Author: Dan Blank

The Anxiety and Enthusiasm of Launching a Book

So I have been working with my friend Miranda Beverly-Whittemore on launching her upcoming book, Bittersweet. It doesn’t come out until May, and we have been working actively on “the book launch” for six months now.

Today I want to talk about what that process looks like, and be honest about the roller coaster of emotions that accompanies a book launch like this. There is so much advice out there on how to market a book, here I just want to share a glimpse into our little experience so far. And I want to always be super honest that this is an EMOTIONAL process for all involved, filled with moments of total anxiety, and moments of extreme enthusiasm. And that is exactly right.

Why are we spending an ENTIRE YEAR working on a book launch? Miranda has been really honest about not wanting to miss an opportunity. This is her third published book, and as she puts it: “I don’t want to feel, as I did with both my previous books, that I could have done more”

For Bittersweet, her publisher has been unbelievably enthusiastic and supportive with it. She knows to not take that for granted, and she knows what she wants to feel a year from now. Or rather, what she doesn’t want to feel: that there were missed opportunities. She is going into this eyes wide open, and is making hundreds (thousands?!) of small decisions to give this book the best chance possible to connect with readers.

So what are we doing for an entire year to launch this book? Quite a bit, actually. Miranda and I recently met with the (amazing) marketing folks at Crown, her publisher, and I encapsulated a lot of our efforts so far as:

“We are doing things that evoke the feeling of the book, while never mentioning the book.”

Immediately after these words came out of my mouth, I thought to myself: “Um, Dan, that is probably not the right thing to say to the Director of Marketing, whose role is all about ensuring the book gets out there.” Of course, it was fine, because we have a LOT of things going on across the spectrum from “pure book marketing” to whatever the opposite of that is called:

  • Creative ideation. A lot of writers/artists explore what their work is really about only AFTER they have created it. I have no idea if that is true for Miranda, but I know she and I have had lots of long conversations about what the book embodies, and how those themes can connect to readers in ways outside of the books.
  • Planning & Strategy. Yes, we have a spreadsheet filled with lots of tiny tasks and a timeline and things are starting to get color coded. The issue many authors face is that there is so much that CAN be done, so our goal right now is to selectively choose what SHOULD be done, and ensure we do it right. It’s pretty astounding the number of tasks now piling into that spreadsheet, and how it is spread across such a big timeline with many different people accountable for different aspects.
  • Blogging the Process: We setup a blog just to share the process of launching the book. This is meant to give an honest account of what it feels like to go through the process. It is here – in a public space – where I often understand the complexity of what Miranda is going through. And… you can too.
  • Being Part of a Team. Miranda has had UNBELIEVABLE support from her publisher. The sheer enthusiasm for this book is pretty much what every author dreams about. But of course, they have jobs to do, so we are all trying to ensure that we best leverage our collective resources. Who should be doing what, and when. And something I am always looking for: when to just get out of the way to let the expert do their job.
  • FriendStories.com: we have created an entirely other site that relates to the type of stories embodied in Bittersweet, but not actually about Bittersweet. Here, Miranda is collecting stories from other women (and sharing her own), about close friendships they had when younger.
  • Tying Everything Together: We redesigned her website (last updated in 2007), and are honing the messaging and visual style of her social media channels.
  • Media stuff, marketing stuff, publicity, social media, oh my! There are dozens and dozens of small things being done, from giveaway ideas, to media outreach, to decisions about how to best use social media in a way that feels right. It’s almost offensive to just shove all of these topics into a single bullet here, but let’s just say, there is no shortage of things for us to take action on.

Because Miranda and I are friends, this feels like a very personal process. We squee in excitement at small moments of success filled with enthusiasm; we talk seriously about the complex emotions around planning so much while she was still editing the book and crafting other stories, as well as, you know: living her life.

Publishing is definitely a team sport (ugh, did I just say that?), and it SO SO SO much of what is happening now is all built on the enthusiasm of folks partnered in this process who love Miranda and her book. A glimpse at moments in the last six months:

This is Miranda and I at the Random House booth at BookExpo last May, knowing her book was slated for publication a full year away.

All book marketing meetings should take place at the LEGO Store, right?

Okay, this is why publishing can seem so scary… the Random House building. (am I supposed to be calling it Penguin Random House now?! Sorry, it just said Random House in the lobby)

Okay, it’s hard not to feel something when you enter this lobby. It’s lined with glass cases filled with first editions of classic books.

Part of the marketing team at Crown: Jay Sones, Jessica Prudhomme, and Elvis:

With Miranda’s editor Christine Kopprasch:

And here we are walking around Central Park discussing Bittersweet. Miranda’s look of slight horror is because I just dropped my iPhone, and the screen shattered into a hundred pieces. But the camera on it still worked!

I want to be clear that everything about this is ALL about the book, and all about Miranda. The story she has crafted drives everything, and without it, none of this would exist. The book is the thing that everything else orbits around.

There is a saying that you can’t plan for success, but you can prepare. That is what we are trying to do. In truth, we have NO IDEA how well the book will do in traditional publishing terms. Actually, I don’t recall having a single conversation with Miranda about that topic – it’s simply a black box.

A year from now, the “success” of the book in traditional publishing terms will be defined broadly by others as a single word or short phrase. But what is clear now, and will be clear in the many many years that Miranda’s story will exist, is that the book’s success will always be a personal thing between the reader and the story. Success measured in ways we can never quantify, in ways that has nothing to do with lists or sales figures or any of the strange metrics that social media provides that try to express human meaning in a simple number or score.

And as much as a book is a thing – an object – this whole process feels like a conversation, an experience, a story in itself.

Thanks.
-Dan

Anatomy of a Book Blurb: Jenna Blum

This is part of the Bittersweet Book Launch case study, where Dan Blank and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore share the yearlong process of launching her novel. You can view all posts here.

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

“In the tradition of THE GREAT GATSBY, Miranda Beverly-Whittemore’s heroine is an outsider invited into the secret, labyrinthine world of the super-rich–but the twist is, you never met such debauched people as the Winslows. BITTERSWEET is a satisfyingly dramatic, super-juicy read.” ~ Jenna Blum, New York Times and internationally bestselling author of THOSE WHO SAVE US and THE STORMCHASERS

 

Jenna Blum and I have met exactly once in person– at the first book event I ever participated in, Misty Valley Books‘ fantastic 2005 New Voices weekend in Chester, Vermont. A handful of authors were invited to come stay in the local inn, go cross-country skiing, and read to the townsfolk, many of whom enthusiastically attended the events. It was a lovely, community building weekend, as evidenced by the fact that Emily Raboteau, one of my other fellow readers, is now one of my closest friends.

Anyway, Jenna had driven in from Boston for the day of the reading– for some reason it wasn’t going to work for her to spend the night– only to discover when she arrived that she had developed a horrible migraine. Since she was only in for the day, she didn’t have a room booked, and so my husband and I gave her the keys to ours, if memory serves, she spent the better part of the day crashed in there on our queen bed.

Since then, I’ve followed Jenna’s amazing career with enthusiasm. She is such a fantastic example of someone who worked her booty off on behalf of her books, primarily through her book club outreach. At one point, she was meeting with three book clubs a day, and that kind of generosity has landed her books on bestseller lists all over the world.

And she’s so nice on top of it all! When I reached out to her to ask if she could write a blurb, despite the fact that we’d only met one time in person, or that she had a ton of travel booked for this fall, she said she’d try. And she did more than that– she wrote me a dynamite blurb (and I think she won’t mind my telling you that she apparently read a lot of it in the bathtub, which, I’ll agree, is one of my favorite spots to read something juicy).

Bummed as I am that she had that migraine all those years ago, I can’t help but thank my lucky stars that it meant she and I got to know each other. I hope I’ll get to see her again in person someday  soon.

Anatomy of a Book Blurb: Maggie Shipstead

This is part of the Bittersweet Book Launch case study, where Dan Blank and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore share the yearlong process of launching her novel. You can view all posts here.

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

“Bittersweet is the kind of book you hope to stumble across on a rainy vacation weekend: a wild New England gothic full of family secrets, mysteriously locked doors, sailboats, suntans, forbidden lust, and a few priceless works of art. An engrossing summer blast.” –Maggie Shipstead, nationally bestselling author of SEATING ARRANGEMENTS and ASTONISH ME

Maggie is a friend of one of my husband’s lifelong friends (so lifelong that he considers her a sister)– one of those lucky connections life brings. Still, asking for an introduction via a good friend can be scary, since you want to be sure that no one feels like you’re using them, or that they have to introduce you, or they have to say yes just because a mutual friend has asked. I used to feel very very shy and very very wary of using my personal connections in this way, but with BITTERSWEET I’m trying to be braver and– while being polite and respecting boundaries– not shying from asking if an introduction can be made.

Maggie’s response to our mutual friend’s introduction was enthusiastic and warm– she would read Bittersweet, and hoped she’d have time to blurb it, and wasn’t asking for blurbs the worst? She was just so NICE. I was giddy since I admire SEATING ARRANGEMENTS so much!

In October, she wrote to let me know that she was most of the way through, and had enjoyed the book while under the weather. I loved this news (well, not the part about her having been banished to her couch for a while), because that’s the kind of book I want Bittersweet to be for readers– a pleasure, a salve, a book you want to escape into. When I got her blurb soon thereafter, I just loved how she put it: “an engrossing summer blast.” I couldn’t ask for a better compliment for BITTERSWEET.

Maggie’s second novel, ASTONISH ME, is due out in April. I’m super excited to read it, and so thankful to her to taking time out of her busy schedule to write something so nice about my book.

The Attention Myth

Everyone seems to be looking for attention. Today as I write this, it’s “Black Friday,” where retailers are offering all kinds of strange offers hoping that it garners attention of shoppers. For writers and creative professionals, many have focused on getting attention for their writing via social media, accumulating “likes” and “friends” and “pins.” This emotions that many writers feel about this is pretty adequately expressed in this post by Sean Beaudoin: “The Horrors of Self Promotion.” (thanks to David Farkas for the link) While I don’t agree with a couple of Sean’s key premises, I definitely feel that the depth and complexity of emotion around this topic is pervasive and very real for so many creative professionals.

A friend recently mentioned that “attention is the only finite resource.”

I’m not sure if that is true or not, but it certainly makes for a good quote. And it explains how we seem to have a greater capacity nowadays for more stuff in shorter timeframes. EG: We don’t wait for a monthly magazine to learn about movie stars, we need a new scandal every 20 minutes on TMZ, from people created as “celebrities,” specifically for this purpose.

But this is only part of the equation. Someone I was working with in a course I teach for Mediabistro recently said this to me after a lesson: “This was an interesting exercise in that it opened my eyes to the discrepancy between my expectations and those of my client. I have been helping the client get attention, but I have no plan in place on how to convert attention into action.”

I am writing this at Starbucks, and in the 1/2 mile drive it took to get here, I was behind a truck for my local lumberyard, who I couldn’t help but notice had a big Facebook “F” logo painted on the back of their truck. This was a signal that they felt it was so important for local customers to check them out on Facebook, that it was a key connection point. Yet, when I go to their site now, I see pretty much what you would expect: haphazard updates without any real frequency. There is nothing “wrong” with their page, most of their updates are actually expressions saying “it’s hot out there, be careful,” which is nice.

But it’s indicative of what many writers feel: this pressure to be present on a social media channel and develop an audience for some mysterious point in the future when they know what to do with all that attention?

The result is often this:

  1. They never really accumulate that big of an audience.
  2. They never really do anything special with the channel they are focused on. (e.g.: Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
  3. They never learn how to turn a vague sense of awareness that someone has for you or your work, into any meaningful connection, whether it is a relationship or the sale of a book.

The word I hear most from people I chat with is this: “overwhelmed.” And there has been some backlash to this idea of attention seeking, with some folks taking sabbaticals or social media breaks.

If I look back at what I am thankful for this year, it is never the base metrics of things like “Followers.” It is always a reflection on a meaningful conversation I had – be it via social media, email, Skype, phone, text message, letter, or in-person. And perhaps the biggest takeaway here for me is that meaningful communication truly happened via EACH of those channels for me this year. And the skill that I need to develop is not to grab MORE attention from MORE people, but rather, to create more meaningful moments regardless of the channel I am using; that these moments are never about “going viral,” and always shared between just two people.

That seeking attention is a hollow action unless you have a clear understanding of how it can lead to a meaningful experience.

Thanks.
-Dan

Tidying Up One’s Online Home

This is part of the Bittersweet Book Launch case study, where Dan Blank and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore share the yearlong process of launching her novel. You can view all posts here.

So we just updated Miranda’s website, and even changed her domain name in the process. It’s funny how one’s online home can become so out-of-date, and for so long. The copyright on her old site still said 2007, and had zero mention of her upcoming book. The photos were all from years ago, and to even begin updating it would have to start with emails and phone calls to the person who designed it years ago.

So we started fresh. One big change we made was go give people a more easy way to find the site. The original URL was MirandaBeverly-Whittemore.com

Go ahead: from memory try to type that into your web browser. That domain will now redirect to a new one that is a bit easier to remember: MirandaBW.com. What’s nice, is that this also now aligns with her Twitter handle: @MirandaBW.

Her new site was something I created rather quickly on WordPress, but there are some key changes:

  1. The focus on her new work, Bittersweet.
  2. A general update of lots of small things, such as her author photo.
  3. Aligning her overall messaging, such as her short and long author bios.
  4. Connecting everything: including links to FriendStories.com, and her social media profiles.

Here is the old website:

And here is the new one:

Is the new one perfect? Nope. But it’s a good start, and a platform that Miranda knows how to access and update on her own, which means that in 2020, the site is more likely to be up to date!
Thanks.
-Dan