2 months till publication: have you done enough?
The Edge of Solitude Pre-Publication Diary: the panic sets in…
It’s two months till your book makes it out into the world – the culmination of all those years of hard work, and you start to wonder: how do you know if you’ve done enough? If you’ve done the right things, or if any of your publicity work has had an impact? How do you cope with the rising anxiety that people will soon be reading your book – or with the anxiety that nobody will read it and it’s all your fault because you haven’t worked hard enough to promote it?
And with all that whirling through your head, how do you find the headspace to do anything other than panic?
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had some really great chats with people on the publishing team for The Edge of Solitude. One was with the publicity team who are working on the book, and the other was with my agent.
In some ways, each conversation was very different. The one with my publicist was all about strategy, and what we can still do, and how we can still be active. The one with my agent was all about taking a step back.
In many ways, this isn’t surprising. After all, part of an agent’s job is to look after their writers during the publication process, and stop us getting too stressed about the enormity of our book coming out into the world. So, when I was worrying about whether we had enough endorsements for the cover, or whether we’d scheduled enough events, or got enough pre-orders, she reminded me that so much of a book’s success isn’t actually down to the writer – or even entirely to the publisher. Sure, a publicity campaign can have a huge impact, but especially with literary fiction, things like prize listings will really help a book to sell well. And once you’ve written the best book you can write, those things are largely outside your control.
On the other hand, that doesn’t mean we don’t want to give the book its best fighting chance in all the ways that are in our control.
Which brings me onto the conversation with the publicity team – and all the things we’ve been up to over the past month, and plan to get up to over the next few weeks:
So what have I been up to this month?
Final typescript: This month, I signed off on the final typescript. This means I’ve done with edits, and with copyedits, the typesetting is all done and now we’ve also done with proofreading, so the book is ready to go to the printers. This moment is equal parts exciting and terrifying, because it means the book can’t be changed, but also means it’s one step closer to becoming an actual physical book that people can buy in shops and take home and read!
Cover text: As well as the inside of the book being finalised, we’ve also finalised the outside, too. This has meant chasing other writers for endorsement quotes for the cover (in a nice way, I hope – just a friendly ‘if you’ve had a chance to read it and enjoyed it, it would mean the world if you could say a couple of nice sentences about it’), and then signing off on the cover text – including those endorsement quotes, as well as my author bio and the book blurb.
Book Club questions: For each of my books, I’ve created a downloadable PDF of book club questions, which lives on my website as part of my Resources for Readers section. This month, I wrote the questions for The Edge of Solitude. I haven’t yet published them on my website – I’ll do that slightly closer to publication – but I wanted to get them written ahead of time.
Bookshop.org: I added the book to my bookshop list on Bookshop.org! For those of you who haven’t yet come across the website, it’s basically an online bookseller that not only pays it’s taxes (!) but also gives money back to independent bookshops. Plus, if you’re a writer, you can create your own bookshop list on there, with affiliate links like this one:
which means readers can buy your book at no extra cost to them, but you get a small commission in return.
Campaigns meeting: As I mentioned, I had a super useful conversation with the campaigns team a couple of weeks ago (main publicist, publicist assisting on the campaign, and marketing), where we talked about some of the strategies for the book, and how they’re progressing. It was great to check in, to cement a few things, and to get the ball rolling on a couple of others. Things like…
Pitches: I’ve worked with the campaigns team to create pitches for off-the-book pieces. These are the features/articles authors will write for magazines and newspapers around the time of publication, to help garner interest in the book itself. Together with the campaigns team, we’ve come up with some pitches – so now it’s just a case of waiting to see if any of them get taken up.
Events: There are now some solid dates in the diary for events around publication. Some of these have been organised by Canongate, and some have been a result of me contacting bookshops/venues myself. A couple have been a collaborative effort: the result of strategically timed emails from both myself and Canongate, to create a kind of pincer movement. I’ll write something specifically about setting up events in the next few weeks, but for now, you can check out all the ones advertised so far on my website.
What are my plans for the coming month?
Well for one thing, I’m getting married! As some of you will know, we got married officially just before Christmas, but this is our big celebration, so it’s taking up a lot of time & energy to plan – because of course planning a wedding and a book launch at the same time isn’t at all overkill… (Did I mention we’re also house-hunting as well? Doing nothing by halves!)
But amongst all of this, I’m also determined not to let the pre-publication jobs slide. So, as well as filling confetti cones with dried rose petals, and stringing up fairy lights and bunting, this month, I plan to do the following:
Website: I added the novel to my website when the news was first announced, and other than adding the Sam Read pre-order link, I haven’t really done much since. So it’s time to update my website with more information about the book, with things like book club questions and cover quotes, and to make sure it’s prominent on the website landing page.
Events: As I say, I’ve been setting up and planning events for a few months now, but there are a couple more waiting on confirmation, and then of course they need to be publicised. After all, what’s the point in putting on an event if nobody comes to it? So I’ll be publicising them as loudly as possible over the coming months, while also hopefully popping a couple of new ones in the diary as well.
Emails: And speaking of publicising events, I also want to invite people to them directly. Initially, this will involve making a giant list (maybe a spreadsheet? I do love a spreadsheet…) of everyone I want to invite, and everyone I want to tell about the book. This will be a combination of family and friends, people I work with regularly, and also people I’ve worked with or had connections with in the past. Then, I’ll send out the email. When my first novel, My Name is Monster, came out in 2019, I was dreading this job. It felt like begging, or bragging, or at the very least uncomfortably like putting my head above the parapet. But it actually turned out to be one of the loveliest parts of the pre-publication process, because it put me back in contact with loads of people I’d either fallen out of touch with, or normally only sent boring administrative emails to. It initiated a lot of catch-ups, and a lot of warm supportive feeling.
Social media: I said this last month, too, and I’ll probably also say it next month. But I think it’s important to keep talking about the book (and about the process of bringing a book into the world) on social media, especially in the more immediate run-up to publication.
And of course, if you’d like to help with some of that pre-publication panic by pre-ordering a copy of the book, it’d be a win-win situation! (I’d be eternally grateful, and you’d get a beautiful-looking book to grace your bookshelves!)