Inside my book preview party

The publishing industry turns up sometimes!

Okay, here’s the tea.

The publishing industry is so cryptic and, well, snooty, that sometimes I feel like it’s just an archipelago of those culty secret societies they have at Ivy League universities. After I published my first book Wordslut and started to unpack what about the launch had gone right and wrong, it became clear that there was a whole underworld of publishing relationships and strategies that I hadn’t seen, that I still couldn’t really see, but that I knew must be at work, invisibly shifting the currents of which books become a “big deal” and which don’t. I know it sounds paranoid, but I started to feel like there were secret events and conversations I wasn’t supposed to know about happening all the time right under my nose, like how certain #blessed actors in Hollywood will have these lavish press parties thrown for them behind closed doors as a bid to position them for Oscar consideration or general stardom or whatever.

Okay, I told myself, I may not be a part of the “literati,” but I refuse to believe that’s necessary to have a hit book. The marketing campaign I later threw together for Cultish was totally outside the publishing establishment; it was scrappy and messy and DIY as hell. It was pitching myself to podcasts and starting my own and totally revamping my social media presence and not turning down any opportunity to get the word out about my book, big or small. Fortunately, it seemed to work. I learned a lot. And my reward was getting to move onto a different publisher who swore they’d show me a fancier kind of marketing treatment for my next book…