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
Dan and I had a meeting today. There were lots of little tidbits on my to-do list, but mostly I’ve been feeling this kind of weird “What happens next-ness,” so my final question to him was a big one: “Ummmm, what happens next?”
Dan and I had a very clear gameplan heading into this year. We had a lot of pieces we wanted to get into place, chief among them, building and launching FriendStories.com, building and launching MirandaBW.com, and getting me more actively engaged on social media channels. There’s been a lot of smaller steps in there, lots of meetings, lots of strategy, but, as of a few weeks ago, most of what we’d talked about doing in a concrete way is now at an end.
There’s still plenty to do; goodness knows, my list is miles long. But we both realized in our conversation today that it was time to have the “launch” conversation, the “holy smokes this book is about to come out” conversation. We’re fiddling with a new social media idea, a project that would go hand-in-hand with publication, and would utilize my visual bank of photographs and other archival items from the real place that inspired Bittersweet. But there are other things to do to, from honing our list of who I should be reaching out to, to having a strategy in place to boost my online presence once media outlets start to talk about Bittersweet (fingers crossed).
In the meantime, I’m trying to make the most of this calm by working on my new book in earnest. This week has been fruitful and enticing. I finally got an outline that feels right, and I’ve written a few thousand words.
I think I might really have another whole novel on my hands.