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Feb 09 2016

The Helicopter Parenting of Baby Book

“My agent pointed out ever so gently that while he was away from his email over the weekend, I’d sent him no fewer than 23 individual messages.”

When I sold my novel to Random House, I assumed publishing a book would be a more or less reptilian exercise: You plant the egg (the novel) in a nice warm place (a top publishing house), and it hatches and raises itself. But it turns out to be a lot more like raising an infant, only not as cuddly. Not softened by a flood of oxytocin. Not cushioned by a love that grows every single day.

When our first child, now a freshman in college, was six months old, I hired a nanny to take care of him while I worked half-time from home. I prepared a document entitled “Taking Care of Baby,” which I came across recently, two pages of single-spaced typed directives for our unsuspecting new hire, who is instructed to:

“make sure the diaper area is very dry before putting on a new diaper”
“put baby down in crib on back, with security blanket to hold, then check after 10 minutes to make sure security blanket is not covering face”
“place baby under a black and white mobile several times per day for stimulation.”

And for a walk in cold weather, Nanny must:

“dress baby in socks, blue hat, blue mittens, sweatshirt and blanket.”

The woman upon whom this document was thrust had already raised four children of her own. She ought to have been typing up instructions for me.

Fortunately for my kids, I ran out of fuel for that kind of helicopter parenting a long time ago. But that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped hovering. To paraphrase our eldest daughter: “You know how some parents derive their sense of self-worth from the success of their kids? Well, you don’t do that with us. But you definitely do it with your book.”

My book had what my publicist called “a slower ramp.” It received great trade reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, was in a feature in Cosmo, and had generous blurbs from other authors, but the day it was published, it did not yet have a single press review. I was advised not to worry. I was told to focus on writing my next book—sound advice that I systematically ignored.

Partly, this was the result of an obsessive-compulsive nature. Partly, it was because in my twenties, I’d spent five years running marketing for a Silicon Valley start-up and helped take the company public. Random House was working hard on my behalf, but when it became clear the book was not going to magically transport itself onto the New York Times bestseller list, my maternal marketing instincts kicked in. Work on the next novel stalled in favor of the feeding and care of the first, and I started working 14-hour days marketing the book. I was on West Coast time, three hours behind, but by the time New York publishing began its day, I had typically already been at my desk sending emails for at least an hour.

Random House publicity ended up doing a stellar job—securing a rave review that appeared on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle’s book section, an Editor’s pick from Oprah, prominent radio spots, and essay placements in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. When their campaign wrapped up after 6 weeks, though, I was still in overdrive, and I thought they should be, too. But that’s not how it works.

My agent, like my nanny all those years ago, was patient, and kind, and honest in guiding me through the realities. He helped me understand that a publishing house can only market a single book for a short time before it must move on to other books, and nothing I could do was going to change that. One Monday morning, he pointed out ever so gently that while he was away from his email over the weekend, I’d sent him no fewer than 23 individual messages.

Clearly, it was time to settle down. But I couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.

I learned a lot. I could (I might) teach a class on what not to do as a first-time author: Don’t waste your time stalking Goodreads reviews, and Amazon rankings, and Google search results. Don’t send so many emails that you exceed your daily limit and turn your messages to SPAM. Don’t raise your voice with your publicist, your agent, your editor or your marketing team. Don’t sweat the small stuff. But don’t wait until the last minute to build a good web site, either. Don’t fail to nail down an elevator pitch until a year after your book has come out. Don’t neglect to turn on Google Analytics. Don’t be surprised when you find you need not only a Facebook Author Page, but Facebook Insights, a Facebook Pixel, and Facebook’s Ad Manager and Power Editor. Do not resist Amazon Associates, MailChimp, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube.

Do not wait to expand your vocabulary to include terms like landing page, mobile discovery, audio clip, bookplate, illegal download, metadata, keywords, thumbnails, blogging. Do not hesitate to call in reinforcements—like your father. Especially if, like mine, he happens to be a graphic designer, marketing consultant and a writer himself: www.etellison.com. Do not expect to spend every evening with your family. Do not think you will survive two dozen book club gatherings and 30 events without someone calling your young protagonist “icky.” Do not show up for your first reading unprepared. Do not forget your fancy new pen. Do not expect your publisher to take care of everything. Do not try to take care of everything yourself.

In the end, have all these efforts mattered? I think they’ve mattered in helping build personal relationships with independent bookstores and with readers, and they’ve helped the book find its way into the hands of people to whom it has meant something. Beyond that, the effort mattered in the way it mattered to me that my son’s imagination was stimulated by a black and white mobile, and that he was bundled up in his socks, his blue hat, and his blue mittens when it was cold outside. It mattered to me to know that I had done my best—and the only way to make all of it matter less was to allow time to pass, and to ultimately turn my attention to a new baby, or a new book.

Will I have calmed down when it comes time to publish a second, a third, a fourth book? Will I have traded helicopter parenting for parenting on-demand, as I have with my actual children? I hope so. I hope that like our fourth child, who just turned twelve, my next books will dress themselves from an early age and make their own breakfasts. They will remind me to put my cell phone away when it’s time to get off a chairlift. They will even take it upon themselves to make bread when the bananas go brown.

Jan 03 2016

Writing sex scenes when you’re a mother of teenagers

“How does it feel to know that your teenagers will now know their mother has a sexual imagination?”

This was perhaps the most provocative of the questions that came my way after A Small Indiscretion was published, and it threw me. In a review in Bustle, Rebecca Kelly calls the sex in A Small Indiscretion “decidedly un-erotic, even uncomfortable or cringe-worthy.” Is this, then, what my kids might assume constitutes their mother’s sexual imagination?

My 19-year old son asked to read the book when the Advance Reader Editions arrived. It sat on his nightstand for a long time, bookmarked at page 30. Every so often I’d sneak in his room to see if he’d progressed, but the book mark never moved. I finally told him he shouldn’t feel any pressure to finish the book if he didn’t want to, and he seemed relieved. He said maybe it was a little too character driven for him. Only later did he admit the truth. The son character, Robbie, plays the piano and is a good swimmer, enough similarity to make my son uncomfortable. The novel is written in the form of a letter from a mother to her son, which certainly must have contributed to my son’s unease.

The book did time on my 17-year-old daughter’s nightstand, too. The bookmark got stuck about half way through. “It’s not that it’s not good or anything,” she said. “It’s just…I mean…I know it’s not you, but I know you, so I can see where your ideas come from, and it’s just kind of weird.” As far as I know, neither one of them ever got to the sex scenes, un-sexy or otherwise, which is a relief. My other two kids, daughters aged 11 and 14, are young enough I’ve simply told them they’ll have to wait.

In the writing of the book, I always knew that the narrator, Annie Black, was only writing for herself, that she would no more share her sexual experiences with her child than I would. I knew her confession would never find its way into anyone else’s hands, and as I wrote, I had to persuade myself the same was true of my novel, that I would be the only person to read it. I locked myself in the room of my mind and followed the characters wherever they went, even into bedrooms in which they undressed. But I was never uncomfortable writing the sex scenes, not only because they aren’t explicit, but because it was the underlying emotional truth I was focused on describing, not the sex for its own sake.

The Bustle review goes on to say that the un-sexy sex scenes have a “gritty emotional realism,” that they are there “to intrigue, not titillate.” I hope this is true; as critical as at least one of them is to the plot, the sex scenes, to me, felt minor relative to the scope of the story. So I was taken aback when again and again, readers called the sex out. My husband read the book for the first time and pronounced it “a sexy page-turner.” The jacket copy my editor wrote included the term “sexual desire,” and reviews referred to “sexual antics” and “sexual confusion.” I ought to have been prepared for this, perhaps, but I wasn’t.

When I published my first short story, The Company of Men, which went on to win an O. Henry Prize, I remember a moment of panic when I realized my mother-in-law was likely to read it. There isn’t any graphic sex in that story, either, and yet I felt ashamed of paragraphs like this one:

“And beyond that, where my husband’s arm had been, was only the back of the couch. There was no sign of the formidable wrist, the sturdy thumb, the callused, well-loved palm. There was no further sign of my husband in the room at all. I was on my own in the company of men with the makings of a straight in my hand, aces high. Desire was thumping in my chest and the instinct to win, to go forward with abandon, was shooting through me, across the back of my neck and down between my legs . . . Then all at once there was a knee pressed purposefully against my thigh beneath the table.”

The protagonist was born out of my imagination, after all. Would I no longer be perceived as a nice girl who fit well into my husband’s traditional, Catholic, mid-Western family?

My mother-in-law read the story. She complimented me on it, graciously, and when my novel came out a year ago, she wrote about it to all her friends. My father-in-law was in the hospital shortly after the novel’s release, and he bought copies for all the nurses who’d cared for him during his stay. Neither of them seem ashamed; they seemed proud.

Then again, they’re adults. My kids aren’t, quite.

Nov 01 2015

The Evolution of a Book Jacket

Who chooses a book’s cover? Or: sex sells

I’m often asked at readings and book groups who decides what a book’s cover will look like. From what I can tell, this depends on the publisher, the editor, the author and the book. When Jonathan Franzen launched Freedom at the Herbst theater in San Francisco, he turned the book face in, away from the audience, because he hated the cover so much. “No birds,” he’d told his publisher, apparently, but a bird ended up on the cover anyway.

I was much luckier. Although my contract stipulates that my publisher has final say over the cover design, it was clear from the start my editors weren’t going to insist on a cover I didn’t like. Still, it was a long and difficult road. I was asked to submit covers I liked, and any ideas for directions. After a couple months of silence, I received a cover design, FedEx, at the hotel in Hawaii where we were vacationing with my husband’s family after Christmas. I’ll admit that receiving that first FedEx package thrilled me; the cover didn’t.

My agent and I liked the concept (the red scarf, below) but we wanted something more striking, and asked for iterations. Instead, after another protracted silence, we got the cigarette (right, below) and after we rejected that, the pearl necklace. I started to get worried, and wrote a long document with excerpts from the book highlighting various tropes that might be appropriate for a cover (lighting, photographs). My editors were, as always, gracious and accommodating, and the art department went back to the drawing board. A half dozen more concept sketches arrived, this time electronically, but none were quite right. Time was running short by then, and I was starting to panic. I found a freelance designer whose covers I liked, my publisher approached her, and in another incredibly gracious and generous move, hired her. The new designer found a photo we liked, the Random House art department improved the text treatment, and we had the final cover within two weeks.

When it came time to consider the trade paperback cover (Feb. 9^th 2016), we all agreed we wanted to try something new. The art department sent a photo of a girl sitting on a bench with her legs crossed, and high heels on the ground. I thought it was an attractive image, but I worried the heels were cliched. We considered a photo of a couple in trench coats, and an image I found of a girl standing before a flooding Seine in Paris holding an umbrella.

I posted a survey on Facebook which received more than 300 responses. Many liked the trench coats but worried the man looked like a flasher. Some, including most of the men, flat out loved the girl’s legs. Others wondered if it might send the wrong message, and whether Annie Black’s legs and toes would be so perfectly manicured. The red umbrella received twice as many votes as the other two covers on Facebook, but Random House felt that photo was too neutral and quiet; they wanted something bolder. So I agreed to the original legs, but at the eleventh hour, the rights to that photo could not be secured.

The Random House art department saved the day by finding a different photo of a woman’s legs—grittier, edgier, more real, with no high heels. My agent and I liked it right away, and to everyone’s relief, we had consensus. Many of you who voted on the original photo of the girl’s legs left comments along the lines of: “Sex Sells.” You might just be right.

The Helicopter Parenting of Baby Book

Writing sex scenes when you’re a mother of teenagers

The Evolution of a Book Jacket

Who chooses a book’s cover? Or: sex sells

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