to the table with nothing for them to work with (and nothing for your publicist to work with—you, an unknown entity, how do you expect them to magically snap you into breakout stardom?). Have I done well with relatively anonymous authors? Yes. But it’s harder to pitch them. I have to use my own work to build on that work, I have to get things moving earlier for those authors—attempt to get some hits before publication, I have to rely more on their regional and hometowns uplifting them, or their identity-communities (which is a whole other conversation). It is more work, more time, and therefore more money.

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MADLIBBING:

For novels: readers care about characters & conflicts (not themes, though publishing cares about themes). I know every synopsis on every book is trying its damndest to get readers to care about theme, and this word just feels like a relic to high school English class. In this same line of thinking, some readers (and genres) care about tropes. So, you’re going to need to figure out, what do your characters want, what are their tensions points, what’s the central conflict of the book (where the desires and the tensions meet).

Questions for the mad lib:

• OMG, Did you hear about _____? (Make the desires and tension GOSSIP)—see what comes of it? Everyone loves gossip and most people love a scandal.

• Can you believe she/he/they ______?

• I can’t believe [insert character] did when …

• Who do they think they are? …

• I totally agree with [insert character] about …

• I think [insert character] is wrong about this …

• What would you have done if ….

For memoir: agents and readers BOTH want to know why you and why now? Go back to elementary school and think: who, what, when, where, and how—you need to be able to answer every question, and then frame your query in your story’s importance RIGHT NOW, for readers RIGHT NOW.

If you find yourself unable to answer “right now,” or you’re using some sort of canned language without specificity, then you might not be a ready to query. Canned language would be things like “as we reckon with trauma with books like Body Keeps the Score and the #metoo movement…”—y’all the #metoo movement was years ago at this point, still VERY relevant of course, but it’s not a thing to tie a book to at this point unless you’re to add to that conversation in some new way (but I would still say think long and hard about that).

If this is you, my suggestion on the publicity side would be to start doing some pop culture (Substack, Instagram, magazines, Twitter) and news deep dives. What are people talking about? What’s in the news? What are the headlines of magazines that include your readers? What are “influencers” (using it in the broadest terms to also include cultural critics) talking about (folks that have platform interests that intersect with your book’s story and threads SPECIFICALLY). HOW are they talking about the things that intersect with your book? It takes a lot of work to figure out why your story matters over everyone else’s story (yes, I mean “over” in terms of market—there is only so much room), and the work will be so helpful in the long run if you do it.

Questions for the mad lib:

• I deeply connected with what [cultural critic] said about [topic], but I wonder if we’re not done thinking about …

• In thinking about the [insert movement / topic], I found myself thinking about … [interesting side quests from your book] …

• For me [thing #1 ] and [thing #2 ] are absolutely connected, I cannot think about [thing #1] without thinking ….

• What changed my perspective on [thread] was …

• It was in [insert moment] that I knew I would never feel the same about [topic]…

• I love thinking about [topic] and how it’s intimately tied to ….

• When I talk about my story, people most often connect with ….

• Part of writing about [topic], is that it leads to [other threads]…

Which leads me to think before all this, you’re going to need to figure out what your book IS (in the genre categories of the marketplace, not in the genre categories of your heart).

Pitching a book as literary fiction when it’s upmarket is unhelpful to you and agents / publishers. You HAVE to figure this out.

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Defining your genre, BISAC codes, and categories for the marketplace: My MFA thesis was this weird Cornell note looking 200-page document of essays where my current self (at the time) was on the larger side, and my eleven year old self’s dialogue was on the smaller side (the year of tragedies in my life). It has no market at a big four press. In the genre of my heart, I thought I was doing something innovative and it would be revered in the land of Lydia Yuknavitch’s, Sheila Heti’s and Kate Zambreno’s. I haven’t opened it since I graduated.

In terms of genre, a few ways you can define this is in trying to figure out what writers align with you (not writers you’re inspired by, but writers whose work your work reflects in some way), and see how they’ve been defined by marketing teams.

Lydia Yuknavitch and Kate Zambreno’s work have both been labeled “manifestos” (funny), Kate Zambreno (Amina Cain, Maggie Nelson) all infuse some term related to “literary scholarship” or “personal canons”—that is using literature as a means to navigate the terrain of the personal. Zambreno’s work has been called “layered, meditative, mode-warping, inventive” etc. On Amazon, her latest book The Light Room has been labeled “memoir,” “nature writing & essays,” and “motherhood.”

So my query is going to translate all of this to something like, “structurally inventive” (will not help me get an agent: an agent will see this and think intriguing, but independent press—they might open it, but it’s going to be a hard sell), “essays,” (another hard sell) and “girlhood” (oversaturated market).

I feel like it’s important to say here that almost every writer in the list above started at an independent or small press and with more books, moved to a big four press. So, I am aware of my future journey should I find myself in the page again.

Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water, has been called “memoir” alongside “highly unconventional,” and “not your mother’s memoir.” As in, this is memoir, but it’s not really memoir you’re expecting (lots of readers enter memoir (or do not for this very reason) expecting this sort of summary of someone’s life, and I’m so glad we’re moving away from that on the memoir front. In some lists, Chronology of Water been called “narrative nonfiction” which I find to be much more journalistic than memoir. On Amazon it’s under “women’s biographies” and “LGBTQ biographies.” Do you see how these labels are like herding cats? I would not say this book is either of those things, and yet—these categories determine how you find it on retail sites and in the library, they’re so important to a book’s sales. Also, this book is TOO old for me to be comping. 2011 is TOO long ago, the marketplace was so different and readers were different too.

So, if I’m looking at all of this from Lydia, I might translate this when approaching the next stage of publishing as “fans of narrative nonfiction’s layered storytelling, memoir’s deep bravery, and unconventional writers like (insert list) will love The Green Glass Door (my thesis title). This is super generic, don’t quote me.

Questions for the mad lib:

• I’m writing for readers who love … [THINGS, not necessarily books]

• Some imaginary shelves I would put my book on …

• If the bookstore wasn’t in order by last name, I’d loved to be shelved with authors like …

• Browsing the library, I want to find my book in …

• In looking at Amazon categories, it looks like I fit in …

• People who blurbed [insert comp] were …, and they might have been a good blurb because …"

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Differences and stand-outs: If you’re not approaching comps as, “yes, my book is like XYZ, but it’s different in these ways,” you’re doing it wrong. I’m working on quite a few motherhood books. As someone who avoided motherhood books at all costs for the last several years, the flood gates opened with Nicole Graev Lipson’s Mothers and Other Fictional Characters which quite literally taught me that I can have an intellectual life while being a mother, and those two things weren’t mutually exclusive (maybe it’s misogyny, and the sad thought that I never thought of my own mother as a “thinker” before I had kids—WHY—but I spent my first few years of motherhood wanting to keep my intellectual life completely separate from mothering, and so I literally NEVER bought motherhood books. And when I did, or they were sent to me, I was real snotty about it).

So, what makes your book stand-out in the sea of _________ books? This is going to help you in pitching your book at all stages. I’m seeing the next phase of publishing saturation being “midlife books.” Last week I had to Google, “what age is midlife?” only to find that I am in the age of midlife. I do not feel “midlife.” Most of my friends (mid-thirties) would not define themselves as midlife. A book marketed as “midlife” would not find us.

Questions for the mad lib:

• Readers who didn’t like [insert comp], said …

• Readers said they learned from [insert comp] …

• [Book speaking], I’m not like other books because …

• People who love [insert NON BOOK RELATED THING] will love my book…

• People who want to understand [insert NON BOOK RELATED THING] will love my book …

• People who want more [THING] in their books about [THING] will want my book because …

• People who want less [THING] in their books about [THING"] will want my book because …

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Making “trends” work for you: A hint would be, if it’s trending now, you are going to need a new way to approach the current trend (because in terms of publishing, you are frankly too late). If you’re writing for “midlife” readers (All Fours is the current headliner here), how can you help writers see you in that category, but above the fray of the trend—beyond the trend? One way would be to publish a few essays in conjunction with your book’s topic that you can use in pitches.

Anna J Rollins (who is on Substack here) is one of my favorite writers who GETS IT. If you read through her headlines, they’re formulaic (and often not chosen by her, but I’m sure she knows how to write a headline), but she’s writing about things that I care about—like her recent TODAY essay on giving up extracurriculars for a year—as a mom with toddlers, I’m already trying to figure out how my mom did it all, and how I’m going to manage our family’s life with the extracurricular pressures.

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Read READER reactions: Read why READERS loved a trending book. Spend some time on Storygraph and Goodreads. Spend some time on Bookstagram reading captions. Spend some time searching Substack for reviews. It’s one thing to read what critics said about a book, guarantee there’s a “dazzling” in there, but what you really want to see is why ACTUAL readers loved a book.

While they’re not always in conflict with critics, reader reviews are way more earnest. They’re not trying to “prove” something, or do some sort of convincing. They are leading with feeling, not with sales. Critical darlings does not a sales lead make. Reader reviews on the big platforms are trying to build community. This is where the good stuff is in terms of how to think about marketing your book for the query or future readers.

Questions for the mad lib:

• Five-star readers said …

• 1-star readers said …

• Three-star readers said …

• Readers loved this book because of its …

• Readers didn’t like this book because of its …

• Lines I loved from reader reviews …

• Things I disagreed with from reader reviews …

• Things I agreed with from reader reviews …

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Fun stuff to think about:

• Where might you find someone reading your book? Is it in the bleachers of their kid’s soccer match? Is it in a quiet cafe in a corner with a cappuccino? Is it in a book club through the local library? During their commute? Before bed TBR pile? This is going to tell you so much more about your readers and your book than you might expect. (This question can lead to answers to: how much time your readers have—is your book structured to fit that lifestyle (I’ll admit this is a crazy question), what they want to be seen reading, where they want to be seen reading, how they find books, who they trust with recommendations, etc)

This is my favorite kind of local coffeeshop to me, I would feel SO COOL if I saw someone reading my future book here. Photo by Lauren Leith.

• Rather than adjectives, think in nouns and verbs: Rather than hoping your book is described as “unputdownable” (though a girl can dream), think about describing your book in ACTIONS and CONCRETES. Think about senses and adding texture to your queries and pitches. When I read queries, I read a lot of writers focused more on getting a point across, than tangibly centering me and bringing me in with graspable language. It’s not description of feeling that moves readers, it’s descriptions of grounded things.

• Write a letter ABOUT your book to a friend: While every agent I know describes queries as a “business document” so I wouldn’t encourage you to write to them like a friend, though I would say stay friendly—an interesting activity might be to write a letter about your book to a friend. What would you tell your closest friends about your book? Your parents? Your dog walker? Your favorite podcast host? Your local coffeeshop barista? A stranger who asks what you do?

  Different from an elevator pitch, what would you say to people who are both already invested in you and folks who you don’t know at all? What’s between those two letters that you can use to your advantage in a pitch?

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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: Nicole Graev Lipson’s Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is on The Millions Most-Anticipated List, Jason Friedman’s LIBERTY STREET is reviewed in Tuscaloosa News and on Alabama Public Radio, Jessica Jacobs, author of unalone, is “Queering Genesis” on Christian Century’s Queering Contemplation podcast, Christian J. Collier, author of GREATER GHOST goes deep with Andy Fogle for Salvation South, Jenny Sadre-Orafai, author of DEAR OUTSIDERS, builds an immersive narrative world for Electric Literature, Sarah LaBrie, author of NO ONE GETS TO FALL APART, talks letting love happen in Creative Independent, Chelsey Pippin Mizzi, author of TAROT FOR CREATIVITY, navigates creative seasons on the FEMME ON podcast, Tatiana Johnson-Boria will be at the Woodberry Poetry Room with Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Saeed Jones and porsha olayiwola on February 12th, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.