5 Tips for Publishing a Book Without Losing Your Goddamn Mind

From someone who's been on both sides of the desk.

My fearless fucklings! Since I’m traveling for a couple more weeks, today’s post comes to you from the archives; it’s an updated version of a popular piece I wrote for Medium a few years ago, and for better or worse, its content could not be more relevant today. Feel free to share with any author friends who could use a sweary little pep talk about surviving the publication process!

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Picture it: it’s late 2018, and the New York Times and Publishers Marketplace have just reported on the latest crisis facing the book industry—a paper, labor, and facility shortage that forced publishers to scramble to print enough hardcover books to meet demand, and even to push out the pub dates of some January 2019 books in order to ease the burden on binderies.

I myself had an aptly-titled new book coming out on December 31st of that year, so when I read those articles my first reaction—as an author—was Everything is shit! My life is ruined!

But I’m also an industry veteran with fifteen years of experience working in New York’s largest publishing houses, so my follow-up reaction was Oh well, it’s always something.

Here are a few of my best strategies for surviving your book publication come hell, high water, or a broken-down truck in central Ohio.

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5 Tips for Publishing a Book Without Losing Your Goddamn Mind

#GOALS

1) Enjoy the good stuff.

You got a book deal! Or you got your ass in gear to self-publish! I’m proud of you and you should be, too. Along the way, be sure to recognize and revel in all the small pleasures of the process. More people will be reading your work. Some of them will even say nice things about it on social media. You’ll get to start referring to “my book” in casual conversation.

You’ll have an ISBN number of your very own—I’m not joking; it’s very exciting. BE EXCITED ABOUT IT.

You didn’t spend 0–15 years writing this motherfucker to skip over the euphoria of getting published and go straight to the despondent-about-everything-else part.

(There’ll be plenty of time for that later.)

2) Don’t read the reviews.

Don’t do it. They will not spark joy. For every glorious paean to your literary prowess, there will be one that stings like bug spray on a freshly shaven leg. A review that makes you wish you’d never been born, or at least that you’d been born without fingers so you never could have written your book OR clicked on that review.

Furthermore, even on your most masochistic day, definitely don’t read any of the 3-star ones. Those fuckers are sneaky. To one reviewer, three pentagrams up means “I am glad to have read this book and I would feel confident recommending it to others.” To another, it signifies “Don’t bother. I certainly wish I hadn’t.”

And you’ll never know until you click on it…which I already told you not to do.

But you won’t be able to help yourself. I get it. Which is why, as an editor, I used to offer my authors another option: “For every bad review of your own book that you read, go to your favorite book on Amazon and look at those bad reviews and you’ll feel better.”

But now that I’m an author myself I realize that doesn’t make me feel better—it just makes me angry that some jackass would give A Prayer For Owen Meany one star with the comment “Boring, I didn’t finish it.”

Oh, you didn’t finish it, Gavin? HOW NICE OF YOU TO TREAT US TO YOUR FIVE-WORD “REVIEW” OF A BOOK YOU DID NOT EVEN READ IN ITS ENTIRETY.

Seriously, don’t read the reviews.

3) Don’t be an asshole.

I know, I know. It’s not fair that Gavin gets to be an asshole and you don’t, but hear me out: bad stuff is going to happen during the life of your book, and it’s going to suck for all involved. I can assure you that being on the publisher’s end of any snafu that threatens sales potential and/or an author’s fragile emotional state is about as pleasant as a pap smear.

Once upon a time, it was my duty to inform a writer that he wasn’t going to get the scratch-n’-sniff book cover he wanted, and he responded with a 2,000-word email that included the sentence “You are nothing but a gentle, implacable steamroller demolishing everything I hold dear.”

So…three stars for me then? Gotcha.

Yes, you’re anxious. Yes, whatever happened is so fucking unfair. I’m not saying you don’t have every right to be upset. But freaking out will not solve your problem.

And neither will sending passive-aggressive emails to the very same people whose help and goodwill you need access to in order to right the ship. In fact, because the publishing industry is both volatile and incestuous, probably within less than two years literally everyone involved with this book will wind up scattered around the only other four major publishers in New York—and trust me, they do not get paid well enough to forgive and forget.

4) Focus on what you CAN control.

Technically, you “can control” the sending of pesky emails to your marketing manager asking them what progress they are making on your book launch, but I think we all know that a far better use of your Fuck Budget would be to make a to-do list of things YOU might accomplish on your own behalf, and then start knocking ‘em out.

There are plenty of things you can do to improve your book’s chances of success—or just to keep yourself occupied between refreshing your Amazon ranking and questioning all of your life choices up to this moment. Potato, po-tah-to.

For example:

• You could visit all of your local/regional bookstores and introduce yourself to the staff IN A NON-CREEPY WAY to let them know you have a book coming out and ask if they’d be interested in ordering a few copies and perhaps even having you sign stock.

• You could try to finagle a speaking gig or other event with your college alumni association, in person or via Zoom, Facebook, IG Live, etc.

• You could make a concerted effort to befriend other authors and help them publicize their books to be a good literary citizen and also so they will one day be inclined to help you with same.

• You could ask your friends, family, and social media followers to post online reviews (WHICH YOU WILL NOT READ), to boost word-of-mouth.

• You could take a nice bath.

5) Let go of what you CAN’T control.

I once had a boss who said that publishing a book was like trying to land a jumbo jet on an icy runway. In a tornado. With a drunk pilot.

It’s complicated and difficult, and there are lots of moving parts, many of which you can’t control. If it wasn’t the Great Paper Shortage of Twenty-Eighteen threatening your precarious first week sales figures, it would be a blizzard wiping out your tour schedule or a big news day bumping your drive-time radio appearance.

Frankly, all kinds of stuff could go wrong long before you even get to publication day: your editor could get fired mid-edit; your publicist could get into grad school; the trade magazines could completely ignore you. (Fun fact: Publishers Weekly has reviewed exactly zero of my books.)

Ooh, or maybe Amazon is showing the wrong version of the cover! That’s always a party.

Or your galleys got printed upside-down.

Or perhaps another book on the exact same topic is going to come out at the same time as yours and you don’t even know it yet—like when two movies about hapless shopping center police premiered within 90 days of each other in 2009.

It happens. And when it does, it’s only marginally less funny than Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

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UPDATE: A few weeks after I posted this,

Kate McKean

of Agents & Books sent out a truly excellent guide to many more smart and effective things one could do to prepare for a book launch—things she’s doing herself for her book, so you know they’re legit! Check out that post HERE.

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Flashback to January 2019: In addition to the paper-shortage thing, I had started getting messages from Canadian fans telling me there were no copies of Calm the Fuck Down to be had in their national chain store, coast to coast.

One said that her pre-order, due to arrive on January 1st, had been updated to “mid-March.”

WTF?

As it turns out, the truck carrying every single carton of my new book destined for the Chapters Indigo warehouse HAD BROKEN DOWN IN OHIO on its way north, delaying stock for that all-important first week on sale.

You can’t make this shit up, people.

So take a deep breath.

Remember that publishing a book is like landing a jumbo jet on an icy runway in a tornado with a drunk pilot.

Some of that stuff you can control; some of it you can’t.

Focus on the former and try to let go of the rest.

And if you need more pointers, I know a book that that might help.

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A bit about me: I spent 15 years as a book editor in NYC before quitting that career to pursue a freelance life (a decision that involved a lot of red wine and a lot of tears). In 2015 I had the idea for my first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck. And people loved it, so I kept writing! Today my sweary self-help series includes Get Your Shit Together, Calm the Fuck Down, Grow the Fuck Up, and more, with 3 million copies in print all over the world. You can also find me on Instagram, where my content skews tropical (in addition to quitting my job, I quit New York entirely and moved to a small fishing village in the Dominican Republic), plus food, cocktails, travel, and cats. So many cats.