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This week, Kelly and JJ explain what happens after you get published, including print formats, the life cycle of a book, and publicity and promotion. Plus, a NaNoWriMo pep talk!

Show Notes

• A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing: Remainders by J. A. Konrath
• What Are Remainders? by Rachelle Gardner
• Self-Promo and Marketing Materials That Work by Erin Bowman
• Do You Have to Say “Yes” to Everything? Sherlocks v. Watsons by Stacey Lee and Stephanie Garber
• Making the Most of Social Media Networks as a Writer by Erin Bowman
• Exciting New York Times Bestseller List Changes Mean Your Favorite New YA Books Are About To Get More Attention at Bustle
• The Times it is a-changing, part deus by Michael Bourret

We’ve written quite a few posts on the topics of promotion, self-promotion, and social media here at PubCrawl, so browse at your convenience!

TL;DL Version

• There are different print formats: hardcover, trade paperback, and mass market.
• Books can get remaindered, which means that the publisher is selling off the remaining stock of a title at a loss to make room at their warehouses for new titles. This does not necessarily mean your book is going out of print.
• The best way to promote books is to make personal connections, i.e. DON’T (solely) BE A SHILL FOR YOUR OWN WORK.
• The New York Times bestseller list is…complicated.

Creative Endeavors

Both Kelly and JJ are doing NaNoWriMo this year! Add us as writing buddies and keep us accountable! We are bookishchick and sjaejones, respectively.

Some NaNoWriMo tips

JJ won NaNoWriMo 13, and then went on to sell that novel, so she feels she’s got a leg to stand on. Some tips and links:

• What should you write about? Anything you want, but if you’re stuck for plot, retelling something can help!
• Pick a story with a small element of “wish fulfillment”. No judgement! Writing from a place of subconscious desire really helps you with word count.
• The Big Idea: How to Turn an Idea into a Book (a post I wrote about finding what to write about)
• More posts on Ideas on PubCrawl!

Books Discussed/What We’re Reading

• Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
• Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo (on audio)
• The Rose Society by Marie Lu
• Carry On by Rainbow Rowell
• The Weight of Feathers by Anna-Marie McLemore
• The Burning Sky and The Perilous Sea by Sherry Thomas
• The works of Courtney Milan
• The Raider by Jude Deveraux
• For My Lady’s Heart, Shadowheart, and The Shadow and the Star by Laura Kinsale
• Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase
• Again, Georgette Heyer!
• The works of Sarah MacLean (the series JJ keeps calling Fallen Angels but is actually called Rules of Scoundrels)

Off-Menu Recommendations

• Secret Garden, Enchanted Forest, and Lost Ocean by Johanna Basford (grown-up coloring books!)
• Dear Bitches, Smart Authors podcast
• Girls Next Door webcomic by Pika-la-Cynique
• And as per usual, EVERYTHING IS STILL HAMILTON. Both Kelly and JJ are loving “Right Hand Man” at the moment.

At the New York Times’ Room for Debate, some of my thoughts on literary prizes. (And on only recently discovering Rabindranath Tagore.)

For Tin House’s site, I write about finding solace for the slow pace of my own novel in the writing of Donna Tartt and my friend Alexander Chee.

“Search is a deep human yearning, an ancient trope in the recorded history of human life.” Please get to know Ellen Ullman’s novelistic and critical brilliance (which I discuss at length at Salon) if you haven’t yet.

“The model I saw was that a writer was someone who sat at the table writing.” At B&N Review, I talk with writer, bartender, and NYT Mag drink columnist Rosie Schaap about her new book Drinking With Men.

Broken Twitter plugin, y’all. If you’re used to reading my tweets here, you’ll have to go over there until I figure out what’s going on.

I’ve been spending more time at my Tumblr recently. Over the years it’s come to feel like a better place for bloggy stuff that doesn’t fit on Twitter or warrant a longer post here.

“I was making a film about a local author when I met Harry Crews. He was not my subject; he was my subject’s inspiration. ‘You oughta put a camera on this guy,’ the local author urged.” How Gary Hawkins ended up making a film about Harry Crews.

I wrote about Mary McCarthy’s dissertation-worthy The Group for Bookforum’s summer Money issue. Print only, for now at least. Please let her Paris Review interview (with a young Elisabeth Sifton!) whet your appetite.

My friend Philip Connors’ excellent Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout is out in paperback. Our Paris Review interview, which spilled over onto this site, is included.

At Bookslut, Elizabeth Bachner wonders “whether, on average, people are lonelier in real life than in novels.”

I spoke with the Nervous Breakdown’s Brad Listi for an hour last month about writing, blogging, day jobs, personal stuff, and why I’m not reviewing nowadays. You can listen at Other People Podcast.

I’m interested in James Wood’s writings on religion, including his novel, The Book Against God, which I read recently. Here he is on Santorum’s attitudes toward the environment. (See also.)

Edward St. Aubyn, whose social comedy is “more reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell or Nancy Mitford than of anyone writing today,” appears Upstairs at the Square this Wednesday.

“Once the Virgin Mary was released into the world, the world took her and ran in different directions.” Jessa Crispin ponders religious icons.

Revisiting the problem of overdosing on beloved writers, or, in Matthew Lickona’s case, filmmakers.

“I think if somebody has to make an artistic work, he will finish it no matter what. It has nothing to do with the money, with the time.” — Marjane Satrapi

“American writers alive today are expected to work as if Gertrude Stein never existed. Gertrude Stein, in her time, had that same problem.” (Via. See also.)

Ted Hughes once wrote a letter to his sister about Sylvia Plath’s “good fortune” in selling “a long rather bad poem to The Atlantic Monthly, which is one of the Mags in America.”

I strongly disagree with the idea that “the Christian faith [has] been in full cultural retreat since the 1960s,” but still recommend Robert Fay’s essay about the dearth of Catholic novels after the translation of the Latin Mass.

What Middletown Read tracks borrowing records of Muncie Public Library patrons from 1891 to 1902 and shows how library use is not a lonely act but “part of the complex story of the social nature of reading.”

Exciting: Poet and Silver Jews singer/songwriter/mastermind David Berman has a blog, Menthol Mountains, where he’s pondering “the phony gulp,” hooked-up verse, and other things. (Thanks, 5redpandas.)

“[U]nhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.” — Jeanette Winterson (Thanks, J.)

Ernest Hemingway wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald “a cutting letter about [Tender is the Night], accusing him of cheating” by fictionalizing Gerald and Sara Murphy. I’m rereading the fascinating 1962 profile of the couple who inspired Fitzgerald’s flawed masterpiece. (Via.)

“What kind of a man wants to put the 10,000 most important books online by 2002 and make them available for free?” Late ’90s Wired article on Project Gutenberg founder Michael S. Hart, who died this week at age 64.