Karla Huebner's Blog, page 9

The Accidental Pinup

Danielle Jackson's 2022 Debut romance The Accidental Pinup launches July 19th. Photographer Cassie Harris loves her job–her company Buxom Boudoir makes people look beautiful and feel empowered. But when her best friend Dana is about to launch her own lingerie line and wants Cassie to shoot and direct the national campaign, company politics and Dana’s pregnancy interfere with the result that Cassie finds herself–a proud plus-size Black woman–not behind the camera but in front of it. Cassie thinks she can handle the modeling, but she’s not sure she can work so intimately with the chosen photographer, her long-time competitor in the Chicago photography scene, Reid Montgomery!

Groupies

The 2022 Debut Groupies, by Sarah Priscus, launched July 12th and takes us to 1977 and the grungy yet glittery world of rock ‘n’ roll groupies. Faun Novak, a naïve college dropout, grabs her Polaroid and hops a Greyhound to Los Angeles, where she joins the women following a big-name band and discovers both the highs and lows of being "with the band."

Amazon Rankings and How We Watch Them

Amazon ranks each edition of a book daily, a process that partly involves how well the edition itself is selling but that also, naturally, relates to how well every other book in that category (for example paperbacks) is selling. As you might imagine, authors tend to eyeball these figures with compulsive frequency during the first few months after publication, and may take screenshots of exciting rises. But most of us, no matter how obsessive, occasionally go a day without looking.

I don't know about other authors, but I can state with some confidence that if I miss a day or two of checking my stats, that's when they will have rocketed upward, and although my screenshot will still show a nice-looking ranking, it's not going to capture that high point in the numbers (something that's only visible on a mouse-over).

Such was my experience this morning. Yea, verily, while at first it was cool to see 778,149 (which is a pretty good ranking given how many other paperbacks there are out there, including best-sellers), once I looked at the historical graph, I learned that on July 7th the paperback edition of In Search of the Magic Theater had reached 307,544! Its previous peaks have been 384,685 on June 8th and 476,918 on June 21st. I had just missed capturing an all-time high for the paperback! The Kindle edition, meanwhile, has had just one notable peak since publication, hitting 262,640 on June 20th. There must have been significant pre-orders, as the Kindle edition opened at 276,852. And indeed, if I look at "All available" rather than the shorter period this book has been out, I discover that the paperback opened at 258,661 on November 5, 2021--almost seven months before publication.

Amazon's figures do not provide numbers of copies sold by them, nor do they tell us anything about bookstore sales. For bookstore sales, there's a tool called BookScan that claims to capture BookScan 85% of all retail print book sales. I'm not too impressed with BookScan, as three weeks after the fact, it hasn't managed to show even the number of copies Barnes & Noble sold the day I did a signing at their local store. Nor does it seem to be capturing the Amazon sales that provided those high rankings. Surely we can call both Amazon and Barnes & Noble retail sellers of print books?

Yes, I'll know my sales in accurate detail once I get my first royalty statement, but publishers take a while to prepare those. I'll be getting the report of my first month's sales sometime before October.

Thoughts on BookTok

Jane Friedman, publishing guru (and I'm not saying that sarcastically because she really is, and is fabulously informative), notes on Instagram:

BookTok has helped authors sell 20 million printed books in 2021, according to BookScan. So far this year, those sales are up another 50%. NPD Books said that no other form of social media has ever had this kind of impact on sales. As a result, publishers are being influenced more than they’re doing the influencing, according to Emma Quick, senior marketing manager at Bonnier Books UK. As is often observed, BookTok is full of readers’ emotional, visceral reactions to books. Strong reactions require provocation: plot twists that make you angry enough to throw the book across the room, or endings that make you bawl your eyes out.

On the one hand, I think it's great that readers become passionate about books and want to promote then on TikTok videos. I mean, if you're an author who appeals to the BookTok demographic, that's likely to result in lots of sales even if you never once go near TikTok.

On the other hand, TikTok's demographic is heavily teen and under-thirty--a limited slice of the readership pie. What's more, even among that age group not everyone wants to read a steady diet of books that prompt sobbing and book-throwing. Even a reader who enjoys a quiet tear over a sad moment in a book may not want to weep copiously or feel buffeted by hurricane-quality winds of emotion.

And so, while I'm pleased that lots of teens and younger adults are reading and loving to discover and discuss books, I won't be so pleased if publishers decide that they need to base their acquisition strategies on what makes fifteen-year-old girls the most histrionic. We already have way too much of a tilt in US publishing toward insisting that novels begin at some exciting point and escalate from there. Again, nothing against novels that do this, and nothing against highly emotional teen readers, but the world of books and readers encompasses so much more. Just as it's good to have books that excite strong feelings, it's also good to have books that are calm, cozy, or thought-provoking. Both thinking and feeling are important, just as rest needs to balance intense activity.

As a side note, I wonder whether Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (infamous in its day for prompting numerous suicides) or the works of Dostoevsky (also known for their emotional effect) are currently inciting any BookTok videos. The Reader of Dostoevsky, 1907, by Emil Filla

At Sea

Emma Fedor's 2022 Debut novel At Sea launches July 5th. Grieving after her mother's death, Cara meets a charismatic but mysterious man who claims that as part of a secret experimental unit of the US Special Forces, he can breathe underwater. Their romance results in a child, but then Brendan and the baby disappear. Will Cara eventually be able to learn the truth and find her son?

Florida Woman

The 2022 Debut Florida Woman, by Deb Rogers, launches July 5th. Florida Woman Jamie wears cutoffs, thrives in humidity, and now, after going viral for an outrageous crime she never even meant to commit, she's a headliner. But when the chance comes for her to do community service at a wildlife refuge for rescued monkeys, it seems like just the fresh start Jamie needs. Until it’s not. Something weird is going on at Atlas. As Jamie ventures deeper into the sanctuary's offbeat world and rituals, her summer soon becomes material for a stranger Florida headline than she could ever have imagined.

Embers on the Wind

Embers on the Wind, by Lisa Williamson Rosenberg, is a 2022 Debut novel launching July 5th. In 1850, Whittaker House was a Massachusetts stop on the Underground Railroad. Two freedom seekers, Little Annie and Clementine, died in a fire there while hiding, and while Whittaker House remained standing, Little Annie and Clementine lingered, not yet free. Many years later, Whittaker House is a vacation rental that draws seekers of another kind, Black women who only appear to be free. Dominique, a single mother, comes in search of an ancestor. Michelle, Dominique’s lover, comes to heal her own traumas. Kaye, Michelle’s sister, is a seer whose visions reveal the secrets of the former safehouse--and her own.

Embers on the Wind was inspired by the author's father-in-law’s home, where a female escapee was rumored to have died. As the only adult of color who visited, Lisa Williamson Rosenberg has always wondered what the woman's spirit would think about her own presence.

Autographed Copies at Beavercreek Barnes & Noble

Dayton-area residents who missed my June book events can still get autographed copies of In Search of the Magic Theater at the Beavercreek Barnes & Noble. Here are some comments from a recent local reader:

...The story revolves around art. Which is another delightful part of the book. Through Sarah’s cello playing and Kari’s experience working in the theater, the reader gets exposed to the inner workings of a musician and a theater person. It is evident that the author has great passion and knowledge about both subjects, as well as art in general, for she slowly and gently exposes the reader to many of the nuances of the arts. It was a welcomed lesson in areas that I had very little knowledge. ...

The story line accelerates very quickly at the very end of the story to the inevitable and surprising denouement. It took turns where I didn't anticipate. By the time I got to the end of the story, I found myself attached to and involved with both characters as well as being surprised at the ending.

This novel works on many levels for the reader. The mix of the story, the knowledge, and the characters lead the reader into this world of the Magic Theater, where they find themselves in a most magical place.

It's always a pleasure to learn of readers for whom the book really resonated!

This Way Out

Tufayel Ahmed's 2022 Debut novel This Way Out tells the story of what happens when protagonist Amar makes the mistake of using a WhatsApp family group chat to announce that not only is he gay but he's marrying a white man named Joshua. He's so eager to relay his good news that it hasn't quite occurred to him that his strict Muslim Bangladeshi family might not be happy to hear it. Will his relationship with Joshua survive, and will they be able to reconcile his family to their love?

Blithedale Canyon

Blithedale Canyon, by Michael Bourne, launches June 30th from Regal House. You can order it in either paperback or a special-edition hardback. From the Regal House website:

Trent Wolfer has blown it, in every possible way, over and over and over. And now he’s blowing it again. Fresh out of rehab, he’s back in his hometown working a dead-end job at a fast food joint and cutting out on his breaks to sneak airplane bottles of vodka and gin when he looks up from his register one day to see Suze Randall, his closest friend from high school, now a radiant blonde single mother of two. Set in a small, sun-drenched Northern California town shifting from hippie haven to moneyed paradise, Blithedale Canyon asks whether a man who has spent his whole life screwing up can stop long enough to avoid destroying the woman he loves. Michael Bourne’s funny, edgy debut is a literary love story for every man who has ever wondered why he keeps smashing up the things he cares about, and for every woman who’s ever wondered just what was going on in the head of that guy she spent her twenties trying to fix.

As a former inhabitant of Mill Valley myself (Blithedale is a main road), I'm eager to read this and see the author's take on the area!