And then sent me this gem from our very own North Carolina Zoo, a zoo I frequent with my toddler and one year old just so I can hear the toddler say he wants to see, “ephalints!”
I have my own weird history with THE Nicholas Sparks (I coached his college roommate’s kid in swimming & that’s the extent of the story I’ll be telling here today). But I’m mystified at the excitement I have if this is a real publicity hit for his book publicity team. And it, I think, surely is.
No, truly, we’re mystified:
If you see me trying to place rare animals from Pine State Pub books on mountains with names like “Purgatory Mountain” know it’s both a sign of the times, and you saw nothing. There’s no shame in book publicity, say it with me.
This week I got to talk to a few writers through Brown Bag Lit (you can watch the playback here and Subscribe to their Youtube channel or follow their newsletter) and the number one question (well, there are two) that I always get on Q&A’s like this is: (1) why didn’t it work? (2) what if nothing happens / is it worth it?
This photo makes me feel like I need to build a bookshelf into my closet-office. But look at my sweet toddler’s face and the hanger referencing that it is in fact a closet—there are jeans next to me on calls.
Publicity of any sort is a game of chance, right? Every publicist’s contract says so with some iteration of we cannot determine the outcome of pitching. You’re paying for trying (and hopefully transparency). And in that case, you want to work with someone that has the following qualities: hustle, ingenuity, relationships, (comedic) timing, collaborative spirit, and an embrace of the mad idea!
Can I spend time building good relationships, writing great pitches, perfecting essays and op-eds, making cool press kits, brainstorming talking points, helping to define the many, many, many micro-audiences, imagining newsletter schedules or social media schedules, yes, of course. This is the bread & butter, this is the everyday.
But the mixed bingo card and game of CLUE of Nicholas Sparks at the zoo with a genetically-rare deer sighting for his new book, is the X factor of publicity—it’s like publicity-potion making.
Shout out to one of my big winter books (& the best author to see in my inbox because I cackle at every email), Book of Potions by Lauren K. Watel.
So, do you want the team behind your book that is going to pitch a rare deer to the NC Zoo in hopes this strange and ephemeral moment can be captured and plugged for a book, yes! And I get it, he’s Nicholas Sparks, so he doesn’t really need the publicity in the case of a debut author. But because he has a mass commercial audience that may not be reading the latest New Yorker review, and he’s not necessarily the hot Bookstagram / Booktok author he (perhaps) might have been ten or twenty years ago, the way you remind his audience he is still publishing your favorite picket-fence-romance, is by going to where his commercial appeal has a crossover audience—the NC zoo—where white moms plan their fall photos. (It really is so beautiful there, it’s me, I’m the white mom).
107k followers, and almost 7k people hearted this photo. It doesn’t even have the book cover in the main image (a cardinal sin of book publicity!) and yet, everyone will want to read the caption to know more about this special fawn. (Yes, it is also tapping into everyone’s favorite form of social media joy—small, odd animals).
This is like … winning Plinko, and then spinning the wheel and winning the showcase levels of book publicity.
And these ideas don’t come from nowhere. Back to our two questions—why didn’t it work (which really means, “why don’t I have sales when I did all the traditional modes of book publicity?) and there are 1000 different answers to that.
In this season, it could be timing (election), genre, what your cover looks like, what the hook of your book is (I had to turn down a book yesterday that sounded interesting though traumatic because I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to take it on), hitting only a specific audience—or one tier of that audience, relying too much on one angle of book publicity (bylines, events, reviews, availability in bookstores, etc), not sharing your good news (don’t shame spiral about the amount of things you’re sharing on Bluesky about your book, we need you to share your good news, your audience continues the messaging-spread), genre, but most often I think—why it didn’t work is because you got stuck in the “this is what book publicity looks like.” I get a review here, I get an interview here, I make a few anticipated lists, and I do five tour stops in my bookstore region. While those are all beautiful, good, celebratory things, I’m positive in a society where book-banning is going to continue ramping up, we have to find other spaces to celebrate and demand literature. The zoo has never been on a media list for me, but why NOT? Maybe the question isn’t “why am I doing this?” and it should be, “why wouldn’t I try this?”
And the second question, “what if nothing happens?” Well, what if nothing happens? How would that feel for you? Is the trying worth the possibilities?
And I mean that in the myriad of ways:
physically—schlepping books to a bookstore or the post office or writing 100 cards for booksellers on the chance that you get picked for Indie Next?
emotionally—how would it feel to put so much work into something and see it sort of dashed. And I say this because I talk to writers all the time that are on publishers mid-lists and want to talk about post-release publicity (which exists for poetry and doesn’t *really* exist for other genres. We try it, and we have had success, but the current publicity cycles just don’t cater to this timeline. So, we have to do an interesting OTHER thing to make the book have the same splash or momentum. That’s sometimes more, and very different work than pre-release publicity).
mentally—what might this mean for your career? for your next book? for the ideas of this book?
I’m biased obviously about the amount of work and the outcomes, and I know that all publicists are built differently, and whether you have an outside team and/or an inside team, you’re a big fish or a mid-list, a poet or a romance author, a chapbook or a celebrity memoir, all makes a big difference in what those outcomes look like, but I always land on the effort side. Is this because I got awards for participating growing up? Maybe. But wouldn’t you want to say, I did as much as I possibly could instead of “I could have done more.”
(And shout out to every publicist I know who will inevitably find the perfect reader or critic exactly seven months after finishing a book campaign. I see you, you are loved).
I love the way you write this column. It's always uplifting, funny, important, and well written. You make me proud! Writing isn't always about novels. It's the everyman column that I like; the opinion page in the newspaper, the essays about everyday life or work. You hit the nail on the head, and you do it flawlessly.
I love the way you write this column. It's always uplifting, funny, important, and well written. You make me proud! Writing isn't always about novels. It's the everyman column that I like; the opinion page in the newspaper, the essays about everyday life or work. You hit the nail on the head, and you do it flawlessly.
Okay, so, go to zoo...write about animals...profit!