Tag: Hurricane Baby

Pontotoc County Library

(Picture above courtesy of Mary Jane Williams)

So my big event last week was going up to north Mississippi to Pontotoc and doing a reading, talk, and Q&A with almost thirty ladies that came out. I passed out my bookmarks and hope a few of them buy it. It was a very nice library, with books and seating and computer desks as well as a nice meeting room. The Garden Club arranged a lunch for the group with three delicious soups, cornbread muffins, and a tray of assorted cookies. So that was lovely.

I had typed notes to guide my talk into my note app on my phone, and that worked really well to keep me on track and keep me moving. Only a few of the ladies had already read it, and the library’s copy was checked out when I asked if I could take a picture of it. So that was fine. I talked about its publishing journey, I read part of the second story, and I opened the floor for questions. Mostly people wanted to ask about either Hurricane Katrina or how I wound up being published. So those were fine to talk about. I took up the whole hour, so I think it was a successful talk. My friend MJ took pictures that I need to get out of my phone and into my folder.

I was kind of stressed about it. All my other appearances had other authors involved, and this was really my first solo event. But I prepared well and think that paid off. We drove right back after it, trying to beat the snow home. But we did!

Thanks to all of you who read and support my website. I’m trying to be as candid as possible in writing these pieces, and I hope I’m succeeding. Seeing all of you reading the site makes me feel supported in this crazy journey called the writing life! Thanks again!

Happy Surprise

We get together and exchange gifts with my husband’s mother, his sister, her husband, and their sons every Christmas Day. This year I was opening a small present from my sister-in-law’s family and saw that it looked like a Christmas ornament, a porcelain star. I pulled it out of the package and turned it over.

This was the inscription:

“The year I was published. Julie Whitehead 2024.”

I was so stunned. I never knew there was even such a thing in the world as a personalized commemorative ornament like that. I went and gave my sister-in-law a hug and told her I loved it.

And they are not bookish people. But they understood what Hurricane Baby meant to me and that was enough. (Picture above courtesy of Bob Whitehead.)

Hidden Costs for Authors

Some recent conversations have got me thinking. Most people do not understand the economics of a literary career. I’m going to talk about that for a bit.

First, let’s talk about the costs of shopping a book. Many debut authors get an in into the book world by being selected as the winner of a manuscript contest. Many presses hold these once or twice a year, where you send in a submission and your work is judged anonymously. But often there’s a catch–an entry fee. I entered many contests with Hurricane Baby and racked up a considerable amount of money since fees were typically $20 a pop. The press that bought Hurricane Baby was free to send to, as were many others.I could have made a principled decision to not participate in paid contests, but I knew that it could limit my options.

I got a traditionally published contract through a royalty-paying publisher. I did not get an advance against royalties and this house offered generous royalties. What I am having to keep in mind with my contract is that I don’t get any royalties until the cost to produce my books has been made. It’s not uncommon for that to be the case with a small press. University presses and larger publishers rarely make that stipulation. So I could sell a good many books without seeing any royalties (my percentage of the book’s price) at all.

Once the book came out in August, I started promoting it. I did not do paid promotions, like ads, etc. None of my media appearances cost me anything. Likewise, I never had to pay a fee to appear anywhere, although I have heard of authors being charged booth fees or table fees to appear at a festival. But I resolved not to do that. But with traveling, expenses can pile up–gas, lodging, food. My husband has said he’s not sure we can afford for me to get another book published. 🙂 But it is a consideration I have to keep in mind, as do many authors in the tier I’m publishing in.

Another fee I have decided to forgo is buying my own books at the wholesale price and selling them myself at library and other events. That route brings with it tax implications that I’m not prepared to handle. So I always ask if there’s going to be a bookseller at the event, If there isn’t, I just have to hope people there will remember me long enough to buy the book afterwards. I’ve also held a library event where guests came book-equipped and I signed them.

One expense I did go for was setting up an account with Vistaprint and buying promotional mailings for my events. My publisher had a social media person who designed the graphics for me, and I just downloaded it and printed postcards that I then mailed out for different events. Vistaprint helped design a bookmark that I’ve been able to hand out all over town, and Canva is another free resource to design your own graphics.

As you can see, I am currently operating a non-profitable outfit. But each sale brings with it a chance to improve my track record, which I can then use for the next deal. Hope springs eternal.

ANNOUNCEMENT!

Last week, I was nominated for my first-ever literary prize!

The Pushcart Prize is one of the older literary prizes in America, and it’s reserved for small presses, publishers, magazines, and journals. Nominations can be short stories, essays, creative nonfiction, or poetry. Each nominating entity can make up to six nominations.

And Madville Publishing decided to nominate “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” from Hurricane Baby: Stories as one of their nominations. This particular short story follows Tommy Hebert of Metairie, Louisiana throughout the day after Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coasts. Tommy had spent the day before and part of the night out on his airboat rescuing people and moving them to higher and drier ground as a volunteer–his trade was fixing cars. He gets up the next day and gets an alert for someone who needs help in Mandeville. So he texts his buddy, who drives an ambulance for a Metairie hospital, and they go and meet up on their boats at Fountainebleu State Park. Then they’re taken with some other men with their saws to the rescue site.

Under the broken-down house are a young woman and her baby boy buried under the rubble of roof. They uncover them and take the baby Avery to the hospital, but Amy Thompson, the young woman, has had her legs crushed under a beam the men can’t move. The EMT gives her a shot to settle her down, then says that there’s nothing else to be done. Afterwards, Tommy and his buddy go eat, but something inside Tommy wants more. He winds up picking up a sixpack of beer for his buddy as a gift for after he helps clean Tommy’s place but alone in his house waiting on him to show back up, he starts drinking them himself to drown out the girl’s screams in his ears.

So I am just pleased s punch that my publisher saw fit to enter me into this contest, along with fellow Madville poets and authors. No idea when prizes are awarded, but it an honor to be nominated, and I don’t take that lightly.

Madville’s 2025 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Life and Times of an Indie Author

So on Tuesday, I wrote my contact at the bookstore I went to yesterday and asked if he had my books in stock. He said no. I thought “OK. They’re stuck in shipping again.”

On Wednesday, he wrote and asked if I was bringing books, a common arrangement for independent authors. I said no. So what finally came out as we talked is that he thought I was bringing them, and I thought he was ordering them. Oopsie.

But he had a workaround–could I pick up stock from another store and bring them? He would work it out with the store to pay them for the books, and I would just deliver them. So I gave him the contact for the store we had here in town. I didn’t know how many they might have, but something was better than nothing at all.

Soon he messaged me back with the done deal. I brought fifteen books to the signing. We sold eight, the bookstore kept two for their stock, and the bookstore here got five books back. I didn’t think I would sell fifteen because I’m not really well known where I went, but I did come close!

It was really a great bookstore, too–a pair of bookstore dogs, a variety of beverages, lots of books, and very welcoming staff. They made me and Bob feel at home. So he enjoyed himself as well.

Two people I know came–my MFA mate Allison, and my lifelong friend, Lorie, who lives in a small town south of where I signed. We’ve talked a lot over Facebook over the years, but it had been a very long time since I’d seen her. To inscribe the name of my lifetime friend in a book that I wrote was a very cool moment.

Lesson: Always be clear on the details! And have an alternate plan in your back pocket if you’re not!

Happy reading, everyone!

Nuts and Bolts

(I’m writing today because I’ll be at Book Mart and Cafe in Starkville, MS for much of the day tomorrow. Wish me well!)

I’ve spent the past few days doing some nuts-and-bolts work for my writing. I’ve called four local libraries to find out how to send them information about Hurricane Baby: Stories for library adoption, consideration for their book clubs, or scheduling an author talk in the new year.

I also went through NPR’s local podcast page to see if there were any book podcasts that looked interesting. I called five of those NPR affiliates and left messages; if I don’t hear anything within a week, I’ll call again and request emails for the decision makers. Being persistent is something I’m good at.

Last night and today I’ve been updating my website with new events, links, and videos for my readers’ perusal. I want to keep the content fresh and accessible. I checked all of my links to make sure they weren’t broken and led to the correct information. Just trying to stay ahead of any problems anyone might have accessing my materials.

Yep. Unglamorous, humdrum, and ordinary tasks. But I’ll never know what sales I may get that I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t kept up with it. Such is the life of a 21st century writer.

Hope everyone is having a good weekend!

Louisiana Book Festival 2024

So us Madvillians went down to Baton Rouge, Louisiana this weekend for this event. It’s much like the Mississippi one, with panels, booksellers, food trucks, etc. We stayed at the hotel designated for the festival because we didn’t know what the parking situation would be, so we rode a shuttle service they had set up.

On the shuttle, we met a very pleasant man named Victor Dixen who spoke English with a French accent. He was dressed out in 17th century clothing with a tricorn hat and was also an author doing a panel–he said he writes vampire novels set in French history. He asked Bob to take some pictures of him on the steps of the capitol building, and we decided after we went and got me registered, we’d go to his panel since it was in the same room as mine.

It was a horror/dark fantasy panel, with Victor, another author that finished two incomplete novels left by George Romero, and two ladies, one who wrote a novel from the point-of-view of the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and another that constructed a bestiary of magical creatures. We couldn’t have picked a better one as far as Bob was concerned. He thoroughly enjoyed it. I also saw Ellen Ann Fentress, my thesis director, and introduced her to Bob.

Our panel was me plus three other authors published by Madville: Steve Yates, who I work with at my job; RJ Lee, an author from Oxford, and added in was Rod Davis from San Antonio. We had a very few people at our panel, but we plugged along and had a cool conversation about craft, etc. Very rewarding. And all the people who attended bought all four of our books, and Rod decided to buy books from us, the three Mississippi writers, which I thought was kind of him. We also signed a t-shirt for a lady collecting signatures as a gift for her daughter. So that was a warm, fuzzy feeling, too.

Next up is Starkville, Mississippi at the Book Mart and Cafe’s holiday open house event, the place where earlier, they didn’t receive my books in time. So I am looking forward to that next Sunday with a slate of other authors. And I hope to collaborate with this bookseller to have library events in Starkville and Louisville next year. So I’ve got a lot cooking for the new year already!

Check in next week and see how Starkville goes!

After the Debut

Hurricane Baby: Stories has been out for about two months now. So I thought I’d post a few things I’ve noticed going on in my head and my life since the debut, actually after I signed the deal in the first place.

A book deal will not fix you.

If you are looking for something to ease the doubt about your abilities, fill the God-shaped hole in your soul, or validate that you have a role to play in God’s plan for the universe, a book deal is not that thing.

Signing a book contract does feel really good for a while. But it will not quiet the voices in your head that say you’re a poser, a dilettante, a pretender. Someone you know will get a better deal. You may not be able to dive into another work right away. Someone you know will sell more than you do. And all of those things will combine to make you feel like an imposter again and you won’t understand why that is.

If selling the book to a publisher is hard, selling a book to the reading public is way harder.

You can schedule a signing, and it seems like everyone you know will message you telling why they can’t make it. The books may not arrive in time. You may not get invited to all the cool kids’ books conferences, and if you do, you may sell one book at that event. You may go weeks with no sales. And all the grinding, strategizing, networking, and peppy social media posts you do may do nothing to move the needle on sales at all. Selling books is hard, and no one told us or trained us in doing any of it.

Releasing your work out in the world is terrifying.

A few weeks after I got the news about selling the book, I was seized by terror. Surely something bad was about to happen to take the joy this achievement brought into my life. The first time I read aloud from the book at a conference, my voice shook so bad I didn’t know if I could finish.

When I found out it was open for pre-orders. I was giddy for two weeks, then realized–people I know are going to read this book. People I don’t know will read it. What if I get a bad review? What if someone comes up to me someday and says how much they hated it?

Don’t let your mind think about all that. It doesn’t take you anywhere nice.

And remember, other people will not care as much as you do. Surround yourself with writing friends who get it, but large swaths of people you know and consider friends will not remember to pre-order your book, or call you on release day, or leave a review on Amazon. All those people who have been living rent-free in your head all this time that you were going to prove something to? Pfft. They don’t care.

And that’s all right.

Why?

Because to me, letting people inside my head and my heart is a payoff in a league all its own. Watching someone I don’t know come up to me asking that I sign their book, where maybe they read an article or just heard the book mentioned in passing or picked it up because it had a cool cover, is a thrill right up there with the feeling I had when I held each of my daughters when they were first born. I made this. I did it. No other feeling quite like it.

Lull

So now I am already looking ahead to see where I can schedule events in the new year. I have one library event scheduled in early January and applications in to be in several large book events (HOMEGROWN, the Oxford Conference for the Book, and the Southern Literary Festival).

Other places I’ll be contacting are libraries in my county, some civics groups, and possibly some business groups. I’m trying to think outside the box a bit. The only thing that makes me hesitate in contacting these groups is that I don’t know if there will be an expectation for me to bring books to sell. I’ve avoided that because I do not have the requisite tax paperwork filled out to be able to do that. But I won’t know unless I ask! So we will see how that works out.

Otherwise, the writing is going really well. I am maybe 40-50 pages away from finishing this draft of Looking For Home, then I’ll work through another draft after the new year. I’m trying to decide when to let readers see it. I am thinking that since I already know some areas where I’m going add more material, I need to wait until I finish them. That’s probably what I’m going to do.

I was asked in a podcast the other day (here) how being a debut author felt right now. I said that it was like my regular life, but shinier. There’s a deep satisfaction in having set my mind to do this and then doing it, against all odds, in my circumstances as an older author selling a collection of stories (usually a hard sell in the book world), as an author no one had ever heard of. But I did it by the grace of God. And that’s something special.

Mississippi Library Association 2024, Natchez, MS

Hello! This week’s book event took me to Natchez MS for the Mississippi Library Association meeting. We arrived Wednesday afternoon because when we made the reservations, we weren’t sure when the panel was. Turns out it was at 3 p.m. the next afternoon. I went with my hype girl MJ, and we had the best time exploring all the shops Thursday morning. Then after lunch, we made our was to the convention center and did a little networking around with the librarians and vendors at the event.

Our panel was called “Diverse Southern Voices in Southern Literature”, and we all three certainly had diverse perspectives and approaches to our work, so it wasn’t a misnomer. We each talked about our books and asked ech other questions, then opened it to the floor. We had a decent crowd–maybe 10-15 people in the room. The signing part fell through, so that was sad. But no matter–onward we must go!

Fridy me and MJ just toured a couple of houses and ate some fabulous meals. MJ loves all things books and literature so she made the best travel companion for this. We drove back yesterday morning.

All in all, I think the event was worth going to, and I handed out my bookmarks for Hurricane Baby out all over town. And I actually added about a thousand words to the work-in-progress as well. A great trip all around!