Book Snob Review of The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, Tramping Through Houses, and PR for Poets progress
- At August 28, 2015
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
- 0
Thanks to the Book Snob blog for this new review of The Robot Scientist’s Daughter (in a paired review with The Girls of Atomic City). I had just been saying to Glenn yesterday how I was feeling anxious because there hadn’t been any new reviews of my book lately! So this helped. I’m telling you – I’m thankful for every blog review, lit mag review, and Amazon review I get, especially now at the five-month mark of the book being out.
The poetry world has been awash in vitriol this last week, so bad I actually had nightmares about it! It serves me right for being too aware of the ins and outs of the poetry world sometimes, too much Facebook and twitter, not enough books and writing.
In other news, I’ve had a pretty bad ankle sprain (due to tripping on, yes, electrical cords around my work desk) and have been hobbling through countless one-story houses with my cane, even going to far as to pre-inspect one yesterday. Hmmm, the pre-inspection had just begun when a complicating factor arose – the house’s crazy next door neighbor started yelling at and berating the inspector for taking pictures of the roof. So, um, that kind of ruled out that house for me before the pre-inspection was over. Crazy neighbors? No thanks. I was wondering if there was a reason such a nice house was so affordable. So the search continues.
On the plus side, the sprained ankle afforded me more time at my laptop, and that means some actual progress on my “PR for Poets” book to the tune of 32 pages now! It stood at 25 pages for the last few months, so I was happy to be able to go in and reformat, clean up, reorganize and write some content. A lot of the beginning of the book is just about setting poets’ expectations for what will and won’t happen when they publish a book of poetry – a bit depressing, but better to be aware and to arm yourself with the facts before you go into the process, right? And then a lot of difficult decisions about what is and isn’t worth a poet’s time and energy – I mean, everyone has to make these decisions – do you help the publisher buy an ad with your own money? Do you send out review or prize copies yourself? How many readings do you schedule for the first few months of the book coming out? Have you laid a groundwork for good publicity before your book is even accepted for publication? That sort of thing. Then I realized I was mentioning things without defining them – PR kit, pitch letter, Netgalley – and went back and inserted little callout pieces to talk about each of those things. See? Progress!
Going to hobble off now and visit yet another home today, this time in the newly-arrived rain, including a potentially Novembery-bluster tomorrow. It’s about time for some rain out here in Washington – with our drought (!!) and wildfires (!!!) – we could definitely use it. And there’s something relaxing about rain, isn’t there, something that prompts us to shrug our shoulders at yard work or errands and pick up a good book…