Ten Little Murderers Are My Bffs

By Barbara Poelle

Sometimes you invite your dearest friends over for a murder mystery party and then sometimes there is a thunderstorm with vibrant lightening and timpani thunder and you keep yelling, “OMG guys it’s like I’m really going to kill you!” and they love you more, not less ,for it. These are the people to surround yourself with during the hard parts of publishing. And also those to maybe keep on speed dial for bail money.

Writing can be a lonely gig. A road that is paved with self doubt and Skeksie voices prompting you to question yourself every step of the way.  (Please be a good writer…pleeease..PLEEEASEEEE) Unlike pipe fitting or squid wrangling, writing can oftentimes be a lonely endeavor, and your pub date can seem uncomfortably underwhelming.  Here’s the truth of it: your agent, editor and publicist have all ridden this bull for 8 seconds in the past and are chafed where your underwear covers your skin (that is how Husband edited this to read) so it might be up to your social circle to celebrate your pub date as hard as deserved. It isn’t our intention to deny the thrill that is your paper birth into the world; it is just a truth that we have twenty five or thirty of these dates this year and forget how electrifying they can be, because we are just trying to move widgets.

There are two books out today that I desperately want you to buy:  the historical upmarket thriller The Sleepwalkers by Paul Grossman (agented by my brilliant colleague, Jon Sternfeld) and the spectacular young adult novel  Banished by Sophie Littlefield (agented my brilliant reflection Barbara Poelle). There is nothing I can say that will make you want these books more or less than previous pimpage, but I am telling you, these are amazing books that had authors who quietly wrote when their kids were sleeping or when they had two hours after 11 pm to put 2000 words down, and today is going to be a day where they open their front door and the paper boy still sneers at them while smashing a garage window with the Tuesday Times. And that just isn’t fair because today is the day when they are published.

All I am saying is make sure when one of your friends or colleagues has a pub date that you take the time to drop an e-mail or an e-card or God forbid an e-motion to say congratulations. Because nobody is going into this alone, and nobody can host a murder party without the total and unwavering support of their guests. No one wants their pub date to go unacknowledged, so here are a few things you can do to honor your colleague on their pub date. Please pick two:

10.) Call their answering machine and disguise your voice and pretend to be a homicidal stalker who is in love with them due to their writing.

9.) Take a picture a la Maxim with you covered by their book in strategic places and send your photo to  their facebook wall.

8.) Rent a sky plane to sky write their title over major cities

7.) Go to a bookstore and ask if they have the book, if they don’t, begin weeping and rending your clothes until the manager orders some

6.) Bake a cake to resemble the cover of your friend’s book- please be aware of allergies, like if their agent can’t eat gluten or dairy

5.) Tattoo the protagonist’s name on your body and also the name of the agent and then start a blog about tattoos about titles and agents

4.) Memorize the first line of the novel and anytime someone uses a word from the first line spray them with whipped cream and yell the title of the book in their face.

3.) Go to your child’s school and create a rhyming couplet to shout utilizing the title and author name of your dear friend’s book and holler it repeatedly while standing in their cafeteria for lunch hours

2.) Blog about your friend’s release

1.) Tweet about your friend’s release

So any of those two will work, and I trust you to chose what is right for you.

Now pardon me while I sip the essence from this Gelfling.

Comments

[Jeff Cohen]

Re: #9--I thought you wanted to INCREASE sales of the book...

[Carrie]

I'm with Jeff.

[DeadlyAccurate]

You were a book publicist in a previous life, weren't you?

[Maria]

Gosh. And here I thought the ultimate way to make a writer's day was to say, "I bought your book it's next on the TBR pile."

Guess I'll go bake a cake.

[LaurenDeStefano]

I tweeted it, not that you'd know because you aren't on Twitter, but you will be by the end of this month or my name is Muddle VonMudderpuppy.

[r. lewis]

Done! Gotta support the troops! :-)

[Alli]

#4 and #9 have worked treats in the past when publicizing a buddy's release date. Congrats to Paul, Jon, Sophie and Barbara for today - very exciting stuff! I'm about to tweet and FB the world with the good news!

[Sophie Littlefield]

I'm having a great release day! Thanks to everyone who sent their good wishes, I left the house feeling ebullient - and then I took myself on an adventure. World's a little sparklier today :)

[Sherry Stanfa-Stanley]

You forgot asking your Uncle Vito to put a little pressure on everyone. It would be a good plan, though I hope it's still effective with him in prison and all.

[Amanda Forester]

Congratulations Sophie!! Here's wishing you all the best! Now if you excuse me I have to go look up "ebullient". Darn writers and their fancy words...