My book even gets chosen for a national book club run by a pretty white Republican woman who is mostly famous for being the daughter of a prominent Republican politician, and this gives me some moral discomfort, but then I figure that if the book club reader base is largely Republican white women, then wouldn’t it be good for a novel to broaden their worldviews?
In the UK, The Last Front is chosen for the Readaholics Book Box. I didn’t know book boxes were such a major industry, but apparently subscription services like Readaholics send books out in cute crates with accompanying merchandise to tens of thousands of customers a month. The Readaholics Book Box edition of The Last Front will have special deckled edges, and ship out along with a cruelty-free vegan leather tote bag, a collectible key chain featuring various jade Chinese zodiac animals (for a special fee you can take a personality quiz online to determine your zodiac affinity), and a selection of sustainably sourced, single-origin green teas from Taiwan.
Barnes & Noble decides to do an exclusive special signed edition, which means that four months before release date, I get eight giant packages delivered to my apartment containing tip-in sheets, which are blank title pages that will be inserted into the printed books once I’ve signed them. Signing thousands of tip-in sheets takes forever, and I spend the next two weeks doing “wine and sign” nights, where I sit in front of my TV with a pile of pages to my right and a bottle of merlot, watching Bling Empire as I write “Juniper Song” in big, looping script.
Are these the signs of a bestseller in the making? I wonder. They must be. Why doesn’t anyone tell you, right off the bat, how important your book is to the publisher? Before Over the Sycamore came out, I worked my ass off doing blog interviews and podcasts, hoping that the more sweat I put into publicity, the more my publisher would reward my efforts. But now, I see, author efforts have nothing to do with a book’s success. Bestsellers are chosen. Nothing you do matters. You just get to enjoy the perks along the way.
EARLY REVIEWS START POURING IN TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE RELEASE date.
I make it a nightly habit to scroll through new Goodreads reviews, just for that little boost of serotonin. They tell authors never to look at Goodreads, but nobody follows that advice—none of us can resist the urge to know how our work is being received. In any case, The Last Front is killing it; its review average is a healthy 4.89, and most of the top reviews are so gushingly positive that the occasional ambivalent three-star review hardly fazes me.
One night, though, I glimpse something that makes my heart stop.
One star. The Last Front has received its first one-star review, from a user named CandiceLee.
No way. I click over to her profile, wondering if it’s just a coincidence. Nope—CandiceLee, NYC, works in publishing. Favorite authors: Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and Jhumpa Lahiri. She’s not particularly active on Goodreads—her last review is for a poetry collection from 2014—meaning this was no accident. Her thumb didn’t just slip. Clearly, Candice went out of her way to log in and give my book one star.
Fingers trembling, I screenshot the rating and send it to my editor.
Hey Daniella,
I know you said not to look at GR, but a friend sent me this and I’m a bit concerned. It seems like a pretty large lapse in professionalism. I guess technically Candice has the right to review my work however she likes in her off time, but after what happened with the SR this feels intentional . . .
Best,
June
Daniella gets back to me first thing in the morning.
Thank you for letting me know. That is quite unprofessional. We will handle this internally.
I know Daniella’s email voice well enough by now to tell when she’s irritated. Curt, choppy sentences. She didn’t even sign off. Daniella is pissed.
Good. Hot vindication coils in my gut. Candice deserves it—putting the sensitivity read kerfuffle aside, what kind of psychopath would fuck around with an author’s feelings like this? Shouldn’t she know how stressful and terrifying it is to launch a book? I bask for a moment, imagining what kind of chaos I’ve sown over at Eden’s office this morning. And though I would never say this out loud about a fellow woman—the industry is tough enough as it is—I hope I got that bitch fired.
Six
MONTHS BECOME WEEKS BECOME DAYS, AND THEN THE BOOK is out.
Last time, I learned the hard way that for most writers, the day your book goes on sale is a day of abject disappointment. The week beforehand feels like it should be the countdown to something grand, that there will be fanfare and immediate critical acclaim, that your book will skyrocket to the top of all the sales rankings and stay there. But in truth, it’s all a massive letdown. It’s fun to walk into bookstores and see your name on the shelves, that’s true (unless you’re not a major front-list release, and your book is buried in between other titles without so much as a face out, or even worse, not even carried by most stores). But other than that, there’s no immediate feedback. The people who bought the book haven’t had time to finish reading it yet. Most sales happen in preorders, so there’s no real movement on Amazon or Goodreads or any of the other sites you’ve been checking like a maniac the whole month prior. You have all this hope and energy bubbled up inside you, but none of it . . . goes anywhere.
There’s no single, crushing moment of realization when your book tanks, either. There’s only a thousand disappointments, stacked on top of one another as the days tick by, as you compare your own sales numbers to those of other authors, as you keep seeing the same signed, unbought copy sitting on the shelf of your local bookstore every time you pop in to check. There’s only a slow trickle of “sales are a bit lower than we’d expected but we hope they’ll pick up” emails from your editor, followed by total, inscrutable silence. There’s only a growing sense of dread and disappointment, until the bitterness becomes too much, until you start to feel stupid for believing that you could be an author at all.
So I learned, from the release of Over the Sycamore, not to get my hopes up.
But this time feels special. This time I learn again how vastly different the world is as experienced by writers like Athena. The morning of my launch day, Eden has a massive crate of champagne delivered to my apartment. Congratulations, reads the attached handwritten note from Daniella. You earned it.
I extract a bottle from the wrapping, take a selfie as I hold it up, and upload it to Instagram with the caption: TODAY’S THE DAY! Feeling grateful, overwhelmed, and nervous. Blessed to have the best team in the business. It gets two thousand likes in an hour.
Watching those hearts pile up gives me the flood of serotonin that I’ve always hoped for on launch day. Throughout the morning, strangers keep tagging me in congratulations posts, reviews, and photographs of my book on the New Releases pile at Barnes & Noble, or face out with a recommendation tag at their local indie bookstores. One bookseller tags me in a literal pyramid of her books, captioned: DETERMINED TO SELL 100 COPIES OF THE LAST FRONT ON DAY ONE! WITNESS MEEEE
Common wisdom says that social media is a bad metric for gauging how well a book is doing. Twitter doesn’t reflect the larger book-buying ecosphere, for example, and books that seem to be getting lots of hype are usually explained by an overactive Twitter presence by the author’s team. Likes and followers don’t necessarily translate into sales.
But shouldn’t all this hype signal something? I’m reviewed in NPR, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. With Over the Sycamore, I’d felt lucky to even get a Kirkus review, and that had been little more than a plot summary. Meanwhile, everyone’s talking about The Last Front like they know it’s going to be a hit. And I wonder if that’s the final, obscure part of how publishing works: if the books that become big do so because at some point everyone decided, for no good reason at all, that this would be the title of the moment.