First Week of the New Year, Cat and Weather Dramas, and Prepping for the New Book in a New Year

New Year’s Day photo, pre-cat-trauma

First Week of the New Year!

This is a photo Glenn took on New Year’s Day. He always tries to take a writer photo of me on New Year’s Day. Well, we definitely had enough sparkles to do it, and the hyacinths smelled amazing. I had moderately high goals for the first month of the new year—a daily Tai Chi practice, writing a poem a day, and submitting once a day.

Much of this was thrown into chaos, first by weather drama (power outages with wind and rainstorms and flooding, which was worse in California than here) and then by kitty drama. The new kitten started acting really strange on Thursday, shaking her head and growling. After $1000 of vet bills, we figured out she’d eaten litter and now she’s back to normal. Immediately after that, my sweet six-year-old cat Sylvia stopped eating, and it turned out she’d eaten new kitten food she was violently allergic to, and after two days at the Emergency Vet, she’s almost back to normal now. So now we are poorer and I was so stressed out—hey, when I go to the ER and get nausea meds, blood work and IV fluids, it’s actually cheaper than the cats! And it’s less stressful when it’s me! I just go to pieces when Glenn has health problems, and it turns out, the cats too. So I am genuinely exhausted emotionally. But still managed to write a few poems and send out a couple of submissions! (Tai chi, I’ll see you again this afternoon.)

So here are a few pictures of the baby kitten Charlotte home from the vet, and another pic of me on New Year’s day (more pics of little Sylvia to come next week):

Prepping for the New Book in a New Year

So, it’s January and that means it’s almost March and the Seattle AWP, and almost May and my book’s official launch! I am setting up readings and (ahem) birthday parties in May, AWP is almost all filled up with book signings and panels and of course I have to build in some time to do the bookfair.
So, what can I do at this point for the book? Given that I have a great team at BOA that does some of the publicity for me?

Well, for one, I can (and did) order the book cards I send out by hand every time I have a book come out. I think of it like a personal invite to read the book. I can send out an e-mail newsletter.  I can start thinking about booking local readings. (I already have! Stay tuned!) I bought an ad in Poets & Writers, and I even hired an outside PR person from the Pacific Northwest—Heather Brown, at Mind the Bird media, who a couple of friends had good experiences with—to help me throughout the launch of the book. Because even though I literally wrote a book on doing PR for your own book, it can be exhausting to do everything on your own, especially if you (or your husband, or family, or even pets) have health problems that suck up a lot of time and energy. I hope it’s worth it, but the best thing about it is that it’s a learning experience for me—what is the difference between doing everything yourself and having help? I interviewed a lot of PR people for the book, but it’s different actually working with people who do PR for a living on the regular. And of course, I have my PR person at BOA too. So it’s a big difference than the last five books. I’ll be interested to see how it affects sales and reviews. Maybe it won’t? Maybe it will? I hope so!

Things I could be doing: I could be writing articles to place in magazines, though I haven’t yet. I could be putting out some calls on social media to see if people want an ARC or e-galley of the book (which I have done once!) How can you be sure you’re doing enough for your book? The answer is, even with a team, you can never be sure. If you’re a workaholic and achievement oriented, it can be overwhelming. I’m hoping not to have that stress this time around. I hope that I’ll have info after this that will help me write an update to my PR for Poets book! Will Twitter still exist when I publish the next version of the book? Will all book promotion be done on a platform that doesn’t exist yet? Stay tuned!

Anyway, if you are like me and in the middle of getting ready to launch a book during a pandemic, please leave your comments, complaints, and helpful tips. It’s been some years since my last book, and it’s a totally different world!