how would they promote your book if you were dead?

a fun thought experiment

Although I write a Substack that’s all about how to get better at promoting your writing on the internet, I’m frequently asked the question: what’s the alternative to promoting your writing on the internet?

In other words, Can’t this be someone else’s job?

For all the Bartlebys who would prefer not to, I’ve come up with a thought experiment for you.

What if you were dead?

How would your publisher promote your book?

This post on X caught my attention—I don’t follow Rayne, so this came up on the algorithmically determined “for you” side of my X timeline.¹

Here’s what I noticed (in this order):

1. The word “stunning” in the tweet. Simple. It stopped me in my scroll. It made me curious to know more about this book.

2. With that throbbing red moon, and those trippy eyes, the cover art grabbed me. It has a vintage look that reminds me of Sloane Crosley’s Cult Classic.

3. Introduction by Melissa Broder? I love her novels.

4. That blurb from the New Yorker: “a true underappreciated classic.”

That’s when I googled Elaine Kraf and learned she’s an American novelist who passed away in 2013. The Princess of 72nd Street, released in 1979, was her final published work, and Modern Library is reissuing it in August. Here’s the description:

Ellen has two lives. A single artist living alone on New York’s Upper West Side in the 1970s, she periodically descends into episodes of what she calls “radiances.” While under the influence of the radiance, she becomes Princess Esmeralda, and West 72nd Street becomes the kingdom over which she rules. Life as Esmeralda is a colorful, glorious, and liberating experience for Ellen, who, despite the chaos and stigma these episodes can bring, relishes the respite from the confines of the everyday. And yet those around her, particularly the men in her life, are threatened by her incarnation as Esmeralda, and by the freedom that it gives her.

In what would turn out to be her final published work, Elaine Kraf tackles mental health and female agency in this utterly original, witty, and inventive novel. Provocative at the time of its publication in 1979 and thoroughly iconoclastic, The Princess of 72nd Street is a remarkable portrait of an unforgettable woman.

Somewhere, in a conference room or on a zoom, the marketing and publicity teams met and asked themselves, “How are we going to get attention for this novel from 1979?” They discussed cover art direction. Because this is a Modern Library edition, they tossed around names for who might write the intro. They wrote down a list of names of writers working today who could blurb the book (Joshua Cohen, Olivia Gatwood, Sarah Rose Etter), they wrote down outlets they were going to seek press coverage from, and they came up with a list of people who are influential online, and in the target market for the book, to whom they sent advance copies, to generate buzz.

Rayne Fisher-Quann, who has 79,000 followers on X, and 90,000 followers on Substack², is what

Kathleen Schmidt

would call a digital surrogate. Her post reached the publisher’s target audience: me.

Here’s who I think Modern Library is marketing this book to: not baby boomers who lived through the 1970s (and who may have read this book when it was originally published!), but millennials who love Melissa Broder and Sloane Crosley novels, who want to read about a female artist in the ’70s dissociating from reality. If Modern Library knows what they’re doing, they’ll market this title to all the BookTok creators who are part of the Eve Babitz Renaissance.

If you are opposed to building a platform and an audience online, and opposed to creating content, I think the alternative is to use your social capital, and leverage connections you have with influential people who can become digital surrogates, and help share and amplify your work with their audiences.

As I recently told

Catherine Baab-Muguira

, I think of my platform as a savings account. It’s a kind of wealth. The strength of my brand and the size of my platform don’t only help me sell my own books—I can also “spend” my influence by blurbing books or by amplifying other writers’ work across the various platforms on which I’m creating content.

Another way around the resistance to investing in building your own audience is to think about it as a form of social capital you can spend in the future on helping others.

You can become someone else’s digital surrogate.

How to create better content for your own book

I know many writers bristle at the word “content” or the phrase “content creator” because they’re yucky euphemisms for “art” and “artist.” Your grief memoir is not “content.”

Here’s a simple way I’ve been thinking about content—from the POV of a creative writer and the author of five books.

Content is what I create and post on the internet that captures the attention of fans, or future fans, of my books.

My novel Self Care is not content, but this satirical post about fear of death, is content for fans of Self Care.

What most creative writers struggle with is creating content that is genuinely valuable to their audience, and not just a cringe ad.

Here’s an example of a piece of content I saw this week that I thought worked really well to promote a forthcoming book.

The multimedia artist Anna Marie Tendler has a memoir coming out in six weeks and she’s encouraging preorders. She made a Spotify playlist for the memoir (that’s content #1) and this Instagram Reel to promote the Spotify playlist (that’s content #2).

annamtendler

A post shared by @annamtendler

I was absolutely mesmerized by this video and watched it several times: the music doesn’t start playing until 16 seconds into the video! There’s something so nostalgic and satisfying, almost like a sense memory, of sliding the record from the sleeve and putting it on the turntable, reclining to listen. Anna is using digital media (Instagram) to remind us of the pleasure of the analog. Her memoir cover also has a vintage ’70s font.

Nearly Departed

Meeting Gila for the first time in 2021; photo credit: Sylvie Roskoff

Continuing right along with the cheerful death theme of this newsletter, happy pub week to my client and dear friend

Gila Pfeffer

! You may know Gila as a humor writer or on Instagram. Gila and I started working on her book proposal in October 2021, and on Tuesday her memoir Nearly Departed: Adventures in Loss, Cancer, and Other Inconveniences comes out from the Experiment.

This is a reluctantly inspirational memoir about how Gila escaped her genetic destiny and saved her own life. It’s hilarious and heart-rending. You can order it right this second from Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon. One of the working titles for this book was “Great at a Shiva” and I’m happy Gila used it for one of her chapter titles.

Happy Birthday

Here’s how I met

Jolene Handy

: she saw Self Care in the “highbrow brilliant” quadrant of New York magazine’s approval matrix and read it and started following me on Instagram. She slid into my DMs! Then she took my “how to pitch your book” class (I think it might have been the first time I ever taught it, during the pandemic?) and said she wanted to write a newsletter called Baking with Ghosts, about baking recipes from the past in her Chicago apartment that still had the original cutting board from the 1920s.

“Why don’t you call it Time Travel Kitchen?” I said. The rest is history. Jolene has become one of the most beloved food and culture writers on Substack and she’s a three-time “featured publication.” 🏆 Yesterday was her 70th birthday! (I know how Jolene spent her birthday but I won’t spoil it—her newsletter on this topic is forthcoming. 🌭)

As

Maddie Burton

put it, an orange check on Substack is the perfect milestone birthday present, and if you’re a fan of Jolene’s charms but not yet a paid subscriber, carpe diem and become a paying subscriber for only $35/year!

1. In January 2023, X added a “for you” timeline that imitates TikTok’s powerful discovery engine.

2. I’m sure that the size of Rayne’s platform helped her sell her essay collection to Knopf in August 2023.