THINK ASSOCIATIVELY
on publicity essays & a conversation with Lilly Dancyger
In October, we shared an essay from Lilly Dancyger about “publicity essays” (which she endearingly called “spin-off essays”) and as a follow-up to that essay, Lilly graciously answered a few of my questions on the topic.
ICYMI, her original essay is here:
But before we get into that, I (Cassie) want to talk a little bit about the publicity essay, and perhaps why it gets a bad rap as a useless sales tool, or an annoying ask at the height of book release anxiety, or that its just a puff piece written in haste.
Part of the problem is the way we frame these essays on the outset. Writers seem to think that any essay written as part of book publicity must mention the book or the book must be anchored to (anchored in, even!) the essay. That’s simply not true, (please, gah!) and would be to your detriment to write ABOUT the book because that limits the placement for the essay (Literary Hub, Writers Digest, CRAFT Literary, Fiction Advocate).
In fact, I want writers to steer clear of their book almost entirely when writing a publicity essay. Sure, I want the book mentioned in the byline, but if I had it my way, I wouldn’t even want an editor to be able to sniff out that we’re using the essay for book promotion. (Though I do mention the book forthcoming in my pitch, but it’s at THE BOTTOM or it’s just “author name, author of BOOK TITLE,” in the beginning).
Should the essay overlap with the world of your book in some way? That would be amazing.
Does it matter if it doesn’t at all? It doesn’t!
Will it relate to the themes of your book anyway? It will, because you’re a person with a writing scab to pick. You’ve probably been writing about the same things for most of your career. We obsess.
I would say Raj Tawney (not my client, I do not even know him!) has the publicity essay down to a science. He has two books out—a middle grade novel forthcoming later this month, and a memoir that’s food-related, and his side-essay writing absolutely relates to the book, but relates more to the world as we’re living it day-by-day.
His middle grades novel is called All Mixed Up, and he just published this essay, “As someone who is mixed race I see myself in Kamala. A largely unseen bloc of voters will too” in San Francisco Chronicle. It’s an identity-point essay that relates to the book but is not about the book.
His memoir published in October of last year is about his multicultural identity too, and he published essays around publication about The Beatles and his father’s journey from India to New York (identity), celebrity chefs selling out (food memoir), his eyebrows (embracing the self), his family’s search for a specific meal (food memoir + searching—very memoir), flour’s power (food memoir), Tony Bennett (family nostalgia, introducing his family), brotherhood and basketball (introducing his family), and HERE is a book essay where he writes about the publicity behind his book (identity + writer).
I share all of these because I think if you scroll through Tawney’s body of work, you’ll see his obsessions and repeated themes, the same way you would see those things in an author’s body of book work. Sure, he’s connecting what he’s writing in essays to what he’s written in his book, but if you look at the span of media outlets: The Comeback, Bloomberg, Business Insider, NBC Think, The Sun Sentinel, San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, The Spectator, New York Times, USA Today, you’ll find there’s such a range for him to build a new audience with each publicity essay. He’s bringing new people into different facets of his book. And perhaps, he (like Lilly) thought about what audience he needed to connect with for each essay and then pursued those media outlets with purpose.
A few of my favorite publicity essays from clients are deeply-felt, beautifully written essays. Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s “The Beast In Your Head” at The Sun (to go with her memoir-in-poems Exploding Head; Eugenia Leigh’s on othering mothers with mental illness for TIME (to go with her poetry collection Bianca); Margo Steines on exercise addiction for The Guardian (to go with her memoir-in-essays Brutalities: A Love Story); Susan Ito on allegiance for Guernica (to go with her memoir I Would Meet You Anywhere); Beth Kephart on wasps for Orion Magazine (to go with her bibliomemoir My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera). They’re all just great essays on their own, and happen to relate to their book projects too.
Publicity essays are not meant to be fluff pieces, or underhanded, or click-baity at all, but instead meant to do several different things at once.
In my perfect world, those things are as follows:
Build an author’s portfolio & resume / for career things, for status things, for future grant and fellowship applications, for future jobs or tenure, for momentum for the gigs after they’re working with me, for more freelance work, etc.
Build platform / And I don’t mean Instagram followers (though that’s an added benefit), I mean platform as in folks start thinking of them as the writer on (insert niche)(insert trend)(insert idea). As the expert on (insert niche)(insert trend)(insert idea). As someone willing to speak on (and speak on well) … insert …
Build associations / I want that platform and those connections to be less, “oh Lilly is writing about this …” and more “oh, Lilly Dancyger is the writer you want if you’re thinking about doing an issue on Friendship.” Or “I’m building an AWP panel on [this thing], I must have [this person] on it” or “I’m starting a salon and I want the first conversation to include [this person] who writes about [this idea.]
Build connections / each publicity piece is a chance for a writer I work with to get to know an editor at another media outlet that may lead to future relationships, connections, and work. This is true for passes too, especially kind passes. When I’m not being paid as a part of the book’s publicity, the success of the book and the author still feels like success to me (and perhaps for me?). Whatever I want to build for an author on the publicity side, I want it to continue living for years after I’m done. I want invitations to continue for them beyond my work.
Build pitching strategy / the more you pitch, the better you get at pitching. Literary magazine submissions and pitching media are such different animals, and it’s great practice to try to figure out your own angles with a book, project, or yourself. What can YOU say and say WELL. What do you have a say on? What do you care about, and how do you get that across to an editor in a pitch? How are pitches organized? All of that is a benefit to a writer after the book publicity churn is over.
Build chatter in the silence / the last month before your book comes out is QUIET. You might be recording podcast interviews, pre-recording interviews, or answering endless coordination emails, but mostly you’re gearing up for a rush of things in the month post-book-release (in our current cycles). One way to keep from unraveling, is to put your energy into these essays. Lilly said it’s an aspect of publicity that she had control over, but it’s also something to think about that is yes, still book related, but also not anxiety-inducing.
Build social media momentum / we all know the algorithm is nicer to us the more we feed it. The folks who go viral, go viral over and over and over again because they’re constantly pushing out content. Authors ask me all the time what they should be posting to their social media for book release, and publicity essays are a way for you to talk about your book without being like, “Remember I’m giving away stickers if you preorder!” As much as you think you sound annoying, you don’t, but you can talk about your book in a different way by sharing links to your publicity essays and even expounding on what you said in the essay on stories, Tiktoks, Substack posts, etc.
Build writing / like the algorithm (I feel gross saying this), for me, the more I write, the more I think about writing. So what if you don’t publish every publicity essay, but I bet, I WOULD PUT MONEY ON IT, that when you try to write those publicity essays, you have ideas for four more things you could write, or do, or say, or create as a talking point connected to your book. Everything is fodder. As your community publicist, I want you to look like this:
So perhaps this essay isn’t going to sell 5,000 more copies of your book (but hey, the right essay could, it has before), but it is meant to do so much more than that anyway.
Onto my conversation with Lilly!
The first spin-off essay you published in Elle came from cut material from the book. How did you sort of sift through the cut material to figure out what might make for a good spin-off essay, and then was there an element of trying to fit that material into pop culture or the zeitgeist? I guess I'm curious both how you chose the cut material to work with, and how you managed to make it work somewhere else or the thought process behind making it work?
Most of the things I cut from the book were smaller fragments—a paragraph here, a scene there. Excess, but part of larger stories or threads that survived in the book. But both the Elle piece about romantic friendship in Broad City and the Offing piece about motherhood books grew out of entire threads that were cut from essays—so not just a single section, but an entire idea or topic. The romantic friendship thread that I cut from the essay “Partner in Crime” and reshaped into that Elle piece was actually something like twice as long as the resulting spinoff essay! So it was a matter of which cut material felt substantial and complete enough to be reshaped into something new, as opposed to smaller fragments that weren’t enough to stand on their own.
For the Elle piece I knew that the anniversary of Broad City was coming up (I always look up anniversaries of older pieces of media that I’m writing about because I know they can make for good pegs), so I decided to reframe the romantic friendship material into an essay about the show. I rewatched some episodes, and wrote a little about how I think romantic friendship shows up in the show, and then pulled from the romantic friendship thread that I’d cut from the book to contextualize and bolster that argument.
The Offing piece was even simpler—I just polished up what I’d written about the various books, and then wrote an intro and a conclusion to sandwich that material into a more complete-feeling essay.
Have you heard from any readers who found you, the class you mention, or First Love through the spin-off essays?
People definitely came to the braided essay class via the Brevity essay (I was promoting a live version of the class at the time, but there’s also an independent study FWIW!). And I heard from a lot of people who read the various spinoff essays and responded with something along the lines of “I’m gonna check out your book!” though who knows how many actually did… but people who reached out to me after reading First Love didn’t usually mention where they’d first heard about it, so I’m not sure how many (if any?) came to it directly through the spinoff essays. But I like to think they helped keep it afloat in the general conversation, at least.
How much control did you have (or your team have) over timing the essays? Were editors willing to work with you?
A lot of the timing was dependent on how long it took me to place some of the essays, so that part was out of my control—but once the essays were placed, the editors were all great about coordinating run dates. There were a couple that I asked to hold because I didn’t want them to come out too close together, or on top of an excerpt, etc.
A few of these essays became published through connections you already had (I’m thinking about Writer’s Digest soliciting, the tweet about “Reading My Way to a Decision About Motherhood,” publishing with Elle for the second time, and Jane asking if you might want to publish something in Beyond), is there advice you could give to writers about building those connections early (perhaps, particularly before the book is even started?)
This comes back to the idea of “platform” vs. something more long-term and authentic and ever-evolving, like “community.” This is what I mean by the bigger picture ways that putting yourself and your work out there consistently will help you in the long run, and people should zoom out from the question of how many book sales an individual essay will lead to, or if a particular essay will land them an agent, etc. etc. This is a long game! Building real literary community and connections with editors and other writers and people who want to publish your work and read your work takes time, and consistency. I’ve been publishing shorter pieces in various outlets for about 15 years now, and each of those shorter pieces has been part of the larger thing I’m trying to build—whether you want to call that larger thing a body of work or a career or yes, even a platform.
How many times might you pitch an essay before you either shelve it or return to the drawing board (thinking about the Slate piece here).
If I believe in a piece, I won’t give up until I literally run out of places I can think of that might possibly take it. I’ll only stop submitting a piece if I decide during the process that I don’t actually want to publish it… like there was one flash essay that I cut from the book and thought maybe I’d place as a stand-alone, but when I got a rejection for it I realized that I felt relief, so then I realized maybe I didn’t actually want to publish that piece (at least not yet, or not in its current form). So I took it out of the rotation. (But I stashed it away for later—who knows how I’ll feel about it next year, or if I might think of a way to rework it.)
But of the published spinoff essays that I pitched or submitted, only a couple ended up running at the first place I tried. Most landed on the second or third pitch. But one took seven tries, and I would have kept trying if I needed to! I always start with a list of potential outlets for each piece, so as soon as I get a rejection, I send the piece back out to the next place on the list immediately. No time to wallow or second-guess.
(I keep that list in another column of the same spreadsheet as the essay ideas, so while I’m collecting essay ideas I’m also collecting potential outlets for each one.)
How long would you tell writers to give themselves in order to produce strong spin-off pieces, and/or do you recommend thinking about them while you’re writing like you did?
I’d say start working on them, or at least brainstorming ideas for them, as early as possible. I think collecting spinoff ideas while you’re working on the book is great, but if your brain just doesn’t work like that (or if you’re reading this now and you’re already past that stage), starting as early as you’re able is good. Drafting spinoff essays is a great way to keep yourself busy in the weird dead zones of publishing a book where there’s lots of nervous anticipatory energy but nothing to actually *do.* But definitely don’t wait until a month before your book comes out and go, “I guess I should publish some shorter pieces.” That’s how you end up churning out subpar work and also how you make it feel like a stressful chore rather than an organic part of the process.
It looks like you placed most of these essays, how involved was your publicity team in the process. Did they edit? Did they send a few out? Did they give you any ideas for what you could write? Did they expect spin-off pieces as part of your publicity campaign and process? There’s collaboration here in your knowing of them pitching Elle an excerpt and the friendship package, but how involved are they on the editing and submitting front?
The publicity team at my publisher arranged the Times essay, but they were not involved in any of the other pieces at all, either writing or placing them. I tried running some ideas by them, but I guess it was just outside of their purview or what they’d planned to focus on, which was getting reviews and more direct coverage of the book.
I’m so curious about the essay cut at the last minute–what brought you to that decision and was it a hard one?
It was hard! But I think it was the right call. It was just a little too far outside the central focus of the rest of the book, and I think it would have pulled too much attention away from what I really wanted people to talk about when they talked about the book. I was thinking ahead to reviews, and which details reviewers would latch onto. I know I’m being vague, but I have a newsletter post in the works that goes into more detail about this choice, that I’m planning to send out when the essay eventually finds a home somewhere else! It was actually a pretty fraught and somewhat political decision, so I think that backstory will be interesting to share once the piece is out. (Back to the idea of always collecting new ideas, I consoled myself about cutting the essay with the idea that I could write something about why it felt necessary.)
One of the frustrating things about book publicity is when the topic of your book is getting buzz before or after the release of the book, and you are left trying to find a way into that buzzing conversation. I just saw your recent tweet about every publication covering friendship right now, and I’m curious if you feel like spin-off essays are a way to catch that wave or if it’s just luck of the draw?
I’ll be honest, I was a little salty that The Cut ran a whole package on friendship breakups and didn’t ask me to contribute to it when I’d pitched several of these spinoff pieces to them, and my publicist was in touch with them about covering First Love, so they knew I just wrote a book about friendship! But so it goes. I think part of publishing a book is contending with waves of envy and covetousness and feelings of entitlement. Like yes, I felt indignant when I saw that package come out, but also… The Cut doesn’t owe me anything.
But yes, more broadly I do think that publishing spinoff essays is a great way to chime into cultural conversations like this—it sucks to feel like you’re begging for scraps by trying to get people to include your book in things they’re writing on relevant topics. I would much rather just contribute to the conversation directly by writing something new myself.
I agree so much with the notion that writers think these essays either need to sort of summarize the book, mention the book beyond the byline (which almost immediately puts these essays into a Literary Hub place, R.I.P Catapult), or repeat a message from the book, when really they are their own off-shoots, growing separately from the original plant, but also in conversation. You already answered this a bit with “getting another crack at the subject matter” but while you were writing, were there techniques you used to notice potential in an idea that could be a spin-off essay? I guess my question is, were there any brainstorming techniques, rituals, writing practices, or prompts you used to arrive at ideas that might help other writers find their spin-off topics.
I write down every hare-brained idea that comes to me. Most of them never get used, but then I at least have a trove to sift through for usable ideas later. The way my brain works is that the more I’m writing, the more new ideas I get. So I just try to catch those random offshoots, and then decide later which are worth pursuing. During the course of writing the book and all of these spinoff pieces, I must have come up with at least three dozen other ideas that didn’t go anywhere. Most of them were bad! But there were some usable ones in there too. So I’d say don’t dismiss an idea right away just because it feels silly or not fully developed or whatever. Save them all, and see which ones take root. That includes every tangent you find yourself tempted to go down that doesn’t quite fit in the main project, every show you watch that could tie into your book topic but that you don’t want to write about in the book itself, other books that come out close to yours that feel like they’re in conversation, etc. etc. etc.
When I was ready to start actually drafting these pieces (when First Love was in copyedits) the first thing I did was organize my spreadsheet of ideas—moving the ones I knew I definitely wanted to write and/or that felt the most developed to the top, and moving the “maybe”s and the “what was I even talking about here”s down. Then I just cranked them out.
I often warn writers that the lead-up to a book release can feel quiet (which can in-turn feel desperate) because critics have to engage with the book before they pitch it out wider. Do you find that working on these essays lessened some of that anxiety to the lead-up of publication, or is that my wishful thinking?
Absolutely! That is without a doubt a big part of the reason I leaned so hard into writing these pieces. I am constitutionally incapable of just waiting patiently for things to happen. So much of the emotional nausea of publishing a book is that something that was entirely yours is suddenly out of your hands—there’s a whole team working on bringing it into the world, but you only get glimpses of what they’re doing. I unfortunately am not someone who can just say, “I’m sure they’ve got this!” I needed to know that I did everything in my power to help support the book on its way into the world.
 | A guest post by
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Honored to be included here, and to be part of your world, Cassie. And here is some news I haven't been able to share with you yet — that wasp essay for Orion is a Notable in this year's Best American Science and Nature Writing. We did it, thanks to you.
Hi Cassie,
My friend Neema Avashia, author of Another Appalachia, forwarded me your email. I'm so grateful that you've noticed my work and how much effort I put into my essays. Funny thing is, I started writing and publishing essays years before I ever decided to write a book. Yes, I'm totally an obsessive (lol) but I'm also deeply passionate about many topics, including exploring my complex identity and heritage. And I've been rejected (literally) hundreds of times, but I just keep going. As I've evolved as a writer, I'm conscious of that fact that any reader of one of my essays might find my books interesting too. It's also about that hustle and passion :)
Anyway, feel free to reach out if you'd ever like to chat further - rajtawney@gmail.com. Keep up the great work with your Substack. Looks like you're helping a lot of people!
Best,
Raj