This time around, I get far more support from Eden. Emily and Jessica are on hand to answer all my questions. Yes, I should be active on all my social media platforms. Yes, I should include preorder links on every post—Twitter’s algorithm reduces visibility for tweets with links, but you can get around that by including links farther down the thread or in your bio. No, starred reviews don’t actually mean anything, but yes, I should still brag about them because artificial hype is still hype. Yes, the book has been sent to reviewers at all the major outlets, and we’re expecting at least a few to run something positive. No, we’re probably not going to get a profile in the New Yorker, though perhaps a few books down the road we can talk.
I have actual money now, so I hire a photographer to take a new set of author photos. My old set was done by my sister’s friend from college, an amateur photographer named Melinda who happened to be in the area and charged me a fraction of the rates I’d found elsewhere online. I contorted my face in a number of different ways, trying to evoke the sultry, mysterious, and serious vibes of the photos of Serious Famous Woman Writers. Channel Jennifer Egan. Channel Donna Tartt.
Athena always looked like a model in hers: hair floating loose around her face, skin porcelain pale and glowing, full lips loose and slightly curled up at the edges as if she knew a joke that you weren’t in on, one eyebrow arched as if to say, Try me. It’s easy to sell books if you’re gorgeous. I made peace a long time ago with the fact that I’m only passably hot, and only from the right angles and lighting, so I tried for the next best thing, which is “tortured in a very deep and brilliant way.” It’s hard to transpose those thoughts to the camera, though, and the results horrified me when Melinda sent them in. I looked like I was trying to hold in a sneeze, or like I had to take a shit but was too afraid to tell anyone. I wanted to take them all again, this time with maybe a mirror in the background so I could see what the fuck I was doing, but I felt bad for wasting Melinda’s time, so I picked the one where I looked the most like a human being and the least like myself and paid her fifty bucks for her trouble.
This time I drop half a grand on a professional photographer in DC named Cate. We shoot in her studio, where she employs all sorts of lighting equipment I’ve never seen before, and which I can only hope will wash out my acne scars. Cate is brisk, friendly, professional. Her instructions are clear and direct. “Chin up. Relax your face a bit. Now I’m going to tell a joke, and just react however you want, just don’t pay attention to the lens. Lovely. Oh, that’s lovely.”
She sends me a selection of watermarked photos a few days later. I’m amazed by how good I look, especially in the photos we took outside. During golden hour I come off as nicely tanned, which makes me look sort of racially ambiguous. My eyes are cast demurely to the side, my mind full of profound and cryptic thoughts. I look like someone who could write a book about Chinese laborers in World War I and do it justice. I look like a Juniper Song.
At Emily’s suggestion, I start cultivating a social media presence. Until now, I’ve only tweeted random shitposts and jokes about Jane Austen. I had barely any followers, so it didn’t matter what I was tossing out. But now that I’m drawing attention for my book deal, I want to give off the right impression. I want bloggers, reviewers, and readers to know I’m the kind of person who, you know, cares about the right issues.
I study the Twitter feeds of Athena and her mutuals to see which community figures I should follow, which conversations I should be a part of. I retweet hot takes about bubble tea, MSG, BTS, and some drama series called The Untamed. I learn it’s important to be anti-PRC (that’s the People’s Republic of China) but pro-China (I’m not terribly sure how that’s different). I learn what “little pinks” and “tankies” are and make sure I don’t inadvertently retweet support for either. I decry what’s happening in Xinjiang. I Stand with Hong Kong. I start gaining dozens more followers a day once I’ve started vocalizing on these matters, and when I notice that many of my followers are people of color or have things like #BLM and #FreePalestine in their bios, I know I’m on the right track.
And just like that, my public persona springs into being. Farewell June Hayward, little-known author of Over the Sycamore. Hello Juniper Song, author of this season’s biggest hit—brilliant, enigmatic, the late Athena Liu’s best friend.
IN THE MONTHS BEFORE THE LAST FRONT COMES OUT, EDEN’S PUBLICITY team does everything it can to make sure all of America is aware of its existence.
They send ARCs—that’s “advanced reader copies”—out to other big-name authors at Eden, and though not everyone has time to read it, a handful of bestselling writers do say kind things like “Engrossing!” and “A compelling voice,” which Daniella will have printed on the jacket cover.
The cover art was finalized about a year before the release date. Daniella asked me to put together a Pinterest board of ideas for the design. (Authors usually get some input on themes and general design ideas, but otherwise, we accept that we know nothing about cover art and leave the process alone.) I tooled around Google for some photographs of the Chinese Labour Corps and found some nice black-and-white photographs of the laborers themselves—there’s one in particular that I thought was charming: eight or so laborers crowded beaming around the camera. I sent it off to Daniella. What about this? I asked. It’s in the public domain now, so we wouldn’t have to get the rights.
But Daniella and the art department didn’t think that was quite the right vibe. We don’t want it to look like a nonfiction history book, she responded. Would you pick that up if you were strolling through the bookstore?
In the end, we went with a more modern theme. The words THE LAST FRONT are printed in massive block letters, against an abstract duo-chrome rendering of what looks like some French village on fire. We want colors that emphasize bold, epic, and romantic, wrote Daniella. And you’ll notice the Chinese characters on the edges of the inner jacket—that’ll let readers know they can expect something different with this one.
The cover felt hefty, serious, attractive. It was somehow simultaneously every World War I novel that had been published in the last ten years, and also something new, exciting, and original. Perfect, I wrote to Daniella. That’s perfect.
Now that we’re much closer to release, I start seeing ads for it everywhere—Goodreads, Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram. They even get an ad for the subway. Either they didn’t tell me about it, or I forgot, because when I get off the train to Franconia-Springfield and see my book cover plastered on the opposite wall, I’m so stunned that I stand frozen on the platform. That’s my book. That’s my name.
“The Last Front,” a woman behind me reads out loud to her companion. “By Juniper Song. Huh.”
“Looks good,” says the man. “We should check it out.”
“Sure,” says the woman. “Maybe.”
A thrum of joy comes over me in that instant, and though it’s so trite you’d think I was imitating an actress in a CW pilot, I ball both hands into fists and jump high into the air.
The good news keeps piling up. Brett emails me with updates on foreign rights sales. We’ve sold rights in Germany, Spain, Poland, and Russia. Not France, yet, but we’re working on it, says Brett. But nobody sells well in France. If the French like you, then you’re doing something very wrong.
The Last Front starts making it onto all sorts of lists with titles like “Ten Best Books of the Summer,” “Debuts We Can’t Wait For,” and incredibly, PopSugar’s “15 Must-Read Summer Beach Reads.” Not everyone wants to read about World War I at the beach, I joke on Twitter. But if you’re a freak like me, you might enjoy this list!