Would You Like to Buy a Book?

It's awkward to try to sell your own book. But you have to do it. That's what everyone - EVERYONE - says. "You're the book's best advocate." "Don't let anyone else do it for you." "You only have one shot and then it's done." So of course you try to get out there and contact people and push your book. In a polite, non-salesmany way. Still, you feel like an asshole sometimes. Or I do anyway. You have to send out emails to blogs, and readings, and festivals, and stuff like that. Would you care to review my book? Would you care to have me grace your festival? You've never heard of me because the book isn't out yet, but would you like to feature me? Luckily you're not supposed to contact book editors or bookstores or magazine editors. I mean, not really, anyway. Because that can come off as TOO pushy, tacky perhaps. So my lovely and amazing publicist does that. Still, sometimes even that is hard. You go back and forth between not wanting to "sell" your book and wanting to push it on every poor soul you pass on the street. You want to contact ever editor on the face of the earth. You want to send them balloons, a cake, a diamond ring, whatever it takes to get them to pay attention to you. You want to stand in the street with a cardboard sign around your neck, or become one of those twirling dervishes on street corners who try to get you to go into Radio Shack or Verizon. You will do anything to give your book a chance at success. Yes, it's like having a baby and wanting it to thrive. And as with a baby, survival depends largely on you. So anyway, do you want to buy a book?

The new book cover

This is the new cover for my novel, which will be published by Random House on April 14. The book follows Lacey Brennan, a 30-something woman forced to redefine love, family and career after her young marriage falters. It takes place over five years, and she goes through a lot, but the story has a happy ending, which I wrote the summer before last while living in a sublet apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Every day I sat at this dark wooden dining table in a straight backed wooden dining chair and wrote with the air conditioning on full blast and music on in the background, four stories up from the ground, and I didn't talk to anyone and I didn't leave the apartment (except to get lunch) until 6 pm, when I'd go to yoga around the corner. It was a strange time because I was missing Los Angeles, and when I did leave to get lunch or take a walk, I'd walk around with my Ipod on, listening to songs about L.A. and missing it, but sort of enjoying the missing. I wore that Ipod everywhere. I didn't feel I was really present in New York. I felt like a voyeur, but not in a bad way. The whole experience helped my writing because I was in my own zone -- it was something like being on my own writers' retreat in New York City. I was living alone and not really socializing and I'd been doing that all summer, just holing up and writing, because almost no one knew I was back in New York and I didn't really tell anyone.

The day I wrote the ending, I'd been writing all day, and I had this concept for the ending that had been building in my mind, so even though I wasn't done with the novel, I decided to try to write the ending scene. So I began, and I wrote the ending paragraph in this sort of dream state, the kind of state you're lucky to get into and always want to get into when you're writing, when the words flow like they should, and then I sat back and I read it again and again and I edited it again and again and when I was satisfied I printed it out and I read it and I thought, Holy Shit, I just wrote the ending of my novel. And, it works. It's a good ending for the book. It felt momentous, and it changed everything to have an ending that I was so pleased with. After that I felt like I could write the rest, like I could fill in the blanks, like I could do it, so I could get to that ending.