Category: business

News From My Publisher

My book has been live with a pre-order button on Amazon less than a week. On Friday, my publisher sent me this screenshot of my Amazon sales rankings, out of all the books published to the site.

To say I was gobsmacked would be an understatement. I don’t know how the algorithms on Amazon work. But my publisher indicated that these numbers mean the books are getting A LOT of attention from somewhere. Pre-orders aren’t tracked by Amazon until the book is released. And the rankings change hourly. But for a debut author with a small press to be able to be discovered enough to generate these numbers? Bizarre.

I am hoping, hoping, hoping to get back into my work-in-progress tomorrow. I have a lot of angst to work out, and I think this new book is the place to do it. Thanks, as always, for reading!

Good Evening!

I didn’t post yesterday because we were traveling by car most of the day.

Just got the notification that Hurricane Baby is up for pre-order on Barnes & Noble! You can click on the Hurricane Baby: Stories page on the left-hand side of the blog and then click on the preorder button provided, or you can go to this link (paperback is the only format available there right now):

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hurricane-baby-julie-liddell-whitehead/1145144169?ean=9781956440959

Pre-orders are really important to get buzz going early for the book, so feel free to take advantage of these connections! Thank you for reading!

Housekeeping Details

Just heard from my publisher–my full book cover is final, and I have a QR code I can slap on all my marketing materials so people can order just by pointing their phones at it! I just ordered VistaPrint bookmarks that I plan to hand out at events.

I have one event coming up–Hurricane Baby the play is having a staged reading coming up. I’ve got everything ready to go to it all lined up–hotel room, ride, etc. I’m looking forward to that. More details will be available closer to time. But I’m looking forward to it.

My new writing has been on hold lately. We have had a lot going on in my family and in my work life, and I’ve honestly been too exhausted to concentrate on my work-in-progress. I hope to be able to change that soon.

And my publisher has said pre-orders are already coming in. So that made me feel good!

Whew. Will ride already. Wish me well with further info and events to come soon! See code below to order Hurricane Baby: Stories for delivery August 2024!

FOR SALE!

Good afternoon! This past Friday night, I got the note from Madville Publishing that my book, Hurricane Baby: Stories, is now LIVE FOR PRE-ORDERS!

Go to the left-hand menu and click on the book’s title to see the brand-new webpage for my book, and you will see a button to click to pre-order my book through Madville Publishing’s site with delivery scheduled for August 20, 2024. As the book goes live in other places like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org, I will add those buttons for you to click on as well. If you want to support your local bookshop as well, you can go and request that they order/stock it.

This page will be updated as I do events, readings, signings, and appearances. If you would like me to come do a reading or speak at your event, school, library, or festival, use the contact form to let me know, and I will see what I can work out!

This past weekend, I went to the annual meeting of the Mississippi Philological Association, which was held by the Mississippi School of Math and Science on the campus of Mississippi University for Women, where I studied for my MFA. I read the first story in the collection, “Still Waters”, and was terrified the whole time. I’ve never read anything as intense as that story out loud in public before this, and it showed. My mouth was so dry I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish it. It was well-received by the largely academic crowd, which made me feel good.

But this event, where I know people are going to be spending their hard-earned money on a book I wrote, is momentous. My life is not going to be the same again after this year. But I think that’s good. Keep growing, keep writing, keep learning. That’s my takeaway. Onward and upward!

Single-Digit Fidget

My publishing company keeps saying we go to print six months before publication.

You know what?

That’s this week on February 20!

So I am nervously anticipating that I get to put up pre-order links and my new website page this week as well!

I have been reading about all the emotional whiplash that happens to new authors with an eye to moderating my expectations and all that. I like being prepared. Because I don’t want this whole wonderful accomplishment to throw me off emotionally. Because my stability is worth a lot to me.

But it’s up to me to manage that–so I am trying to keep my expectations in line with the fact that I’m a new author, I don’t have a big pre-made audience to sell to, and I have to understand all that I can control is my reaction to events. I can’t control what others do or say. I can’t control what kind of reviews i get or anything like that. I can just put it out and do what I can to move the needle–and leave the rest up to God.

Like I said when I prayed that day to give my pledge to the church. It’s all up to him. I’m just to give him the glory that is his. I gave the book my best shot for success revising and sending it out. I plan to keep doing that with events and publicity where I can get them. I’m going to start to introduce the book the first weekend of March at the Mississippi Philological Association at my alma mater, the Mississippi University for Women.

I’ll be reading what I can of Still Waters, the first story in the collection, at a panel of other creative writers. I’ll attend other panels while I’m there, probably just the creative writing ones. It’s kind of a full-circle moment for me–when I was in my last year of grad school at Mississippi State University, I read a paper I had written on James Thurber, the great American comic writer, at the MPA Conference that year–also at the W. So I will mention that before I start reading.

(My parents were at that conference since it was only a few miles away from their house. My daddy later asked me was my paper supposed to be funny? I said yes sir, it was. He was scared the audience was laughing at me in a mean way so he decided to check.)

So that’s what I’m preparing for this week. Wish me well!

Success?

So last week I told you about my pitch meeting with a publisher at the HOMEGROWN festival. I told you I looked up his email address and sent him a thank-you note for listening to my pitch and taking my materials and being so encouraging. I told you I didn’t know what was going to happen as a result of the meeting, but I felt good about it.

So Monday I got an email back from the gentleman, and he said for when it’s finished for me to send it through the regular submission channel but be sure to specify in my query letter that I had pitched it to him and what event I had pitched at! So that’s a connection I would not have made had I not stepped out and just did the thing. I’d never done an in-person pitch before, but I was calm and confident in my story, and now I feel so much further ahead of the game than I did for Hurricane Baby!

So now I am starting a list of who this book is going to go to first once it’s finished, beta read, edited, and revised. One is my current publishing company, another is the group that published the original novella, another is this company, another is a contest where Hurricane Baby was a semi-finalist, and another is one where I got the very kind personalized rejection. That’s five for the first shot of it. I hope to start sending it out in January 2025.

Just goes to show where you have to put in the work, be persistent, and believe in yourself. I am learning more and more about this process and what all effort goes into a finished book. I don’t have all the answers, certainly. But I am committed to share my journey with you all and be as transparent as possible about how things are working (or not working) for me. Makes me feel less alone in the journey and makes me feel good that i can provide information that I wish I had known when I was starting out.

Happy writing!

HOMEGROWN: A Writer’s Exchange

I went to a new literary festival this weekend with my friend Mary Jane in–of all places–Kiln, Mississippi. Jami Attenberg was there. Lee Durkee was there. Margaret McMullen was there. And Mary Miller and Ellen Ann Fentress, my MFA thesis supervisors. and I met people I only knew by reputation. So that was super cool!

It was structured a lot like the Mississippi Book Festival–there were panels on various topics–cookbooks, memoir, short stories, novels, publishing, the writing life, etc., etc. A really cool feature was that there were three presses (one of them was University Press of Mississippi) soliciting book pitch meetings directly from authors!

I only found out about this event on Wednesday of last week, and the trip came together really quickly. So I sent in a request to have a pitch meeting with Looking for Home. I really wasn’t expecting to get in to one because of how late i was signing up–but I did! Pelican Publishing picked me up and wanted to hear my story! I didn’t find out until late Friday afternoon, so I didn’t have long to prepare. But prepare I did!

I took my computer and printed out a writing sample of my book, my CV, and a very generic query letter in the hotel’s business center after we got there Friday night. So when I got to the pitch meeting, he asked about the book, and I handed him the letter and talked about the structure and the story. Then I asked if I could read my writing sample aloud, and he said that would be great. So I did, then i handed him my CV with all my publications on it. Then he asked me about myself, hobbies, etc. (That was the hardest part; trying to make myself sound interesting has never been my strong suit.)

I don’t know if I’ll ever hear from him again; I did pull up his email and sent him a thank-you note for the meeting, and I think that was a good idea. I also had another good idea–I printed out copies of my sell-sheet for Hurricane Baby and handed them out strategically–to the guy who organized the event so I could maybe get included in next year’s event, to people who ran publications, to people who do author interviews, etc. And almost everyone I wound up meeting the first time. I handed out about half of what I printed, so that was cool, too.

Anyway. I will be doing a lot of this in the coming months and after publication, I think, so I’m looking forward to that! It felt so good to finally be able to say, “Hey, I have a book coming out, too!” So a good time was had by all.

Hope everyone has a really good week! Thanks for reading!

COVER REVEAL!

Finally able to get back to my computer after some illness and traveling and able to reveal . . . the cover for Hurricane Baby: Stories, due out in August 2024!

I want to thank Jacqui Davis for her design work here in realizing exactly what I’ve always had in mind for the cover of this work. Appreciate the whole team at Madville Publishing for taking on this project and awaiting the next proof copy with bated breath! Much love to all!

Line-Edits!

I got line-edits last week! So I spent yesterday working on that project. Only 335 punctuation corrections! (Ugh.) I did notice a trend–a lot of em-dashes had been typed incorrectly, and I LOVE using em-dashes, especially in dialogue. And I love writing dialogue. So that was that.

Only content question the editor had was about Leilani, James’ second wife, having such an unusual name. I did not know this–it’s Hawai’ian for “royal child”, which was perfect for the spoiled baby of the family! But that was only a happy accident–I certainly didn’t think that up while I was writing, and it’s doubtful that Leilani’s parents would have either. So I dreamed up a new explanation for why her parents named her that–that you will have to buy the book to see :).

Now it goes for formatting into InDesign, then another read to make sure nothing horrifying mechanical-wise goes through once it’s converted to a PDF. Then I read proof versions, then it goes back into design for final formatting of the text.

I am trying so hard to be calm and professional in my interactions with them, but I can’t help for my joy to come out! It’s really getting real! In eight months, my book will be out on bookstore shelves, Amazon, Barnes & Noble! A big goal for my life since I was a very young thing! I have been writing stories for FOREVER. Treasure stories cribbed from the Bobbsey twins’ adventures when I was a kid, teen romances when I was a teenager, short stories in my first Master’s program–I’ve had stories in my life longer than almost anything except my parents. And I’m so close to having a book!

It boggles my mind how far I’ve come.

Onward!