Truth and Dare - What One Debut Author Really Thinks About Promoting Her Book.

Last week, the family was in turmoil. There were mice. There were competing and strongly held opinions expressed about what ought to be done about said mice. A Dad who bought traps was emotionally crucified after not one but two mice died for his sins. The first because DAD successfully and intentionally set one of the traps to the door-slamming horror of the children-formerly-known-as-his; and the second because his WIFE, showing HER father how the trap worked and why we wouldn't be using them anymore, left it set on the counter and forgot about it and...well...blammo slammo and then both parents were monsters, both traps ended up in the garbage, the children retreated to the Switzerland of sleep, and I ended up constructing a no-kill mouse trap out of a wine bottle, a book of Emerson's essays, a biography of Madame de Pompadour, a hunk of cheese, an oil slick and a garbage can. If nothing else, the surviving mice were entertained!

And what does this mice saga have to do with the fact that THE NINJA LIBRARIANS will be going out into the world in two weeks? 

1. Neither Can Be Ignored  
Well, YOU can ignore them. Well, actually most people in the world could safely ignore them but if I turn a blind eye to the mice, I'll likely face wild mammalian multiplication, Hansa virus, and holes where the Swiss never intended them.  

If I ignore my own book release, I will ...well...I'm not actually sure what would happen, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't help the book find its first at-large readers. It also wouldn't make me very popular with my publisher's hard-working staff, or with the many book-loving people who have generously taken the time to read Advanced Reader Copies, write blogposts and reviews about THE NINJA LIBRARIANS, talk it up with friends, create beautiful trailers for the heck of it, and just generally share their enthusiasm for the book.

2. At First Blush, the Options  for Responding to the Situations Seemed Limited and Terrible
In the case of the mice, the initial choices seemed to be A. hosting a mushrooming mouse jamboree or B. snapping necks and taking names (Tattered Ear...we hardly knew ye).

In the case of the Book Release...

Oh, readers (are we alone?) because I must confess. (hey, I was raised Catholic. Be happy I'm not taking out your kneecaps with a ten pound thurible) As the calendar pages flew off the wall cinematically, hitting me in the face more often than not, and I finished making a torture chamber of the stalwart copyeditor's life with my final 500 changes, and the Advanced Reader Copies became available, and the beautiful cover materialized, I didn't see a choice looming in front of me as much as a hellish inevitability.  

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The inevitability took the form of a zero gravity self-promotion thunderdome in which I would be consumed, defeated, and cheapened. It waved tentacles, it drooled, it let out ugly peals of fake laughter and faker puffs of bonhomie. It handed out flyers with instructions for how to bootlick and curry favor (I'm not proud!) and different flyers that explained how to do it all wrong anyway and...well, no need to get er...Hieronymus Bosch about the whole thing, but it SCARED me! The idea of trying to bring attention to the book 

felt tantamount to attempting to shove it down the world's throat. The act of bringing a book to someone's attention felt exactly the same as trying to hard sell it Glenngarry Glenn Ross style, and perilously close to trying to hard "sell" myself in the same bill of goods. I felt bewildered by the cloudy intersection between wanting to encourage the reading of my story for the value I hope it has, and the related need to sell books, to underwrite the possibility of writing and publishing the rest of the stories I want to tell. I wanted it to find its audience in some "pure" fashion. The way water finds its way across and under the earth through its own chosen crooked channels.

I started using my Twitter account a little (because that's what lapsed Catholics do when they're not swinging thuribles). I felt dirty if I retweeted something positive that someone had said about my book. I felt like a fool if I couldn't bring myself to do it.  In the midst of trying to get my head around the beginnings of my second book, the question constantly posed itself: How can I let people know about my book without being an overbearing, self-centered, irritating, honor=less fiend? Well, I'm paraphrasing a little.  

The truth was, that despite understanding the outrageous extent to which luck, privilege, the generosity of others, and smelling the right way on the right day,  mixed with my own efforts to result in THE NINJA LIBRARIANS getting published. I didn't want to have to sell it.

3. With a little help from friends, I ended up seeing another possibility.

In the case of our little Mus Musculus problem, my brother's room-mate (Hi Ioan!) showed me the clever non-lethal contraption pictured above, which besides not squishing little mouse heads has the added advantage of being impossible to forget about (Another friend warned us about the ease with which one can forget about variations of the "have a heart" trap, and the mouse slowly dying of dehydration inside)

In the matter of the promotion of the book...I had help from my friend, John Gibson who, if not sternly, then with loving force, helped me see the process of actively bringing my book to the attention of others in a different light. He said (in his habitually compelling uncapitalized way):

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 "many are spooked by asking for themselves.years of fundraising taught me a useful distinction:
when you believe in a cause, asking for others to support it is a privilege-- for both parties.
think how good you feel when helping others-- they have given you that gift.
conversely-- asking for support for your work (not 'you'-- your work) is not asking them to help you profit, but for propagation of ideas you believe in. 
you wrote that book because you wanted it to exist. you believe there are readers out there who are you thirty years ago. asking for others to help spread the word improves the odds that somewhere some kid who needs 'ninja librarians' (needs-- not wants) will be connected with it.
to fail to support your work is to deprive that kid of what they need. 
modesty (true or false) and pride (true or false)-- two sides of the same coin, and obstacles.
but not obstacles between you and what you want; instead, between your potential reader and what they need.
ourselves: that which we are here to get the *f* over."

Thanks John, and thanks to all my friends and acquaintances, new and old, inside and outside of the publishing world, who are helping spread the word about THE NINJA LIBRARIANS.


Oh, and good news...we caught some mice!