WHAT'S INTERESTING HERE?

Looking at your book like you're looking at art in a museum & dissecting marketing copy

You might imagine that I spend a lot of time thinking and talking with writers about what’s interesting in their book. At the point that you start a publicity campaign—so much has been defined. The publisher has often written copy (though sometimes we do this), blurbs are in or we know who we’re asking—which assumes a certain flavor of reader by the asks, SEO and keyword searches have been established for metadata, BISAC codes have been chosen for library and bookstore bookshelves, in essence what I’m saying is that teams of folks have defined the book for an assumed-reader. And what you inevitably hope happens from this defining, is that it matches the book to the reader like this NetGalley review of Kate Crane’s forthcoming Whatever Happened to Eddy Crane? (I have galleys!)

But many readers do read this way—they stick to genre, or even trope and don’t branch out. But I like to think of books much more in the vein of “gateway drugs.” As in, the more you read, the more your tastes become eclectic and roving. You might enter a literary life through romance, and find yourself inhaling Dolly Alderton, then Sally Rooney, then (next year) Haili Blassingame’s They All Fall in Love at the End. And slowly you’re a literary fiction reader too. Reading begets reading.

Yesterday, our pediatrician and I had a great conversation about books. She loves reading books where she can then watch aligned documentaries, which means she reads a lot of presidential biographies, and watched most of the David McCullough interviews available on C-SPAN. When we talked, she was deep into Ron Chernow’s GRANT, alongside the 2020 Grant miniseries. Lucky for me, this is what my dad read (well, that and every Diane Steele on the market). And while I don’t work on biography tomes of presidents, I absolutely recommended Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb by Iris Jamahl Dunkle (now in audiobook, and in paperback in February, though the hardcover is a thing of beauty) and Ken Burns The Dust Bowl as the television companion. And she said something like, “oh yes, I love reading nonfiction about women who don’t get their due.” Well, Dr. M, I have a catalog of those I can recommend. But how would she find that catalog without a publicist bringing her baby into the office?

THAT is the question. Of course there are Reddit threads and Facebook groups and Substacks and Electric Literature lists and comp titles, and you can Google things like, “books with great party scenes” and you’ll get a million hits for The Great Gatsby, but you won’t get The Weekend by Peter Cameron which has one of my favorite dinner party scenes, but that isn’t really how most people find books. They take on bookseller recommendations, they look at bestseller stickers, they look at face-outs in Barnes & Noble, they hear about it from a friend, or see it posted on social media with the combo of beautiful flat lay + compelling caption-review. Before you can make a love match between reader and book, the reader has to actually find the book. And my assumption is that they’re never out looking and searching. I truly think most readers “happen upon” their next read.

For instance, when my husband and I have a few hours without kids, we always pop into our local bookstore and walk around quietly with our hot coffees *bliss*. He ends up with some computer science nerd book on SQL, we have four kid’s books, and I get a paperback of whatever book I haven’t seen a million times as I’ve researched for our books. When my mom is trying to find a book for my sister-in-law for the holidays, a supremely picky reader, she’s all over the map. One year she bought a southern woman’s memoir (it didn’t work out), then she saw on my sister-in-law’s table, Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff and went the biography of historical, famous woman route, and after that was a hit, she tried some Donna Tartt, which seemed in the same realm.

Books are a form of entertainment where decision fatigue is kind of the point. I want to roam a bookstore and read the back copy of twenty different books, carry four around, put two down, pick two more up. I want the scavenger hunt. And in that case, the publisher’s definitions need to be accurate. But when I’m working on a book for publicity, I’m often confronting something else entirely, which is the question of what’s interesting here? This is the question I find, maybe because writers have now heard their book defined a certain way, or they’ve spent years defining it for themselves when people ask what it’s about, at the querying stage, in talks with their agent and editor, and then seeing how it’s being marketed, that writers don’t know how to answer. It’s also not an objective question, it’s subjective to thinking about audience and community.

I don’t always get it right at first, and the answer often develops throughout a publicity campaign, but when we’re not sure what’s interesting about a book or story, I find that writers end up answering a lot of questions about their “process” rather than literally anything else. And while I’m interested in the occasional process-oriented interview, something Zoe said yesterday about Chloe Caldwell’s Trying is that rather than hear again about Caldwell’s process (which I think is maybe the copy’s fault on this one), she wanted to know the opposite thing—what was Caldwell choosing NOT to write about because her process was seemed so wide-ranging. I have the same question for a book that feels similarly inclined The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits.

And this question of what’s interesting is not a broad question, though that would be an easy target. It’s not a question that can be answered with, “oh, well I’m writing about grief.” Or “oh, I use writing to process my messy life.” (To me, that’s journaling, and it’s also what every writer ever is doing on some base level). For me, the question of interesting leans more towards how we ask questions when we look at visual art. Think: what’s interesting about “Winged Victory?” If you look at the statue without any background knowledge, it’s headless. The body isn’t whole. The base looks like a ship. It’s made of marble. It is marble in movement, it’s not in a static pose. When people describe the statue in conversation, they use “she/her” pronouns.

There’s so much to notice without looking anything else up about the history of the statue or what’s around the statue (how it’s placed in the museum, where it’s placed in the museum, why it wasn’t stolen via ladder in seven minutes, what it says about us that we display this statue so prominently, etc. etc). This is the kind of: what’s here at the notice & wonder level, and what’s missing, that could help everyone think more deeply about “the interesting” of their stories. Think of your book as a piece of visual art, and make yourself a little list as if you’re standing in front of the book at the museum.

If that’s an unhelpful place to start, then investigate the copy the publisher has written.

Copy and paste it into a word document (alongside your blurbs too), and ask as many questions as you can about each sentence (each word!), about how they’re defining the book. What does it mean for a story to be “powerful?” What does it mean to “investigate”—what does that tell you and readers about how the narrative is written vs “explore” or “navigate” or “search” or “examine.” How are they defining the characters and what’s missing when you think about who you’ve written? Why is it missing, and what does it say with how they chose to define them vs. you? Where is everything less clean and tidy? What’s too quiet here, or not included? What’s loud and might be too broad to be meaningful from a publicity standpoint? What’s in the “Great Green Room” beyond what they’ve written—objects, adjectives, verbs, what’s the larger landscape of the book? (I.E. what’s around “Winged Victory” and what does it tell us?)

And then—what can you create from this list? Are there essay ideas here? Talking points? Is there a way to pitch an interview? Are other writers having conversations about x, y, and z from your list, and can they do a conversation with you, interview, event? Are there magazines or podcasts interested in these specific things you’re finding? What are other words you can associate with the bigger tentpoles you’re seeing in the copy—motherhood is also caregiving, parenting, maternity, matriarchy, rearing, kinship, family, nurturing, etc. Have you expanded your searches for media to help you see more of what under your umbrella?

Why is Melissa Febos’ Girlhood a “searing anthem?” What does it mean that so many novels are being written about women who want to check-out? Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Austyn Wohlers’ Hot House Bloom, and others. What’s in the water?

It’s not that Jocelyn Jane Cox is writing in Motion Dazzle about her career as a nationally ranked ice dancer (though come on, what a dinner party story!), it’s that she spent that career partnered to her brother, who was also her caregiving partner during her mother’s dementia diagnosis, and a time when “performance” is a necessary distraction.

It’s not that you’re writing about your sister, it’s that you’re writing about your little sister (and what all does that imply? How does that change the narrative? So simple!).

It’s not that Gabriella D’Italia’s marriage was polyamorous, it’s that she quit cultural constraint in so many realms of her life before it blew up (and not because of her abandonment of “norms”) and she had to learn to get dressed in the dark through crisis. She does it through art (and not just art but shifting the materials of her world—gardening, design, styling), what had always steered her.

It’s not that Margo Steines is writing about violence in Brutalities, it’s that she learned violence was a way to soothe, and when tenderness appeared—she had to walk through a new matrix of knowing herself. What does that kind of shift do to and for a person? How are their old defenses made meaningful or meaningless?

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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.

You can read an essay from Erica Stern, author of Frontier in Wall Street Journal (in print too!) and read a new (stellar!) review in LA Review of Books, listen to Ashley M. Jones, author of Lullaby for Grieving, on WHBM, an interview with Michelle Gurule, author of Thank You John, in Jezebel, Jehanne Dubrow wrote about “The Scent of Trauma” for Writer’s Chronicle (alongside her new craft book The Wounded Line), Jeremy Jones wrote about his “Long-Lost Cipher” and was interviewed in Off Assignment and his book Cipher was reviewed in Post & Courier, Jocelyn Jane Cox, author of Motion Dazzle, has new essays in Jenny Mag and Mutha Mag, listen to Diana Arterian on Between the Covers with David Naimon, and read THREE STARRED REVIEWS in Shelf Awareness for Margot Kahn’s The Unreliable Tree, Ashley M. Jones’ Lullaby for Grieving, and Michelle Gurule’s Thank You, John, and so much more on Twitter & Instagram.