SELLING YOUR SOUL
on framing in book publicity and for authors who aren't coming in hot with a "platform"
Platform platform platform. I gave up the shoes several years ago (though I can still manage those stylish Norwegian clog looking shoes in a mustardy yellow—call it what it is, kooky art teacher, farmer’s market, too many tote bags). We all get spooked by the word, but I’d like to REFRAME (you’ll see what I did there) the idea of platform, particularly when it comes to promoting a book project of any genre, and especially if you have no platform going into the publicity campaign.
I don’t mean authors who are a nobody (everybody! is! a! somebody!), but I mean the kind of thinking in publicity where at some point in a book campaign (if that’s what I’m working on, primarily a “product,” for months before the release of said product)—I often have a moment and a think to myself: should I focus on marketing THE person or THE product. Of course, it’s always a mix of both, but the framing changes. And sometimes, it’s more advantageous to market THE person, and sometimes it’s more advantageous to focus on the materials, ahem the book at hand.
Now, I’m not typically working with “experts” in the traditional sense—historians, politicians, doctors, folks in decades-long academic careers with titles ahead of their names. This is to say I don’t often work on “serious nonfiction,” where the point of the book is also a point towards a certain degree of professionalism—an area of expertise. Thus, I’m not speaking to that sort of “platform” of an author here. I’m speaking to the memoirists who have something specific to add to the body of conversation and literature, less an anecdotal experience and more a truth so relevant that it demands testimony alongside what we call “fact,” (truth and fact, woof the connotations) or a poet-with-a-point, or a project book (writing on a specific job, experience, culture, sub-culture, grouping, identity marker), a story collection embedded in a cultural moment or created to give an idea, perhaps fringe, actual space in culture.
We’re living in the time when most books that garner publicity of the national kind point towards a more obvious “take” or surface a specific sub-culture story. It is what it is for the publicity machine. I’m not saying the stories that get publicity are all scandal and intrigue, but they often have cultural resin and are not simply well-written. Though we do always hope the book with voice and verve (and not just the aboutness book) finds its people, of course. Fine, fine, fine. So, we use all that resin to publicize the book, but what happens when within framing the book, the author is actually the necessary ingredient. When I inevitably look at this question at any point in a book campaign, or simply thinking about building a platform for someone who eventually wants to write a book—the question it always comes down to is: how many degrees of separation can this author be from their book?
The questions:
Can the author simply backseat and answer the Google doc interview questions?
Must the author write about aspects and adjacents of the experience in the book?
How does the author’s career play into the story?
What about the author is IN the book, but not IN the book—experience outside the realm or scope of the text, but necessary to understanding the story of the book.
Are there experiences not in the book that apply to the development of the themes in the book?
Famously, Suzanne Collins wants very little to do with publicizing her books. She does the occasional interview, but you’re not going to find her on every magazine or doing every interview like you would, say, Emily Henry. Her degree of separation from the books is that people know her name as the writer of The Hunger Games, and that’s that; her website even reads quite distant—as if she just approved the copy (minus the rat photo, that’s fun).
So much goes into this degree of separation thinking—the tone of your metadata (book description, blurb banners on Amazon (colors, fonts, quotes chosen—often dependent on the cover of the book, which also plays into the closeness readers feel to an author), level of author photo seriousness or friendlessness (Zoe and I joke that EJ Koh is the queen of her books match her author photos), how conversational is the copy on your website (closer to readers=more conversational, further from readers=more direct, often third person, often professional and not whimsical), what dominates the book pitch (summary, blurbs, previous publications, shock factor, intrigue, dynamic questions, depth, wittiness, cattiness, etc), all of this should be in the recipe of how you’re thinking about an author’s relationship to their publicity campaign and how the campaign is framed.
Everything in publicity, (yea, I can agree with myself here, I just nodded alone on the couch, well the cat is here) is about framing. From the bookstagram flat lays to which central questions go in what pitch, to the section of the book that gets asked about in interviews (and focused on in reviews), to the theme or thread pulled out by the publicist for which critic (and which audience), to the way you introduce the author in a pitch (—does “Guggenheim fellow” do more than “acclaimed writer?,” (does “acclaimed writer” do ANYTHING) does this critic need to know more about the author’s identity, etc). I’m working with an author right now who has written over 22 books, and I hesitate to write that anywhere because does it weigh her down? (Fell obscene? Is her muchness going to be taken the wrong way? Why do we only love when people do this in the mystery or romance categories, but for literary fiction it’s seen as kind of obscene? “Your art should take longer!” the critics rejoice. But folks, that’s a CAREER. It’s all picking a frame (I guess literature prefers that I use the word lens here).
It’s true that you don’t have to sell your soul for good publicity, you don’t have to write personal essays that should have stayed in your diary, you don’t have to schlep yourself across the country for events (unless you’re a poet, and then we can talk), you don’t have to answer EVERY interview question asked of you (you’re allowed to have boundaries around the kinds of things you want to answer, especially if you’re a memoirist), but does WHO YOU ARE (in quite literally any way) matter more to the book than it might another book? Perhaps.
And this isn’t about whether and author can magically turn into an influencer on any specific platform. I repeat: you do not have to launch a Substack, an Instagram account with ATfirstname_writer, a Tiktok (though I’ll be the first to tell you that Jodi Picoult is that girl on Tiktok), but you do be do be do have to think about why a reader might go to your website and what they should find there, what about you elevates your books, are you the bridge between what you’re writing now and what you want to do / write next (how can you cross that bridge with publicity for the first project?), what do you want the book to do FOR YOU—and how can you use the publicity process to get to that point?, and again, what frames the book project?
WAYS OF FRAMING:
pop culture / current events (example: “Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story, disrupts the cultural narratives of birth, and the language of women having "sacrificial instincts" (Idaho legislature) particularly when it comes to motherhood.”
setting (example: “Deep in the rhododendron tunnels of the Blue Ridge Mountains, poet Mary Ardery writes the history of soaked feet on a five mile hike in winter’s gray excuse for daylight.”
rituals and practices
philosophies & spirituality (example: “Nocturne in Joy is séance, Elizabeth city sidewalk crack, and growing with an absence. Johnson-Boria writes into the drunken boat of her family home revealing that she is the sea her ancestors called to and wade through. Breeding butterflies in freezer bags, the book lives between downpour and daylight.”)
past lives: past careers, past work, past identity
compare and contrast
an argument & a talking point
a question or more than one (example: Through her interior investigations, Lipson removes the moral cloak of motherhood to claim imaginative control of her life. For under that cloak, isn't everyone, "a damp, matted down, trembling, very small thing?")
a moment in your life, a moment in history, a moment in the book (example—the roller skates scene still stays with me: “Yet the new feelings of cessation from homeland (she can't speak Twi or Ewe, can't cook the old ways, can't, can't, can't) and the unshakeable memory of her daddy’s voice after her first fall on roller skates, makes it difficult to gather her selves.”
a personal history
a crisis point (a before and after)
voice (you’ll notice this with someone like Patricia Lockwood)
repeated subject matter (Melissa Febos, I wonder if it’s easier for her at this point to write a book proposal because her work stems from following a similar thread),
a feeling—rooted in time or place, or feeling through tone
a time lapse or time crunch (I kind of love doing this in pitches, example “What is left at this time, but the ordinary? Burn piles from raging Pacific Northwest brushfires, yarn around her fingers, oranges at her feet. She has sown her oats–on a blanket in Maine, against a sink in a yellow Brooklyn bathroom, and now fifteen years into a marriage, the oatmeal pot is cold film in the sink. She wasn’t sorry then, and she’s not sorry now.”
lists
a recipe or formula: a little bit of and a little bit of b gives you c (you can do this with comp titles—though it’s not my fav thing to do, or adjectives, or themes, etc). (example: “Heir of Elif Batuman & Melissa Bank…”
deja vu or backtracking to forward track (example: opening line, “In 2017, in an exquisite hotel spa—soaking in a hot tub surrounded by opulence she had no business being in—Gurule confronted her sugar daddy, John, about his support for Donald Trump, hoping she could open his mind…” [three more paragraphs then], “In that hot tub, months later, Gurule tried to prod John more about his support of Trump.)
describing the reading experience (example: “As I began reading Brutalities, the spit gathered in my mouth and never left. There is no swallowing it down easy. My heart rate increased, my chest flushed with heat, and I couldn’t find a comfortable way to sit in my chair, to sit in bed, to sit in my body.”
Accolades (From NY TIMES bestselling author …)
Labels (example: “Described as an “intellectual sensualist,” Jehanne Dubrow conveys how our sense of taste is our bridge to community. Navigating honey and the Holocaust, the kitchen table and garden of Eden, Persephone, sweat, HIV, Proust, and the Campbell soup can–Taste is for culinary exhibitionists and poets alike.”)
Titles (Dr., award-winner, this year’s ….)
central image or metaphor (“Like a perfect apple, to simply exist.”
how the book is DIFFERENT from the trend
juxtaposition of unlikely words /phrases together (example: “Hilarious and bristling, Son of a Bird is Nin Andrews' memoir of emotional dehydration on her family's dairy farm in rural Virginia.”)
Okay, that’s probably enough for now. I need to finally shower for the day and spend some time with the trees, and this smiling guy whose leg surgery is finally healed and he’s back to chasing deer. (Kids are at their grandparents and we plan to eat all their popsicles).
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: Lauren K. Watel’s Book of Potions was reviewed in World Literature Today, and she wrote behind the scenes of her poem “The Island” for Poetry Society of America, Diana Arterian was interviewed for Academy of American Poets’ “enjambment series,” Michelle Gurule’s Thank You, John was reviewed in Publishers Weekly, Whitney Gardner was interviewed in Publishers Weekly about her “pop star with big hair”, Dr. Melody Glenn wrote about motherhood in the emergency department for TIME, three Pine State books are in Debutiful’s MOST ANTICIPATED for the second half of 2025, Erica Stern’s Frontier was featured in Psychology Today and you can read an excerpt of the book in The Sun, Esinam Bediako was interviewed in Split Lip’s newest issue, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.
unless you’re a poet and then we can talk 😆
This is helpful to think about as I’m working on my next book and asking some of the same questions about framing (poems, sections, book). On another note, yellow clogs are so much cooler than pink 😁