Spring is Springing, Small Press Expo and Some Practical Book Launch Advice

Welcome to Seattle where spring is definitely doing its thing, springing! Those are cherry and magnolia trees in the first picture at one of our local parks (and that’s me after three-and-a-half hours in an overly warm, stuffy doctor’s office downtown – head of rheumatology/immunology this time – determined to get in a little sunlight and flower time before the sun went all the way down!)

So, this weekend we have the small press book festival at Hugo House that I always love to attend, not less this year because several friends will be representing their presses and literary magazines there. See this article for a rundown on the festival and other lit events around Capital Hill this weekend. It is truly the kind of event that makes you realize you’re very lucky to be in a city that loves and supports the arts, but as Hugo House changes – as the article mentions – there’s a big question mark hanging over “where will our arts events happen in 2016?” Things are changing as Seattle and its environs get more overrun, more expensive. (Did I mention I’ve had two bids on two rather modest houses outbid on in the last month, by 25-50K?)

There was a fascinating discussion among some of my writer friends on Facebook this week about how they hated what they had to do to launch a book, book promotion and all that. I’d reproduce it for you, but I’d say the majority of the responses were something along the lines of “everyone doesn’t like it, but you do it to share the work that you’ve put a lot of time and effort into and to support the press that published you.” It was interesting to me how many poets – and I’m a little ashamed to say myself included – are perfectly confident about their writing, but when it comes to doing a little book promotion, feel somehow dirty or ashamed.

Since I am in the process right now of launching my fourth poetry book, this left me with some questions. Was I doing enough? What kinds of things should I be doing? I sent out a press release about the April 16 Seattle Book Launch and Reception, who knows if the local press will cover it or not. Glenn and I put up a few flyers for the event, too, and I’ve e-mailed local friends about it. If you’ve been reading the blog the last few months, you might have seen this post too, discussing book promotion. (PS: I’m not going to AWP this year, as I mention we should in the list, but if you are, stop by the Mayapple Press table for a fresh copy of The Robot Scientist’s Daughter!)

Anyway, some practical advice on your book launch from Kelly Davio. Here’s “Things I Wish I Had Known Before My Book Came Out,” Part I and Part II. Part II was extremely interesting to me as I’d never thought of cold-calling bookstores to ask them to stock my book. I mean, I may have asked people I’d already known at bookstores I was already familiar with, but I’ve never done it as she suggests, with a sell-sheet. Since one of the big barriers to poetry sales is not having your book on the shelves, that’s a great idea, even if it sounds like it might be tough. (Some bookstores are more friendly to adding local poets to its shelves than others. Some will do it on consignment, where I’ve typically lost money because of the cost of author copies, sigh, but maybe that’s better than nothing?)

Anyway, these kinds of posts help me think in a new way about what I should and shouldn’t be doing in the next two weeks before the Seattle book launch. Probably arrange some more readings, maybe cold call some bookstores? You do have to pace yourself a bit as you can burn out before the book has really even been out very long! Poetry book sales are usually a slower burn than fiction, so don’t fret if you don’t sell two hundred copies the first weekend or anything.

In the Middle of the First Month of “Book Launch” and Ready for a Nap: The thyroid files

So what have I been up to in the middle of the first month of the launch of The Robot Scientist’s Daughter? Well, I’ve sent out all my postcards by now, I did my first reading in the middle of a torrential storm on Bainbridge Island. Now I’m prepping for my Seattle book launch reading and party on Thursday, April 16 at Jack Straw Cultural Center – I helped Glenn put together a flyer which we still need to put up in a few places, wrote and sent out a PR release for it, and created a Facebook event for it. I also edited (along with partner Kelly Davio) a really fun manuscript for the Gailey and Davio Writers’ Services, went back and edited and reorganized my own fifth manuscript, did some tax work and…Whew! Now I need a nap!

Speaking of…Achy, tired, brain-foggy, fatigued, need to nap in the middle of the day? In my experience, it’s possible that it’s not all in your head. My thyroid meds were doubled a few months ago, but after some blood tests a couple of days ago, my TSH is still higher than it has been in years, which means more tweaking is needed, and possibly another ultrasound of my pesky thyroid nodule. On the plus side, my b12 is almost completely low-normal now, not just low, and the number is higher than it’s been in ten years, so that’s good news!

Anyway, whenever I’m having trouble sleeping – sleeping too much, or not enough enough, feel grumpy and brain-foggy all the time, it’s usually either my thyroid acting up or my lack of b12 that’s to blame. Which is good, because I’ve been exercising and eating less and otherwise attempting a healthy lifestyle, and it’s so frustrating when you’re still tired and heavier than you want to be after all that work. At least now I know why! Hopefully the little tweak in my thyroid medication will result in a more energetic me in time for the Seattle book launch!

Becoming the Villainess on the radio, and How to Pick Poetry Book Cover Art

Thanks to Jim McKeown at KWBU in Texas for this feature on Becoming the Villainess, my first book of poetry.

And a new blog post up at the Gailey and Davio Writers’ Services blog on Poetry Book Cover Art. well, if you’ve ever struggled with what makes for good and interesting cover art for a poetry book, I hope it’ll be helpful!

Thanks to all of you who have bought The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, reviewed it on Amazon and Goodreads, or talked about it on your blog. I can’t tell you how much it perks up my day when I see something related to the new book! The first month of releasing a book feels so fraught with peril, to borrow the cliche – you worry no one will like it, or no one will talk about it, or no one will buy it or come to your readings…so any little lift kind of acts as a calming agent to that time of fraughtness.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, a rainy reading, and Poetry and Science

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I hope you are enjoying some spring weather wherever you are. I always like to take today to remember to read a little Irish poetry and some Irish fairy tales. I found out recently through DNA that I am almost 70 percent Irish genetically, though neither set of my grandparents really knew much or talked much about their Irish heritage. (I may also watch The Secret of Kells, which, though set on the ancient Scottish island of Iona, depicts beautifully pieces of ancient Irish folk culture, including a Miyazaki-esque spirit-fairy-type character who can change into a white wolf, and follows the history of the famously illustrated and historically-important-to-Ireland Book of Kells, which you can view online here.) You can also support a genuinely Irish poetry press by buying a copy of Unexplained Fevers (published by New Binary Press) today!

I’m blogging elsewhere today – on Tahoma Review’s blog about Poetry and Science!

We had a lovely reading on Bainbridge on Sunday and got to see some good friends there, though we had a nasty storm that day (that made the three-hour round trip commute, complete with hydroplaning on waterlogged roadways, a bit dicey). I am thankful for my poetry community that turned out despite the deluge and it was nice to see Eagle Harbor Books, a charming Bainbridge Island bookstore. Here’s a pic from the event, with my fellow reader Carol Levin and some local poets and spouses – you may recognize some current and former Crab Creek Review and Two Sylvias editors in there!

Speaking of Two Sylvias Press, I think you should sneak a peek at April’s issue of Oprah Magazine, which features the fab local women-run press on one of its pages!

Sunday Robot Scientist’s Daughter reading on Bainbridge; new review of Unexplained Fevers; a little post-publication letdown

First, my very first reading for The Robot Scientist’s Daughter happens Sunday, March 15 at 3 PM on Bainbridge Island at charming local bookstore Eagle Harbor Books, where I’ll be reading with Carol Levin. Hope to see some of you there! Read more about it on their site here.

And I have to say thank you to The Next Best Book Club and their reviewer Lindsey for this unexpected review of Unexplained Fevers.

Another unexpected attention for Unexplained Fevers is Sundress Publications’ Best Dressed Feature (that was “Sleeping Beauty Loves the Needle) this whole last week. Here’s the newest: “Rapunzel Considers the Desert.” Thanks Sundress Publications!

So it’s very funny, when you start sending out review copies for one book, sometimes there is accidental attention to your other books it seems! As a writer of poetry, I’m always grateful for attention to my work, no matter when it arrives!

It’s interesting, but there’s sort of a letdown when your new book actually comes out—at first you’re all excited when the book arrives, you take a picture of the box of books, and you send out your e-mails and postcards, and people congratulate you—but that sense that well, maybe nothing will happen with this book, maybe everyone will hate it, starts to creep in after, say, a week. I know I have friends who call me right after their book actually makes it out—not when it’s accepted, but when it’s out into the world—to say how much they hate the book, how other people will hate it, etc—so I know it’s not just me. (Plus, Sylvia Plath killed herself the month after her book The Bell Jar was released, which is not really ever discussed, but I’m sure it contributed to her depression—like oh, the book isn’t getting the attention is deserved, etc.) So even though I’m technically just going to my first event this Sunday for The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and I’m very grateful to already have a few reviews of the book out there this early—I’m feeling a bit of discouragement, letdown, fear of failure, like oh, this is my fourth book, and I’m still struggling? Like I said, I’m only talking about this here because I feel it is a fairly common phenomenon, and you and all your friends should be ready for it, and have a little party/get-together/ice-cream-coffee-preparedness session in the works. My “official” Seattle book launch isn’t until April 16, which is still a month away, but I think it’s a good thing to have an official celebration, to invite your friends, to have some champagne and chocolate and say “Yes, I did this thing!”

None of this means I’m not extremely grateful for the good things people have said about the book so far (I really am!), it just means that sometimes our negative voices can talk over the positive ones, and we have to guard against that as writers. It’s always: when I get my book accepted, when it gets published, when it gets reviewed, well, things are going to change. And then that happens four times, and things still don’t really change. But I still have goals, I’m still working on the next manuscript, sending out my apocalypse poems: that’s what I have to focus on. Stop checking my Amazon ranks and get to work on the next thing.

Poem on Fukushima on KUOW, Squeezing in Real Life, and More Book Stuff

If you listen to “The Record” on KUOW today at noon, from 12:25 PM to 1 PM, you may hear me read a poem commemorating the fourth anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, about the sunflowers that were planted to uptake cesium from radioactively contaminated soil. If it’s any good, all the credit goes to Elizabeth Austen, who recorded and edited our segment on Fukushima and Oso.

And the podcast will be available later on in the afternoon (think 5 PM Pacific time and afterwards) at this link:

http://kuow.org/post/sunflowers-fukushima-foxglove-oso

This has been a crazy busy week, plus I was kind of knocked out by the time change (fell asleep accidentally around dinner time two days in a row) but I had to take a second to photograph some of the early cherry blossom frenzy here and to walk through a farm and pet a miniature horse who put out her little nose for me to scratch (hoping for apples?) and watch some baby goats jumping and frisking around a couple of rocks at our local farm/park. (Farrel-McWhirter Park in Redmond—I highly recommend it for both animal lovers and people with kids.) Do you ever get the feeling you’re trying to squeeze in moments of “real life” in between work, doctor’s appointments, physical therapy, errands, etc? Yeah, me neither 😉

Let’s see, I’m doing my first reading for the new book, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, this Sunday at Eagle Harbor Books on Bainbridge Island (3 PM with Carol Levin) and I’m looking forward to it—it’s a lovely bookstore and I love seeing my island-living friends out there—but I’m also strangely nervous. It’s a tough book to pick poems from, for some reason, and because the poems are a little more personal, harder to read out loud.

I wish I could tell you I was being some kind of PR wizard with the book but honestly I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I ambitiously set out to do. Maybe that is a thing for all poets—most of us have so much else going on, including our writing (!!), that we barely have time to do any promotion for those books we worked so hard to write, send out for publication, and then, after years of suffering, patience, and hard work, have published! And you sort of wish people knew about your book without you having to tell them about it, right? (This is why famous writers have PR people! It saves so much psychic draining.) That’s also why every author is so grateful when someone reviews their book on Goodreads or tweets about it or mentions it on their blog at all because it means “Hey, someone besides me cares about the book!”

I hope it’s all right to document the trials and tribulations of the book’s launch here, and I hope it’s helpful to someone. And thank you to everyone who has mentioned my little book, even if it’s just to your mom or your friend.

New blog review of The Robot Scientist’s Daughter by Lesley Wheeler and Sundress Publications Best Dressed!

Lesley Wheeler writes a bit about my newest book, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, as well as its journey to publication, and the concept of poetic difficulty, at her blog here.

Thank you to Sundress Publications for choosing a poem from my third book, Unexplained Fevers, for this week’s “Best Dressed Feature” “I Like the Quiet: Snow White”.

Yesterday we spent a beautiful afternoon over at my little brother and his wife’s rented house (where they kindly allowed us to do laundry, since our washing machine remains broken) and we took a gorgeous walk at downtown Seattle’s Seward Park, which was lovely. This was the view of Mt. Rainier from the lake there:

It’s easy to love Seattle in the sunshine, with the mountain out, and all the water shining and blue. Hyacinths, cherry blossoms, daffodils, and I even spied some early magnolia trees blossoming downtown. Seattle’s usually a moody, grey, difficult-to-love city in March, so this is quite extraordinary. I also spied two bald eagles this week.

We’ve been house-hunting as well, and I’ve observed even a lousy neighborhood can appear beautiful with shafts of sunlight hitting the puffy white and pink cherry tree branches. I’m a bit behind of all my writing obligations, but in my defense, it’s hard to concentrate with all this getting ready to buy and sell a house/appliance breakdowns/allergy testing/sunshine going on. It’s supposed to be 63 outside today…

Recording Poems for the Radio and the first week of the book launch

Yesterday I had the opportunity to go into our local radio station, KUOW, and record a couple of poems from The Robot Scientist’s Daughter for a segment that will air the KUOW show “The Record” at noon on March 11, the fourth anniversary of the disaster at Fukushima. The two poems I read were on Fukushima, including this one “A Morning of Sunflowers (for Fukushima)” I worked with the gracious current Washington State Poet Laureate Elizabeth Austen, who keeps poetry in the public eye by keeping it on the radio. I sat in “the green room” for a little bit with a professional athlete which was pretty exciting. They had a robot in the green room, too, which I took as a good sign.

Now, right before that, our brand-new (well, two-year old, so just over warranty) washing machine decided to crack one of its components and cease to work, so we were frantically gathering up laundry and such, right before we went downtown. This is the way life is: you get all excited to go record some poetry, then your large appliances turn against you. Hello to the laundromat once again, since they couldn’t get a repairman out til the middle of next week!

So, it’s the end of the first week of the book launch. I mailed out the last of the book postcards yesterday. This year I sent out about a hundred more than I did for the last book. I also sent out a book announcement e-mail and the best thing about that (besides selling books) was that it allowed old friends I hadn’t been in touch with to get back in touch, which is always a warm and fuzzy feeling. I’ve been very lucky in that I had three (!!) “official” book reviews in the first week the book came out, which is the first time that’s happened for one of my books, I think. (Here they are – reviews of The Robot Scientist’s Daughter at The Rumpus, at Poetry International, and at Escape Into Life.) I am very thankful to both the reviewers and the review outlets for this! Because I was telling a friend, I think I waited about six months for official reviews with the last three books.

So all in all, though it was a low-key book launch week (my readings for the book start on March 15 ) it was exciting, if not totally free from stress (the allergy testing’s 50 needle pokes left me bruised, sore, and tired for two days, and the washing machine breakdown thing made me think “Oh my God, I do NOT have enough towels for this to happen” and “Do I know how to hand-wash clothes in the bathtub?”) and I am very grateful to everyone who bought a book (thank you!!!) and everyone who queried about getting a review e-galley (thank you too!) Thank you to folks who’ve left reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. I am so happy some people are liking my little book!

Review of Robot Scientist’s Daughter up at Escape Into Life and Mythic Delirium featured poet, Plus Being a Human Pincushion

Thanks to Kathleen Kirk and Escape Into Life for this new review of The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, up today here: http://www.escapeintolife.com/blog/the-robot-scientists-daughter/

Thanks also to Mythic Delirium, as one of my poems, “Introduction to Your Own Personal Genome Project,” http://mythicdelirium.com/?page_id=2832, shows up as their March featured content: http://mythicdelirium.com/?p=3275

I needed this good news this morning. Yesterday I practiced being a human pincushion for science as my allergist’s ungentle nurse pushed a total of 48 needles progressively deeper into each quadrant of both arms, resulting in bruising, swelling, and difficulty typing or lifting things this morning (Note: Bleeding disorders, autoimmune problems, and needles do not go together well.) On the plus side, spending a couple of hours that way gave me a chance to read someone’s poetry MS AND watch the X-Files Season 5 episode, “Bad Blood,” about vampires (I was bleeding a lot yesterday, all up and down my arm, so I thought it was appropriate) and that episode made me remember all that was good about the X-Files. Seriously, if you haven’t seen it, even if you’re not an X-Files fan, you should rent it right now. Luke Wilson does an amazing cameo as a southern sheriff. (Dear Amazon Kindle Fire – this was not the first time I’ve watched distracting videos in an unpleasant medical setting thanks to you!) On the upside, they gave me my own room this time instead of making me wait out the two hours of tests in the public waiting room next to screaming children. And now I can go back on my allergy medicine, thankfully.

Today outside is sunshine and blue skies, our pink hyacinths have started to bloom, and Friday I go in to record some poems from the new book for the radio! The time change comes this weekend, which affords us Washingtonians a bit more time to take a walk after work and enjoy this nice weather! I have heard that the rest of the country is due to be blanketed by more snow – including relatives in Cincinnati, Tennessee, and even Georgia – so pull up a cup of hot chocolate, read a good book, and watch a classic episode of X-Files.

The Robot Scientist’s Daughter Book Launch and another review at Poetry International

The Robot Scientist’s Daughter is now officially out, the book that critics are calling “her most haunting and masterful book yet!” (OK, it was Mary McMyne at The Rumpus, but I can’t stop quoting it!)
Get your copy now from me, from Mayapple Press, from SPD, from Amazon, or, if you’re local to Seattle, from Open Books! I’m excited and still feel like I haven’t done half the things I was supposed to, but happy that it’s out in the world! (PS If any of you would like to leave Amazon reviews, I’d be extremely grateful! And thanks to the folks who have already left Goodreads reviews!)

Thanks for this, my second “official” review, up at Poetry International by Donna Vorreyer :
https://pionline.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/book-review-the-robot-scientists-daughter-by-jeannine-hall-gailey/

And, here’s an endorsement from my cat, Shakespeare, or as he is affectionately known, “Scrummy” (he looks relaxed, but he assures me he found the book riveting:)