Launch Week!!

The wild ride of publishing a novel and some recent press.

A dream launch event at P&T Knitwear

My debut novel, NOTHING SERIOUS, came out last Tuesday and I’ve been in a kind of manic whirlwind state since. The launch was a genuine dream come true, with so many people from all parts of my life showing up to support and celebrate.

Before this week, I’d heard “launch week” would be a busy blur though I didn’t exactly know why or how. Travel for events, yes. More emails and outreach than usual, makes sense. A few interviews if we’re lucky, but I’d done most of those in advance then cleared my schedule in full. The thing I didn’t anticipate, a stressor that fills me with shame as much as surprise, was that a large part of the overwhelm for me has been…social media posting? Perhaps I’m doing this all wrong because I hate social media, I know it mostly has diminishing returns and I don’t by any means want to be spending all of my time on it this week. And yet I feel as if I’m doing something even more wrong if I’m not?

I’ve been lucky enough to have a handful of press come out for launch—podcasts, essays, interviews, events (see below 😊). Each is something I’ve worked very hard to create and place over the last few months. And so…I want them to be seen! But disseminating all these pieces over the course of the three or four days in which they were all simultaneously released while also sharing book tour events without making my network nauseous with self-promotion has been, well, a challenge.

Especially now, when the social media landscape is beyond fragmented. Long gone are the days when Twitter was THE water cooler for writers. If an essay was good, you’d generally see it on Twitter and it was easy enough to share or re-tweet accordingly without having to awkwardly cut and paste a link into a linktree into a bio or however the f* it works on Instagram. I mean the clumsiness of sharing there is almost laughable with the story-tagging and bio links and the glaring lack of a simple re-share. And I guess some people still use Facebook? So I pop in there, too, but apparently now the algo de-prioritizes links, and also LinkedIn even tho it makes me kind of queasy but I guess content is taking off there too?

Then there’s Threads and BlueSky. I hate Meta as much as the next person but I did an experiment posting the same content on both platforms for weeks and got almost zero engagement on BlueSky (which could totally be a me thing) but launch week has no time for experimentation and so I’m trying to post all the things on all the platforms.

Including Substack! The new home for writers. But I write slowly and posts are long and time-consuming. Oddly the most viral thing for me in this launch week was a Substack Note that I tossed off the morning of the book’s release without much of a thought. Actually the thought was simply: no one reads my notes so who cares that I’m in my pajamas and looking like a wind-burned nut. This note got 2k likes!! I do not have a big Substack following so the traction of this post is wild and actually hilarious—the power of the algorithm when it takes something under its wing—but people love a hard-earned success story and I’m so grateful for all the kind replies 💕

As a result of that note, I have a bunch of new subscribers—hello! 👋 I’m so glad you’re here. Very soon, when the launch craziness calms down, I will write a detailed post about the process of getting my novel published, with as much transparency as possible since it was a long and wild ride that didn’t start until my thirties after a career in tech so this is all new to me and I think a lot of subscribers are interested in those details.

For now, though, I’d like to use this post as one more way to disseminate the interviews and essays I spent the last few months working on for this launch week, many of which are also about the process of getting this novel published. I hope you enjoy and share if you feel so inclined ❤️

Essays

How I Learned to Write by Emailing My Father for Lit Hub is one of the most personal essays I’ve written. Having grown up without financial stability, I studied engineering in college and climbed a very specific corporate path, knowing I needed to support myself. I didn’t consider writing until my 30s. I hope this essay shows how we can discover writing in so many different ways and at any point in our lives.

This essay for

Sari Botton

’s “How My Book Came To Be” column explores how I landed on this idea, the process of writing it, and how it ended up getting published. For anyone on writing / publishing path right now, I hope it’s helpful!

How My Book Came To Be #2: Emily J. Smith

7 Stories About Women Coming of Age in Their 30s and 40s for Electric Literature. A list of my favorite kind of stories—later in life coming of age tales of women that don’t center marriage or children—including how and why NOTHING SERIOUS falls into this category.

How I Turned My Autofiction Novel Into a Thriller. This essay is for anyone who is banging their heads against a wall of rejection. I was hitting that wall for about seven years… then I shifted course! (Note: my novel is not really a thriller—to me it’s a later-in-life coming of age story—but it has thriller “vibes.”)

Interviews

Writer’s Digest published an interview about my process getting an agent and a book deal, what inspired NOTHING SERIOUS, and all the little surprises along the way.

This interview for Write or Die with my dear friend and brilliant writer Sarah Kasbeer, got into a lot of juicy details around obsession, writer friends, and the hell of the dating apps.

I talk to

Sara Petersen

almost every day but for the launch I had the honor of chatting with her for her fantastic newsletter about deciding whether or not to have kids, representing childlessness, platonic obsession, and many other things.

"Like driving in the wrong direction on a one-way street."

Kate Brody and I sat down for CrimeReads to talk tech, dating, shifting from obsessing over men to obsessing over women, and and how real life inspires fiction.

Reviews

The SF Chronicle had an AMAZING review of the book! This makes me particularly happy because the book is set in SF. I especially loved that the reviewer appreciated the conference room names 🙃

Huge thank you to

Tell the Bees

for this incredibly thoughtful review, coupled with his usual whip-smart analysis of culture, in this case the misery of online dating. He did such an excellent job of seeing and explaining what the book was really about:

“An incisive look at what it means to be a single, childless, 35-year-old woman… while this book is ostensibly about the dating apps it’s actually about women and what it means to exist in a male-dominated society… [It’s] about the ways that men hurt women, the ways certain people are treated as disposable, the ways our society benefits people who will treat others as disposable.”

There have been a number of others posts from the bookstagram world, which I won’t detail here but am so grateful for all of them!!

Podcasts

• Interview for the Writing Stories Podcast

• The Bleeders Interview with

  Courtney Kocak

The Launch Event!

It hasn’t all been social media anxiety. My launch event was one of the coolest nights of my life, a real out of body experience. Though I didn’t get to talk to most people nearly as much as I wanted to, it was amazing to see all the people I love in the crowd and have space to talk about something I put so much time and thought and so much of myself into.

One of my dearest friends, Chloe Caldwell (who was also my first writing teacher ten years ago) interviewed me for the launch, which made it exceptionally special and comfortable and fun (and also made me cry multiple times during our conversation). Chloe has gotten in the habit of lovingly referring to me as “bookzilla” and because she’s become something like a sister to me it’s not only fine but funny—I love a tease rooted in truth 👰 And yes, I put A LOT into this launch. I spent ten years trying to get a novel published, I don’t take it lightly! I’ll write more soon about how launching a book is eerily (sadly) very similar to launching an app / startup; I had spreadsheets, to-do lists, google docs up the wazoo, and most of it was self-funded and self-initiated. It’s like a full-time job, even with a top-five publisher, which is hard and exclusionary given that most writers also need to have a full-time job. Luckily, I was able to save enough money to take what people are calling an “adult gap year” for the last few months in order to focus on it.

Back to the party, where these gorgeous women got me this gorgeous cake, which made me burst into an ugly cry when they opened the box. I have known this crew since my first writing workshop ten years ago and they are the single biggest reason I was able to keep going through countless rejections. From left to right, these genius angels: Jillian Eugenios, Courtney Preiss, and Chloe Caldwell.

The aforementioned

Sara Petersen

also came down from New Hampshire to celebrate! I text Sara nearly everyday about writing of course, but also relationships, girl-crushes, fashion dilemmas, general anxiety and depression, my dreams, you name it. But BIZARRELY I can count the number of times we’ve hung out in person on ONE HAND. Alls to say I also burst into tears when I walked in and saw her.

The other major shoutout is for my engineering friends—Liz and Luke—who I’ve now known for 25 years!! We all studied engineering together at Cornell (like Edie, the main character). Liz came down from Boston and Luke from Wisconsin and it was so special to have them there. Also funny because the excerpt I read was about “Edie’s” college experience and I had to stop myself from looking up at them because I knew the tears would flow if we locked eyes.

There were so many people who were beyond special to see from every corner of my life and I’m so grateful to each and every person who came out. I joked before the event that this was my wedding (I have no desire to have an actual wedding) and it really felt like that. Sure, maybe I spent way too long putting together a very specific and ordered playlist that increases in intensity for optimal dancing potential even though we only got through half of it, but I couldn’t have asked for a better night.

This week I’m in California for an event at Skylight Books in LA and then Green Apple Books (on the park) in SF. The SF one should be particularly fun since so much of the book is based on my time living out there. Then Baltimore, Cleveland, Kinston and Westport. If you’re in any of these cities, I would love to see you!

Again, I’ll write more soon about the publishing process. For now, thank you so much for all the support and encouragement this week. Please consider buying the book if you haven’t! And if you’ve read it, I’d love to hear from you! Hearing from readers lights me up every time, it’s so special to know when someone connects with your work. Also if you’re open to it, posting a review on Amazon is incredibly helpful.

I’ll leave you with this absolutely unhinged video of me wishing for a movie deal at the launch party (yes, I’m even attempting TikTok; it’s a real spaghetti against the wall situation over here) 🙃🫣❤️

More soon! xx