Hobble Creek Review, Geek Girl Aftermath, and Thoughts on Launching A Book

First of all, let me thank Collin Kelly and Justin Evans, because this latest, pop-culture-focused issue of Hobble Creek Review – in which my poem “Teen Girl Vampires” appears – is a great one. There’s a lot of sharp humor in the issue, and it’s just plain enjoyable.

I’m suffering from a little post Geek-Girl-Con fallout – a bad cough that keeps waking me up at night (the string of cold, foggy days here hasn’t been helping) and a serious need to catch up on sleep before I can catch up on work. I genuinely still get thrilled meeting people excited about Star Wars and Buffy and video games and such.  Then yesterday I saw Sarah Michelle Gellar – several years younger than I am – on the cover of “More Magazine” – which used to be reserved for the over-40 set – and realized hey, if she’s on the cover of More, I really am getting older! I can’t party like a 22-year-old anymore! But, on the other hand, if people are looking to Buffy as a model of graceful aging, I guess that’s kind of cool.

I was talking to a friend of mine, who has a book coming out next year, and we were talking about book tours, and I was telling her a little bit about how launching a book is really a never-ending endeavor – I remember for my first book, I really pushed traveling all over to readings, and even the second year, I was still visiting universities across the country (and I told her the book sold better in its second year than its first – probably not uncommon for poetry books, when reviews trickle in after eight months and word of mouth is usually slow burning rather than wildfire-like.) When you’re launching a not-your-first book, you start looking at strategy – like, I might want to visit Florida, because a surprising amount of copies of my books are down there, and I might want to visit old-hometowns, like Cincinnati or Knoxville, because I’m more likely to have a friendly crowd in those areas. I definitely want to send review copies of my book to places that reviewed one of my first three books. Those kinds of things. It doesn’t feel as scary, because you know what you’re getting into, but these days, we have to be savvy about promoting across more kinds of platforms – reddit and tumblr are still new to me, for instance, and think about things like paper versus e-publishing rights when we look at our contracts. It’s really a different kind of thing than it was back in spring of 2006, when poet blogs were still sort of a new phenomenon, Borders was still going strong, and there was really no such thing as reading a book on your mobile phone. What do you guys think is the most important thing for an author publishing a book to think about these days? Put your thoughts in the comments!