Listen, we all have those apps we spend way too much time looking at on our phones. I left Facebook behind a while ago, Twitter became the toxic cesspool that it is now, I never got the knack of Instagram, and TikTok is scarily good at sucking you in so I avoid it as much as possible. Threads is my social media fixation of choice. I’m pretty good there, that or its algorithm just helps you find people on the Venn diagram whose attention-seeking quirks overlap with yours. Anyway, I’ve fostered a social circle of nihilistic weirdos from across the arts and queer spectrums. For some reason, I feel some semblance of safety in expressing the inner workings of my brain there. I make stupid observations of happenings in the areas of the writing world from which I’m mostly detached; why does the drama always seem to start in the romance sector? I crack jokes about political happenings. I recount the funnier parts of the day. But mostly, I mix vulnerability with flippancy in a cocktail of self-deprecation. If I have a complaint about my writing career, you can usually find it wrapped in a joke there. Most people see it for what it is and commiserate, just leave a heart, or in some cases unfollow/block me. But then there is the occasional person who can see through the artifice or they just missed the joke. They are the ones who try to offer advice and in some rare cases, it was advice you didn’t know you needed.
As framing, I posted a Thread yesterday that just said, Trying to sell books on vibes alone was probably not the best marketing strategy but here I am. To me, it was just a throwaway line birthed from thinking about how the Democrats have had to switch from all vibes to actual messaging in this latest election. To be fair my marketing isn’t all vibes but that doesn’t mean I’ve come remotely close to figuring out what the hell I’m doing with it. I’m unhappy with it but I don’t even know where to start with making it better and quite honestly to me it feels like an unclimbable mountain. For the most part, I’ve fallen back on the strategy of maybe if people like me they might be interested in my book. To bring it back to the people offering advice you didn’t know you needed, there was a response to that Thread that kind of shook me. Essentially it was, What’s the one thing you want people to know about your book? It sounds like a no-duh, taught on the first day of Marketing 101 kind of thing…but I don’t actually have an answer for it.
I have multiple pitches for the book. There’s the simple plot breakdown of what it’s about. Then there’s my pitch about what it’s really about. And finally, there’s the pitch about what the book means to me. In those pitches, there is not one single line about what I want people to know about the book.
Those pitches look like this. Plot breakdown: Dawnbreaker is the story of a young street artist trying to find her long lost brother in a bioluminescent world where imagination is the one true currency and anyone with enough cunning can instantly turn their thoughts into reality. That’s like six or seven things compressed into one sentence. I don’t know if it’s super intriguing but it does curry additional questions from people a book shows and I have sold a few copies on its back.
The pitch on what it’s really about goes a little deeper into theme. I don’t really have prepared patter for this one but I try to convey that it is a story of light vs dark and of chaos vs order. It’s about how extremes on either end are not necessarily good things. It’s about learning to accept your limitations, it’s also about learning to live with them, and if you’re lucky learning to turn them into assets. It’s also about the perils of trying to do things on your own. I get a pretty good response on this as well, it’s just a lot harder to convey in marketing. It also doesn’t answer the question of what’s the one thing I want people to know about it.
Finally, there’s the pitch about what the book means to me. This is the one I would share at a book talk if I ever found the nerve to give one. I don’t know if I could without breaking down. For me, the book in question represents a complete paradigm shift in the course of my life. I was completely locked into a way of living that was making me miserable. The book itself was a meditation on my own anxiety, depression, and identity. The process of writing the book was the therapy I needed to make me realize I needed therapy. The micro themes living below the macro ones made me confront some issues I had been ignoring for the majority of my life. It made me realize that the darkness I thought was going to make me a good writer wasn’t the asset I thought it was. It was literally ripping me apart.
The what’s the one thing question is a hard one to answer because I want people to know everything. But I guess if I were to distill it all down I would just say, Dawnbreaker is a story of hope.