The Riff

Pivoting to a new season in the book process (I’m not panicking! You’re panicking!) means there’s a good deal of marketing thoughts bounding around my brain. For one, marketing isn’t just promoting, though promoting is part of marketing. Marketing is building relationships, being of service, being generous, thinking outward, a delicate balance of sharing vs. oversharing. It’s no longer only about YOU.

Talk to any author and the idea of self-promotion turns the gut for all the usual reasons. Look at all the authors doing it wrong and trying to social media their way to visibility and it looks all the more futile and … pathetic. Everyone is screaming pay attention to me. Well, why should I?

Our myopia often has us thinking that promoting our book or ______ is solely a self-serving act. For many it feels icky, but it has to be done. Taking another angle, you didn’t write your book alone. It takes a village: editors, designers, willing early readers, printers, researchers, agents, bartenders, etc. If you don’t find creative means of getting the book out in front of the people who you seek to serve/entertain/inform, you’re doing a disservice to the incredible amount of man-hours beyond your own.

It’s why actors and directors go on interview campaigns for their movies. Look at the credits of any film. If the figureheads of the production don’t do the public-facing legwork, they’re undermining the work of everyone in the chain of production. But B.O., Shouldn’t the work speak for itself? If that were the case, Lily Gladstone would not have been beating the interview circuit to try (albeit futile) to win an Oscar. Had she won, yes, she’d be holding the statue, but she’d be holding it for costume, makeup, publicists, the team behind her. It would have been their win, too.

Bear with me … this is going somewhere.

In this recent newsletter boom of the last year or two (similar to the podcast boom c. 2017-ish), people are largely getting it wrong. A newsletter is crashing someone’s inbox, a sacred place that is, more or less, divorced from much of the algorithmically driven bullshit we see on social media. Inboxes are a curated, overgrown garden of our own design. (Which makes it all the more infuriating when authors, desperate to grow their email lists, add you without asking. Don’t do this, please.)

This means that you better offer value. What’s in it for me? (hat tip to Stephen Knezovich’s brilliant five-days-a-week Read This newsletter. It is a joy and he’s something of a newsletter mensch. Maybe hire him.). My aim with this newsletter is to offer insights into leading a more intentional online life independent of the algorithm we were hoodwinked into thinking we needed, building a more sturdy platform, one that WE own, not Zuck, Musk, or China. For the next year, still holding true to those ethos, I’ll offer insights into my approach to marketing my forthcoming book that’s due out in May 2025 (as of this writing).

There will be an element of “working with the garage door open.” But only so much where I feel it serves YOU and where you want to go. Otherwise it’s gratuitous and gives you more reason to stall (Seth Godin used stalling in back-to-back blog posts here and here). My big gripe with people incessantly talking about “process” is that it offers a great excuse to stall. It is fun to hear how people go about the work. If you do something that might help someone, then you should share it, and a curious person should ask, but if I tell you what pencils (Blackwing) or notebooks (Field Notes) I use, it’s of no service to you. Using that pencil isn’t the silver bullet. That said, if the pencil reinforces the story you tell yourself, makes you feel special, makes you feel more writerly and you start doing the work, OK good then.

This excessively long newsletter is a cue for the upcoming year. I hope to provide a strong answer to the What’s-in-it-for-me? question. I’ll likely share stories of what I did when Six Weeks in Saratoga came out from 2011. I plan on inviting some publicists and agents on the podcast to talk about their side of things.

The first lesson is simple, but it sure as hell isn’t easy: Build an email list. Speaking from experience, it’s difficult and it takes forever and you’ll gain five a month and lose seven, but that’s the grind of it all. The more value you add, the better chance you have. Nobody really cares what time you wake up in the morning, nobody really gives a shit about your “process,” but if you speak to a literary agent about the five things they see authors doing wrong, well, I guarantee that’ll get you sign ups.

Again, very long, but I hope this orients your expectations for the upcoming year, give or take, and subtly offer some newsletter fundamentals you can start right away.

As you know, this newsletter starts here and goes up to 11!

The Books

1 . First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger. This is a front-runner for a CNFy, my non-existent CNF award show. I’m in love with this book. For those in Oregon or Washington, Lilly will be at Powell’s City of Books in Portland May 21 at 7 p.m.

2 . The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman. I listened to this on Spotify, read by Chuck. I wish I could formulate thoughts and stuff the way Chuck does. I “came of age” in the 90s, so anything that references this decade is a tasty bite.

3 . Daddy’s Little Stranger: A Memoir by Acamea Deadwiler. A fine read from a young woman navigating the void left by her father, playing hoops, the 90s Bulls. Dig it, friend.

4 . Cues: Small Signals, Incredible Impact by Vanessa Van Edwards. Apparently charisma can be learned? High fives! Turns out I’m somewhat charismatic! My wife disagreed. I’ve got a long way to go and this book is the playbook.

The Other Stuff

5 . This short film is brilliant, beautiful, painful, tragic, pure magic. It’s about 19 minutes long and stars former SNL star Cecily Strong along side KeiLyn Durrel Jones. It was written by Neil LaBute.

6 . Geared mainly for indie authors, but there’s some good stuff. My favorite being don’t try to do ALL THE THINGS.

7 . Maybe consider NOT burdening your partner with your shit.

8 . An oldie but a goodie, Jerry Saltz’s life as a failed artist.

9 . The case for learning in public. I have thoughts about this better spent for a future blog post …

10 . Beverly Gage says, “A major challenge in writing a biography is finding that balance between the subject of the story and what is occurring around them.”

11 . Excellent profile on Padma Lakshmi by the New Yorker’s Helen Rosner.

Writing Prompt

Recall the greatest cup of coffee/tea you’ve ever had.

CNFin’ Happy Hour

How about I include a date? Gonna try Google Meet vs. Zoom

Thursday, May 16 · 5:00 – 5:45pm Pacific

Video call link: https://meet.google.com/wac-ojtk-gmg

Patreon: More Than a Tip Jar

Patreon helps keep the lights on at CNF Pod HQ, but you get some pretty cool stuff, too. I shared my six-figure-earning book proposal with the Patreon gang, and some tiers even get one-on-one time to talk their work out with me. Sometimes a hitter needs someone to watch their swing. Writing is a conversation.

Editing/Coaching

If you need a little extra, if you need someone to perhaps see what you can’t see, I’d love to help you get to where you want to go with a piece of writing. You can reply to this email and we can start a dialogue.

Stay wild,

b.r.o.