August.
One of my all-time favorite months of the year and not just because my birthday is coming (but I do get all giddy like a little kid because I’m one of those people that loves celebrating my birthday).
This feels like curling up in the soft belly of summer. The sun is almost a deeper color, the air warms in the day and bites at night, going to the beach to sun and swim feels like the most relaxing place in the world and…wait…can you hear it? The whisper on the wind that says “fall is coming.”
In the past, summers have been fraught with too much to do in the way of book promotion and it’s my least favorite time of the year to spend marketing. There’s a reason for that: I’ve released six books during the summer in my career and five of them flopped colossally. Whether it’s the fact that people are just too busy or the horror market is just unbelievably saturated with brilliant releases coming out at the end of the month (and the beginning of September), I’ve watched books that I spent hours, days, months, years of work on immediately vanish into the ether with barely a glance from readers.
It’s never a good feeling, friends. And the saddest part about it is that it’s all subjective. The one book that did well (and I can argue it did so because of its predecessor’s impact) was Dead Folk.
And…I’m heading into another August promoting a book with an early September release… Because I’m masochistic, I guess?
We all want our books to find the right audiences, to be lauded with awards and good reviews and advanced praise and yada yada yada. So we absolutely throw ourselves into the marketing machine in order to try and do the utmost work to ensure our book “makes it.” There’s asking for blurbs and contacting reviewers and sending out ARCs and cross-promoting titles and sneak peeks and targeted ads and recommendation graphics and…
There’s always the struggle to come up with more, more, more.
It’s exhausting, isn’t it? You get up on Saturday morning, when you should be ready to start your weekend and you look like this:
Even when you have six months of preparing for this book to release, that final month becomes like The Running Man. Your sprinting for your life, fending off the anxiety, depression, and harbingers of everything going wrong while entertaining the masses with dark violence and squalor.
Christ, it’s only August 5th. I’m not even in the official “month” before release date and I’m already staring down the barrel of this book release waiting for the eventual boom to put me out of its misery.
Which all brings it down to this very vital piece of advice that I need practice more than preach: just do the best you can and don’t beat yourself up.
Not to continue to sound like a Negative Nancy… Suppose I’m more of a Practical Penny at this point. The system is flawed. Millions of books are vying for attention. The ones that get the best marketing from their publishers (those that can afford to pump thousands upon thousands of dollars into ads) are the ones who will be seen the most. Those who have the greatest reach or who sign the biggest names or who make an effort to throw themselves into the mosh pit for carnage.
There’s a small chance (and I mean very small) that the books we write will end up on bestseller lists, or in the mouths of some of our top influencers and mentors, or having a film made out of them. What you can anticipate is that if you do what you can, you will get that book into at least a few reader’s hands who will enjoy it. It’ll distract them from the crap going on around us for long enough to entertain them. Maybe make them feel something more.
And, that’s what we’re doing all this for right? So people can read our work.
So, drop the Arnold Schwarzenegger act of fighting for your literary life in the last month of promotion.
Push it but don’t push it, you get what I’m saying. The last thing anyone wants is for you to get a heart attack a week before your book comes out because you’ve had 40 cups of coffee in one sitting.
Also: this isn’t a competition. Make sure you share and feel joy toward your fellow authors who are releasing their books, too. Everyone is going through a similar struggle, similar anxieties. We’re all in this together, friends.
Speaking of which:
I got to blurb my friend, Amanda Headlee’s novella, This is How A Villain is Made, and it’s exactly what everyone needs to read right now. Raw feminine vengeance and resilience in a turn of the century western backdrop. I loved this book.
Order it here.
And if you’re thinking you need some other book suggestions, how about some of these:
Chasing Moonflowers by Pauline Chow
Enter The Peerless by Kyle Winkler
Unclaimed Property by Cat Delani
The Off-Season by Jodie Robins
Suicide Music by Paul Jessup
We Like It Cherry by Jacy Morris
The Sundowner’s Dance by Todd Keisling
Black Out The Stars by Christopher Bond
and maybe…
Pre-order my gastro-speculative, queer, grief novel here.
Until next time, friends.
-Kat
