Jeannine Hall Gailey's Blog, page 63

A New Review at Savvy Verse and Wit for The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and the Top Five Ways to Replicate AWP in Your Own Hometown

Thanks to Serena and Savvy Verse and Wit for this kind new review of The Robot Scientist’s Daughter at Savvy Verse and Wit!

AWP starts Wednesday. I won’t be at this year’s AWP in Minnesota (though I plan to be at next year’s in LA) so I made a list for all of us who aren’t going to AWP to simulate the experiences!

Top Five Ways To Replicate AWP in Your Own Hometown

Invite all your writer friends into a very small, smoky bar or coffee shop with no parking and stage a poetry reading and, for bonus points, either a spontaneous fistfight or dance party. Then, get them all into a hotel elevator, preferably slow, for awkward conversation.
Arrange to hang out in a local crowded hotel lobby and see if you spot any writers you know. Ask at least two people who might vaguely resemble authors to sign books for you.
Find your local university’s bookstore or the closest magazine stand that carries literary magazines, flipping through as many as possible in a very short amount of time. Carry home as many as you can, and then stack them by your computer where they will gather dust. At the bookstore, buy yourself a shot glass, magnet, or postcard with a witty literary saying, and you can call it swag! Even if you spend, say, a hundred dollars on literary magazines, that’s still way cheaper than AWP!
Wear a name tag around your house, to the mall, or just to your daily errands all day but keep it turned around so no one knows who you really are. Carry a very heavy tote bag with you (bonus points if you carry one from a previous year’s AWP!)
Go three days without any sleep, eating only handfuls of candy and drinking only the kind of alcohol you like the least, along with plenty of cheap coffee. Go to your local book store or library late at night (if possible) and ask everyone there about their thoughts on the state of publishing (if no local libraries or book stores, try closing time at the grocery store.) Maybe try to slip someone your latest manuscript.

Seriously though, if you’re going to AWP, have a great time, and  stop by Mayapple Press’s table to get a copy of my new book! If you’re not, well, let’s cheer each other up by posting pretend gossip from AWP!

2015 Big Poetry Giveaway!

 Happy National Poetry Month! That means it’s time for the Big Poetry Giveaway!

This year, I’m giving away a copy of my fourth book, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, all about growing up in “America’s Secret City,” Oak Ridge, Tennessee. If you like robots, stories about atomic history, poems based on radioactive elements, then you’ll enjoy this book! (See a sample poem here.) In a review in The Rumpus, Mary McMyne called it “her most haunting and masterful book yet!”

The second book is a copy of local poet and translator Don Mee Choi’s The Morning News is Exciting from Action Books. She’s a fierce writer and this book in particular showcases her abilities with both lyric and prose poetry forms.

Both winners will also receive an assortment of literary journals from my collection!

Please enter your name and contact information in the comments section below. If you are new to my web page, please click my About link above. You have until April 30 to leave a comment. I will announce the winners sometime at the start of May.

Thanks for taking part in The 2015 Big Poetry Giveaway! If you want to learn more about it, click here!

Interview with Marie Gauthier, Director of Sales & Marketing for Tupelo Press, and PR for Poets

It’s April, National Poetry Month, it’s almost AWP (I hope you guys who are going are going to post all the exciting stories and pictures!) so it’s time to think about poetry. I’m going to feature some interviews with poets this month, starting with this one!

I’m very excited today to post this interview with Marie Gauthier, terrific poet, author of Hunger All Inside and the Director of Sales and Marketing for Tupelo Press. She also runs The Collected Poets reading series. I am so grateful she was willing to share some of her expertise about ways you can help your press sell your book of poetry, ways to connect with readers, and how the book industry is changing. I know I for one struggle (especially now that I’m thirty days into my new book’s official debut) with what is helpful, what is annoying, and new ways to reach people! As you may know from reading this blog, I’m very interested in how we poets can effectively promote not just our own poetry, but poetry in general. Happy National Poetry Month!

1. As the Director of Sales and Marketing for Tupelo Press, what kind of PR would you say worked the best for poetry book sales? Review copies, PR kits, postcards, e-mails? I know Tupelo has also created “Study Guides” for its books, among other innovative ideas…

MG: The idea is to make it as easy as possible for people to support you and buy your book. For a straight-up sales bump, nothing beats a mention on the internet — via social media, or a well-designed e-mail — something easily shared, with a cover image and link to purchase.

At Tupelo, we’ve redoubled our efforts to work with our authors on the Reader’s Companions (RCs). Available as free PDFs on the Tupelo website, they’re written by the authors themselves, and then edited with just as much care as the books we publish. The RCs are very useful for attracting course adoptions, or poet-in-the-school programs, as well as the general reader who’s simply interested in a deeper engagement.

Review copies are still really important. Reviews can be long in coming, but attention builds on itself, one review leads to another as more readers find your work. While we’re judicious and realistic, we still send as many review copies as we can.

You have to take the long view. Poetry sales and prose sales are different animals. A poetry book doesn’t “age” on the bookstore (virtual or actual) shelf at the same accelerated pace as a prose book.

2. What’s the one thing that you think authors can do to help their publishers boost their books sales? And what’s the one thing they should avoid?

MG: Maintain a web site. Link to your publisher. Simple things that make it easy for potential readers to find and buy your book. Also, when you think about giving readings, consider asking friends or family to host a salon, or book party. Sometimes people can be intimidated by the idea of a poetry reading, but will attend something less formal and more their idea of fun. Less book, more party. Make a mini-book tour of it if you can, traveling from home to home, party to party.

Avoid spending all your review copy capital by giving away free copies to family and friends! Give them a cut rate if you like, but allow them to acknowledge the hard work you’ve put into your art by paying you, or your publisher, for it.

3. How different was it for you to try to do PR for your own book compared to doing PR for the books at Tupelo Press?

MG: Oh, it’s so much more difficult to promote your own work than it is to promote someone else’s. All the angst and insecurity is your own. Doing PR requires a sense of proportion and a sense of humor. For yourself, exponentially so.

4. As the PR and publishing businesses are changing (social media, distribution changes, Amazon, etc…) how are you changing what you do for poetry books in particular?

MG: Tupelo is different from most small presses in that we have commission sales reps who make sales calls on independent bookstores all across the country. In addition to distributing our books via SPD, Ingram, and Baker & Taylor, we actively self-distribute, and manage our relationship with Amazon directly. We’ve taken a very hands-on approach to handling sales, and while it’s been a positive experience, it continues to be a challenge.

5. Okay, here’s the real question…can you talk a little about how hard you think it is to sell a book of poetry, and what poets and publishers can do to make it a little easier?

MG: It is hard to sell a book of poetry. At full price. To strangers. And relations! You can’t take poor sales to heart. But all things being equal (quality of the work, etc.), I’ve noted that the poets whose books sell regularly tend to be active members of some sort of poetry community. Translation: poets who take joy in all aspects of poetry, who are interested in other poets and other poems beyond their own, who seek out ways to be involved. As in most things in life, you should be giving as much, if not more, than you receive. Which is to say, sales are a natural progression of your own engagement with others. For example, someone who spends a portion of her time writing reviews of poetry books is more likely to find her own book reviewed. It’s not about networking, but about having a personal stake in the poetry community.

Tulips, Bookfairs, and Things to Boost Your Immune System/Confidence

Sometimes you have to purposefully do things to inject your life with joy, hope, and confidence.

Since last week was a meeting with the head of rheumatology/immunology at UW, and this week is the (much feared, long awaited) replacement of my scary root-touching temporary filling with a real filling by my new dentist (sans novocaine but with lasers this time), plus I received a record number of sometimes kind, sometimes blank and bland rejections, I thought to myself: this might be a good time to grab ahold of some joyful and confidence-building moments.

So I took myself on Sunday to The Richard Hugo House where they were having the APRIL Small Press Bookfair. It was wonderful to see and talk to so many people accomplishing things in our little community – people who have started their own presses and literary journals, like Kelly Davio, Kelli Russell Agodon, and Annette-Spaulding Convy in the picture at the Two Sylvias table above. I mean, you can complain and lament about the literary world, or you can do something positive, and it is such a confidence booster for me to be around women who choose to really go for it in the literary world. Did I mention Kelly Davio’s new venture, The Tahoma Literary Review, will be at AWP next week? And that Kelli and Annette’s Two Sylvias Press just got a mention in Oprah Magazine’s April issue? I mean, I feel so humbled and yet I feel like I can do more when I’m around them. And Seattle’s literary community is pretty great, full of genuinely sweet people I like to hang out with – it’s good to remind myself of that. I came home with new books, literary magazines, and other inspiring items.

On Monday, Glenn and I decided to take off from work, taxes, real estate worries, doctors, and dentist appointments to go to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival – sometimes we try to take the whole weekend and stay overnight, we love it so much up there (and this visit I was thinking – what about buying a house in La Conner or Mt. Vernon? So much cheaper than Seattle, beautiful surroundings, and genuinely small-town friendly people…) but this time we just snuck in a day trip. We found to our delight, besides blooming tulips, cherry blossoms, rhododendrons and lilacs (!!) that there were hundreds of loudly honking migrating snow geese, a few dozen trumpeter swans, and several bald eagles and herons during our trip. Pictures do not convey the way this place fills up your eyes, nose, ears with such splendid stuff. When I lived in California, land of year-round flowers, I missed Skagit’s Tulip Festival. Quaint shops and galleries, little restaurants, and wonderful parks surround this area, and I feel we’re always discovering something new when we visit.

Anyway, after a frank talk with the UW guy about my autoimmune stuff, he said something that stuck with me about doing the things we can to boost our immune system – not just negative advice, like “avoiding stress,” (which is impossible anyway, right?) but positive things to do, like taking probiotics or actively seeking out things that light up our joy, awe, and gratefulness sensors, which apparently can help our systems out (I mean, and along with also taking helpful things like steroids when symptoms act up, but still, this holistic stuff really hit home.)

Spending time with friends that inspire you, reading books that move you, spending time in nature, and lighting up your brain with beauty and awe – I’m realizing at 41 that our lives are not eternal, and these are the things I should prioritize. Instead of worrying over a rejection, listen to a friend tell you their new idea; instead of (as in my case) worrying about some health problems that are probably never going to go away, go out and do what you can with the stuff you have that still works.

An update: this morning, I woke up to this kind review/feature of The Robot Scientist’s Daughter on Tweetspeak Poetry. “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter is a remarkable, cohesive collection, built upon the same theme. It is a story of a unique childhood, and an American childhood. It is also the story of nature and technology, and the bargain we make between the two, often without fully understanding what we’re doing.” An unexpected gift! Thank you, Tweetspeak Poetry!

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.

You can listen in live at noon Pacific at this link:

http://radiobookmark.com/listener-interactive/webplayer/#/fullscreen/station/2YfA5Lv3HhzSR28

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.