Did it again and again and again and again and again and again
Hey I wrote another book and you can preorder it
Friend and fellow writer Karen Gonzalez recently sent me this interesting and sort of depressing Vox essay about the amount of self-promotion writers and musicians are now forced to do. I don’t use the word “forced” here casually, because if there’s anything I absolutely detest about being a writer in the year 2024, it’s the constant reminders that we have to build a brand and a platform.
I’m a Gen Xer who grew up in and around the Bay Area’s DIY punk and hip hop scenes. The indie magazine I co-founded and helped edit was the path to finding an agent and writing my first nonfiction book, which was about the history of 20th century DIY creative communities. My politics are communitarian and leftist and my biggest influence as a teacher of writing is the late Brazilian radical educator Paolo Friere, who posited that authentic learning can only happen when students and teachers work as collaborators. Antithetically, the nature of our age of platform and brand requires a healthy ego and a high degree of self-centeredness because it’s no longer about your writing, it’s about you. But not the real you; it’s about a curated, edited, filtered version of you, the author, not you, the unhappy slob writing this in a coffee stained bathrobe.
The whole brand/platform era of being a writer is antithetical to every kind of ethical stance I’ve ever espoused, and I just don’t find myself interesting enough to spend time honking my own horn. The phrase “selling out” is one my friends and I uttered with actual disgust in our twenties and thirties. And yet, back then, if you were lucky and persistent enough, if you signed a book or record contract, you could at least expect the label or publisher to do some baseline promotional work, pay for your book tour, or push review copies out and follow up on them.
These days… not so much. The collapse of institutions as reliable sources of support for artists has been coming for a long time now. Naomi Klein1 told The Guardian that since she published No Logo in 1999, the biggest change in book publishing has been the fact that “neoliberalism has created so much precarity that the commodification of the self is now seen as the only route to any kind of economic security. Plus social media has given us the tools to market ourselves nonstop.” You’ll note she doesn’t say “market our books" but “market ourselves.”
As the Vox article I linked above explains, even the most successful musicians and writers when it comes to figuring out the social media hustle are starting to be transparent about the real creative and psychological costs of constantly being forced to create content. It comes at the cost of doing art. Plus the stats about social media and mental health are widely available and obvious: the more time we spend on social media, the more anxious and depressed we become. That’s the bind. You either become a brand and risk the mental health damage of spending more and more time online promoting yourself2 (remember, your art is secondary) or you risk your work disappearing in all of the noise.
With my last book, I exhausted myself into burnout doing promo. It was the winter of 2021 and the pandemic was raging, yet other authors were having in person book launches and meticulously detailing them on Instagram. The way it looked was that you could have a superspreader event or a virtual one, so I did the latter, but I also needed to learn Canva (to make Instagram content, and that had to be pushed out multiple times a week), to Tweet multiple times a day (before Elon wrecked it), to start a YouTube account, and to use this newsletter to promote promote promote promote promote promote!
I hated every minute of it. It was humiliating trying to make videos (I hate my face and my voice was once described on a course evaluation as “sleep inducing”), so TikTok was an absolute no, but you were supposed to have influencers host your cover reveal and do a launch team and constantly bug people you respect for Amazon reviews and promote promote promote promote promote! (never mind the above about DIY, ethics, and hating corporations) and this was during a pandemic when everyone’s mental health was already precarious, and guess what? It sent me into a major depressive episode. And the book still didn’t sell all that well, which is a bummer because I really poured a lot into it. We don’t have a ton of evidence that kind of relentless self-promotion actually sells books either, but we keep doing it because we no longer live in a monoculture where reviews move copies. We don’t actually know what does any more.
So this time around I’m trying something different. I want to be transparent about the reality of promoting ourselves books in 2024. My publisher is doing the best they can, which I do appreciate, but they’re an indie and resources are strained to the max. But I suspect that the only way authors and musicians and artists are going to be able to survive in the Age of Influence is if we’re honest about the real costs of self-promotion: psychologically, sociologically, and financially.
For example, I’m not going on a book tour or doing many out of town events because I have cancer, but also because like most authors, I’d have to pay out of pocket to travel between cities. I’ve done that in the past and guess what? Didn’t sell a ton of books that way either. Sometimes colleges will pay speakers to come and even buy a bunch of books to give away at the event, but that has really dried up since Covid. I used to get asked to do a few of those every year, and in the past four years I’ve done two total. And when it comes to the online stuff, there’s a real danger that the more we clutter the internet with promote, promote, promote, the more it can backfire. I’ve unfollowed more than a few authors who overshare their lives to the point of it becoming embarrassing to watch. There’s a balance between helping readers get to know you and filming yourself crying on a toilet in an airport.3
What really works to move books is, in my experience, word of mouth, but there has to be a way to tell people I have a book coming out without breaking myself into pieces. So, let’s start here. Transparently.
I have a book coming out in July of 2024. Somehow, even though advanced copies aren’t yet available, someone has already written a (middling) review of it on Goodreads which is exactly why promoting a book is awful… you can’t prevent that kind of thing. You have zero control. You have no agency over something you worked very hard on. However, I do actually think this book is pretty good, and the topic is certainly timely. I will be promoting it on my social media channels but I won’t do it to the point where I’m ashamed of myself. If I make any videos, they will suck. I will not film myself crying on a toilet. I have no cute kids to help drive engagement (unless you’d like to loan me a few) but will shamelessly use my cats for this purpose.
Here’s the cover. It looks great! Really!
Here’s the Informative Cover Text:
From religious communities to therapeutic spaces, the importance of forgiving those who've wronged us is often enshrined as an unqualified good. But what about horrifying cases of abuse, predatory behavior, or systemic wrong? Too often, when predators or abusers are exposed, the chorus comes immediately: "What about forgiveness?" In these cases, forgiveness places the onus on victims, diminishes real hurt and anger, lets perpetrators off the hook, and prevents justice from being done.
In Not So Sorry, journalist and culture critic Kaya Oakes tackles these questions with intelligence, nuance, and a bit of righteous anger. Ranging effortlessly from Christian theology and world history to psychology and pop culture, Oakes takes us on a whirlwind tour of the many abuses of the concept of forgiveness, including the abuse scandals of the Catholic church, the outing of high-profile abusers like Larry Nassar, and white America's obsession with false narratives of marginalized peoples granting forgiveness to oppressors. Ultimately, Oakes dares us to ask the necessary question: Is it ever better not to forgive?
You will also soon be able to see blurbs from writers I really respect which say really generous things about this book. Most importantly, here are some preorder links:
I realize $28 is a lot of money, and that it will be a stretch for many of you. So, just a reminder, you can request that your local or school/university library carry it. Having books available in libraries is great for authors. There may or may not be an audiobook, not sure about that. Stay tuned. There will be some local events here in the Bay Area4 in the summer and maybe the fall, and definitely some online events. There may be a few out of town events. Maybe. And I’ve been on a bajillion podcasts in the past and am available to do those if you happen to have one.
Again, transparency is the only way I’ll be able to get through this cringe-inducing part of the process but I won’t be turning this newsletter into a song and dance number about book promo. This is just me saying well, look, here’s what I did for the last few years. And now, here’s a Tiktok dance I choreographed with my 17 homeschooled kids while we shopped at Sephora for Drunk Elephant anti-aging serums, or whatever Taylor Swift gets engagement Taylor Swift these Taylor Swift days.
See what I mean? Just bear with me, I am too fragile for this world5.
When Naomi Klein followed me on Twitter I actually gasped.
If you want to see how awful this can get, the Reddit subs I’m the Main Character and Influencers in the Wild are real eye openers.
This was an essayist I used to like a lot. Now I can’t read anything they write without imagining them writing from that toilet.
The way things are going with hair regrowth after chemo (negligible) I may be bald at these events.
This is not really true but I’ve heard people like fragile authors (this is also not true).