YOU: a Thoroughly Modern Bunny Boiler

I haven’t been able to get YOU by Caroline Kepnes out of my head since I read it several months ago. For starters, Kepnes’ writing is excellent, an intoxicating mix of humor, horror, and heart. The book’s narrator, Joe Goldberg, is the most relatable psychopath since Tom Ripley. Like Ripley, Joe is surrounded by privilege that has been denied him, and hearing him bitterly opine on those around him is a sincere, pop-culture laced pleasure. His rivals for the affections of Beck (the titular “you” to whom the book is addressed) are so delightfully loathsome that it’s easy to sympathize with Joe’s hatred of them. From pretty-boy trust funder Benji, to cruel, insecure snob Peach, to the duplicitous, amoral Dr. Nicky—we like Joe better than anyone else in the book. Even though we know we shouldn’t.

Kepnes pulls off a number of difficult feats in the book, from making us sympathize with a psychopath, to using the notoriously difficult second person to stunning effect. YOU is compulsively readable. But as the book settled in further, I realized there was something darker and more compelling to this story for me than most thrillers, even ones as finely written as YOU.   

The thing is, unlike Ripley or Sabastian Faulks’ creepy outsider Englby (another favorite of mine) Joe isn’t just captivating, he’s familiar. Luckily for me,I’ve never had a stalker or anything close to it (and before someone gets all #notallmen on me, I know that stalking and its many gradations are anomalies). Most men that I’ve known in my life have respected the lives, choices, and autonomy of the women around them. But any women who has put in her time in the dating pool has, at very least, had a few dates who made her a little…nervous. Even if the guy who wouldn’t stop calling, or the one who googled and memorized every last detail of your online life before your first date, or the one who desperately wanted you to tell him you loved him on the third date, wasn’t ever going to turn into a murderous psychopath. Probably.

Like any good horror story, YOU is thrilling because it lets us follow a narrative to its extreme and unlikely conclusion. Much like Glen Close’s lovesick, obsessive (probably mentally ill) character, Alex, in Fatal Attraction, we can see why Joe is charming and attractive at first. I mean, he’s a cute guy who works in an indie book store. I spent my entire 20s in New York hoping to be asked out in an indie bookstore! But unlike Fatal Attraction, which is from the POV of the stalked and handily makes a caricature of Alex, in YOU we get to see things from Joe’s perspective, and to horrify ourselves by empathizing with him.

The book adds an additional layer of creepy familiarity by taking on another omnipresent fear: that the constant stream of minutiae we put on social media might be turned against us—not by sophisticated North Korean hackers, but just by a regular (if intelligent) Joe. If someone wants to comb through all that we’ve made available of ourselves online, for most of us, they’d have plenty to work with. Imagine what could be discovered about you, how you could be manipulated, if someone spent enough time researching you online? There’s a dark thrill to exploring all of this within the safe confines of a novel. Maybe there’s even a little comfort for the reader in feeling that she can now count Joe as the devil she knows, can reassure herself that if she ever saw anything like him in real life, she’d run the hell away before he could so much as friend her on Facebook.  

How to Have the Best 2015 Possible

I originally tried to write a post about making more meaningful resolutions. About planning and giving yourself targets and actionable goals to get from where you are now to where you want to be. You see, I did this for myself in 2014 and it seemed miraculous. I got a book deal, I found love, I got promoted. It was a banner year. As I look forward to 2015, I find myself frantically trying to decode how I managed to have all this good fortune all at once.

It’s true I worked hard for these things, and it definitely helped to set intentions and hold myself accountable. I did some goal-setting with a friend of mine and we had regular check-ins. Giving structure to abstract goals like romantic and artistic achievement can be life-changing. And yet, to pretend I was in control of all the things that happened to me in the last twelve months is laughable. I controlled what I could, the rest was fate, God, the universe, whichever your poison.

2014 was a good year, but the ones that come before? Not so much. 2013 was okay. Nothing great happened, nothing terrible happened. But 2012 and 2011? Those were truly awful years, dominated by an all-consuming family crisis and its accompanying emotional pitfalls, poor decisions, and paralysis.

I choose to believe that I did nothing in this life or any former one to bring about those awful years. Sometimes fate is just a real bitch. Martha Beck, one of my all-time favorite wisdom givers, calls this phenomenon a rumble strip, and suggests that much can be learned from them.

It seems that my own rumble strip produced a happier life on the other side. And perhaps this has as much to do with why 2014 was so good as anything else. If I didn’t engineer my bad years, then I suppose I didn’t completely engineer the good one either. Maybe I just had it coming.  

One of the things I learned from my bad patch is how much you can’t  control: others people’s choices, your family’s health and safety, the vagaries of courts and other bureaucracies. Many things happen that are deeply, profoundly unfair. The upside of being faced with such cosmic indifference, however, is that harnessing the things you can control—your own choices, whom you spend your time with, what you eat, how much you write—suddenly seems wildly simple. That’s the happiness you can plan for, that you can take steps toward.  

I like the esteemed Gretchen Rubin (master planner of happiness) on the subject. For her, it’s all about good habits:

“It took me a long time to realize that what I thought of as “resolutions” could almost always be characterized as “habits.” Most often, when people want to make some kind of change in the New Year, they want to master some kind of habit.”

Here are a few of hers.

I love a can-do attitude, but we’d all like to get the universe on our side. For this, let’s turn to my girl Martha Beck for a little practical magic.

She suggests using adjectives to describe your goals rather than the regular noun + verb formula, which can focus you on “imagined situations” rather than “Imagined experiences”.  

”By using adjectives, you can avoid this trap by focusing all your efforts on the quality of the experience you want to create. This process is harder than “normal” goal setting—it requires some serious soul-searching and perhaps a good thesaurus—but it does pay off.”

Incidentally, one of my goals this year is to get back to blogging. Happy 2015.  I’ll be here all year, folks.

Marketing Inspiration from the Patron Saint of Self-Publishing

Let me begin by telling you about the late, great E. Lynn Harris. I worked with him back when I was a baby publicist at Doubleday, and I remember him for many reasons. He was kind and funny, full of good gossip and southern charm. He was generous in the extreme and used his good fortune to care for a vast entourage of friends and family. He also sent us the best thank-you gifts eve

r after publicity campaigns. His work itself was delightful, veering from his poignant, heartbreaking memoir of growing up gay in the South to his tales of the raucous and raunchy secret lives of Atlanta’s elite; I’m still not convinced thatThe Real Housewives of Atlanta did not spring fully formed from his brain.

E. Lynn had an extraordinary backstory, the kind of up-by-your-bootstraps tale that politicians like to trot out to show what makes our country special. He was born in 1955 and grew up poor in Mississippi and Arkansas before going on to graduate from the University of Arkansas, where he became the first male cheerleader and the first black yearbook editor. He went on to work as a computer salesman for IBM before finally quitting to pursue his writing passion. When he couldn’t find a publisher for his first book, Invisible Life,he self-published it. Mind you, this was 1991—none of the sleek self-publishing print-on-demand models that have taken over the marketplace existed; no one even bought books online yet. But E. Lynn knew there was an audience for his work, and he knew just where to find it. E. Lynn drove around to Atlanta beauty salons, natural hubs of chitchat and connection (this was pre-social-media), and told the ladies about his book. Via this deeply authentic word-of-mouth marketing, E. Lynn sold thousands of copies out of the trunk of his car (literally) and was eventually picked up by Doubleday, who published him until his sudden death in 2009. Every single one of his books became a New York Times bestseller.

I miss E. Lynn. I still think about him, and I bring him up frequently when I speak in conferences or classes. I think of E. Lynn as the patron saint of self-publishing, and as one of the best examples of grassroots book marketing the world has ever known.

Keep his story in mind as you head into what is for many authors the most difficult part of the process: marketing your book. Getting attention for a book has never been easy, and it’s tempting to think that it’s harder than ever now, given the deluge of new titles hitting shelves every week. But never have there been so many tools with which to market your work as an author. You, my friend, need not pack your trunk full of copies of your novels. (Though I still think beauty salons are a brilliant place to market.) So, what do you do?

Don’t rely on traditional media. If you have a best friend who happens to be a book reviewer or radio producer, sure, give them a ring. But regardless of who is publishing your book, opportunities for media coverage have diminished drastically while the number of titles going on sale every week has exploded. It’s especially difficult for fiction, as the meager book-review section is often the only opportunity for coverage. And most reviewers are still pretty reticent to review self-published books, not because they’re snobs about it (though some probably are) but because they’re so inundated with books that they have to draw the line somewhere.

Embrace social media. Now is the moment to ditch your technophobia and harness the power of social networks. Social media can help you every step of the way in your self-publishing journey, from raising the money to fund your book project with sites like Kickstarter and Inkshares, to finding a community of beta readers on Book Country, to helping you market your book to readers through blogging platforms, Twitter, Goodreads, and more. This landscape can feel daunting, but it’s also incredibly empowering for authors to have these tools at their disposal. Just as you no longer need to wait by the phone for a publisher to give you a green light to publish your book, you no longer need the approval of the traditional media to let people know about it.

Start early. Don’t wait until your book is coming out to start promoting it. You need to be finding and attracting your audience long before the book goes on sale. Connections, whether online or off, take time to build, and these are going to be the centerpiece of your marketing efforts. Books take time to create (though self-publishing is much faster than traditional publishing), so while you’re waiting for the book to make its way through the editorial and production processes, start thinking about how you’re going to sell that puppy. Using some combination of the above-mentioned social media tools can be a very effective strategy, but it takes a sustained effort, ideally one that starts six months to a year before the book goes on sale.    

Build relationships. Marketing your work is not about telling people to buy your book. It’s about building relationships: relationships with bookstores, with other writers, with online communities, with librarians, and with any other potential readers and champions of your work. Always be on the lookout for how you can find, contribute to, and nurture these communities. Don’t neglect the part of the process that involves being a loyal reader, customer, and friend.

Know your audience. Maybe you’re writing on a subject that easily lends itself to social media content: vegetable gardening or World War II fighter jets. But maybe it’s not so clear what to blog or tweet about. This is a problem for many novelists in particular. Therefore, I encourage you not to look at your book’s subject matter but rather at its audience. What are they interested in? What can you give them besides your book? This is where finding and connecting with authors of similar books (something in-house folks do frequently for blurbs and endorsements) can be key. Get to know your audience to best learn how to serve them.

 If approached the right way, marketing your book can be rewarding and evenfun. So go forth and find your readers, and may the legend of E. Lynn Harris light your way.