You publish a book. You get a marketing plan (or not) from your publisher. Now it's your turn to get out there. You do it all: school visits, blog tours, interviews for the hometown paper, drive-by signings.
Yay, me!
Your publisher definitely appreciates your willingness to do the work of getting out there in front of potential readers but honestly, it doesn't affect the bottom line much. All of those things are lots of fun and many are personally satisfying but the amount of legwork involved rarely results in corresponding sales.
But why?
Because you are one person and unless you happen to have thousands of friends willing to buy your book - like tens of thousands - your efforts won't pay off the way you hope.
That sucks.
Yes, it does.
Maybe my book is no good.
Wrong - your book IS good. Your book is great. But what sells books is beyond your control. It's word-of-mouth. It's placement on a list. It's a celebrity bringing a copy of your book to the Academy Awards. I learned this firsthand this weekend when AOL happened to pick up a blog post that discussed my book, ALL ABOUT VEE, and placed it on its front page for about six hours. The post at Lemondrop was based on that awesome article Leanne Italie wrote and was itself amazing, with some tremendous comments from readers about weight issues, books, and my main character, Veronica May.
That alone was fantastic press and made me feel wonderful but AOL added a headline on its page with my book's cover next to it: "Plus Size Book Stirs Up Debate." This got people clicking over to the Lemondrop post, got people talking about the issue, got people clicking through to my website and also clicking through to Amazon. I couldn't buy this publicity!
More than anything, though, was that the post and the AOL headline encouraged people to discuss an issue that is very important to me, important to my book, important to a lot of readers out there. It happens to be timely (even though the book came out over a year ago!) considering the healthcare debate, the Fat Acceptance movement, the HAES movement, and the many new television shows like Dance Your Ass Off and More to Love. It's part of the zeitgeist, I guess, but it's not anything I could have created myself.
I just knew that if people were talking about weight issues and understood where Vee and I were coming from, they would want to know more. But I couldn't prove it until it happened.
Showing posts with label HAES. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HAES. Show all posts
Monday, August 31, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
Random or not....a personal tale of body image
By far, one of the most frequent questions I get from readers is "Why did you write ALL ABOUT VEE?" The answer I tell them is my standard how-I-got-the-idea anecdote: Not long after moving to LA, I saw a heavy young woman waiting to cross the street in Beverly Hills near all the talent and literary agencies and it occurred to me that she could be an actor on her way to an appointment and that made me wonder what it would be like to be larger in a city that values skinny above skill. And since I'm all about fish-out-of-water stories, I took that character and moved her from Arizona to LA just to freak her out and see what she'd do.
Kind of like me.
In truth, Veronica - or Vee - is nothing like me. I have none of the confidence or self-esteem that she has regarding her weight or her talent. She has a very deep well of support from her friends and family that she can go to when she needs a boost. None of that is present in my life nor has it ever been.
One of the reasons I wrote that book is that I have always had a problem with my weight. I have always thought of myself as a Fat Girl. In Connecticut. In Boston. In New York City. And especially in LA. It doesn't matter what the mirror reflects or what the numbers on the scale add up to. The number is never small enough. The size on my jeans is never small enough. I am never small enough.
On the internet, I troll the Fatosphere, a collection of blogs by men and women who espouse Fat Acceptance (FA) and Health at Every Size (HAES). I love these blogs! They're insightful and truthful and I find myself nodding in agreement whenever I read them. I heartily endorse the practices they proscribe. For others, though, not for me.
Why? Am I being hypocritical thinking like this?
Well...here's a bigger light to shine on the inner workings of Leigh's mind: I also regularly visit a blog called Every Woman Has an Eating Disorder, run by Dr. Stacey, a clinical psychologist in New York City. I don't lurk there - I post. Often. Because I am a woman with an ED. Anorexia if you haven't figured it out. And btw, thanks for not mentioning it. :)
FA - what Rebecca Rabinowitz and other experts promote - is Fat Acceptance. Rebecca read ALL ABOUT VEE recently and blogged about it. (See this link for the very interesting blog thread which answered many of my questions.) While VEE had a lot of great things going for it, FA was not one of them. This boggled my mind: I had a character who was big and who loved herself for being big and had friends and a boyfriend and was popular and talented and wasn't that promoting FA?
Well, no. Because Vee lost weight - not much but enough to negate the theme that it's okay to be large. I thought that's what I was saying in the book. By not having her diet or smoke or get lap band surgery, I assumed I was promoting FA and HAES. But Vee does lose weight when she takes up yoga.
In an earlier draft of the book, Vee's friend Ginny and Vee's love interest Malcolm react very negatively to her losing weight. Ginny thinks she's rejecting her and Malcolm just wants her to be exactly as she was forever and ever. Alas, those scenes were "trimmed" (hah!) from the book so the voices of readers who might have wondered if Vee losing weight was a cop-out were silenced. Perhaps if those characters and scenes had stayed, Rebecca Rabinowitz might have given me higher marks!
I will probably always be this way about myself and my weight. It's deeply ingrained in me, it's who I am and always have been. It infects all that I do and say and write about. But I won't stop trying to get better. And in the meantime, at least my characters have the courage I don't.
Kind of like me.
In truth, Veronica - or Vee - is nothing like me. I have none of the confidence or self-esteem that she has regarding her weight or her talent. She has a very deep well of support from her friends and family that she can go to when she needs a boost. None of that is present in my life nor has it ever been.
One of the reasons I wrote that book is that I have always had a problem with my weight. I have always thought of myself as a Fat Girl. In Connecticut. In Boston. In New York City. And especially in LA. It doesn't matter what the mirror reflects or what the numbers on the scale add up to. The number is never small enough. The size on my jeans is never small enough. I am never small enough.
On the internet, I troll the Fatosphere, a collection of blogs by men and women who espouse Fat Acceptance (FA) and Health at Every Size (HAES). I love these blogs! They're insightful and truthful and I find myself nodding in agreement whenever I read them. I heartily endorse the practices they proscribe. For others, though, not for me.
Why? Am I being hypocritical thinking like this?
Well...here's a bigger light to shine on the inner workings of Leigh's mind: I also regularly visit a blog called Every Woman Has an Eating Disorder, run by Dr. Stacey, a clinical psychologist in New York City. I don't lurk there - I post. Often. Because I am a woman with an ED. Anorexia if you haven't figured it out. And btw, thanks for not mentioning it. :)
FA - what Rebecca Rabinowitz and other experts promote - is Fat Acceptance. Rebecca read ALL ABOUT VEE recently and blogged about it. (See this link for the very interesting blog thread which answered many of my questions.) While VEE had a lot of great things going for it, FA was not one of them. This boggled my mind: I had a character who was big and who loved herself for being big and had friends and a boyfriend and was popular and talented and wasn't that promoting FA?
Well, no. Because Vee lost weight - not much but enough to negate the theme that it's okay to be large. I thought that's what I was saying in the book. By not having her diet or smoke or get lap band surgery, I assumed I was promoting FA and HAES. But Vee does lose weight when she takes up yoga.
In an earlier draft of the book, Vee's friend Ginny and Vee's love interest Malcolm react very negatively to her losing weight. Ginny thinks she's rejecting her and Malcolm just wants her to be exactly as she was forever and ever. Alas, those scenes were "trimmed" (hah!) from the book so the voices of readers who might have wondered if Vee losing weight was a cop-out were silenced. Perhaps if those characters and scenes had stayed, Rebecca Rabinowitz might have given me higher marks!
I will probably always be this way about myself and my weight. It's deeply ingrained in me, it's who I am and always have been. It infects all that I do and say and write about. But I won't stop trying to get better. And in the meantime, at least my characters have the courage I don't.
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