The Maris Review, vol 16

Conventional wisdom says that publishing is dead in August, but this a big week with new offerings from some excellent indies.

Aug 06, 2024

∙ Paid

The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden

I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk about this luscious (I’m sorry to use a food word, but “luscious” really is the best adjective to describe it) debut novel for a few weeks now. Set in the Dutch countryside in the early 1960s, The Safekeep is the story of Isabel, a spinster (at the ripe old age of 30-ish) who lives a very quiet existence alone in her family home, until her brother’s girlfriend Eva comes to stay with her for a while. This is not a spoiler alert: hot stuff happens.

But let’s talk about another potential spoiler alert that I’m not gonna ruin for you. The marketing copy for The Safekeep explicitly prepares readers for a big discovery that unravels everything Isabel knows, a twist that turns the novel into a whole other thing. So I knew going in to look out for signs that something was amiss, and when the twist came I had already figured out what was going on (but still incredibly impressed with how seamlessly the narrative came together). But I kept thinking about how, if I hadn’t been warned and had gone in cold, the turn in this book would have fully and completely astounded me in the very best way.

There’s no easy answer here. Marketing a book like this one is tough and the team at Avid Reader Press did a great job. It would be much too risky to try to sell such a book in today’s retail environment (mostly online, literally a gazillion books to choose from) without some hint to potential readers that the novel contains more action than just the unfolding of one steamy relationship. I was thrilled to see that The Safekeep is longlisted for the Booker Prize; maybe that’s all the marketing copy you need to establish literary bona fides?

The Rich People Have Gone Away by Regina Porter

I think this is the first lockdown novel I’ve read that feels big and expansive rather than claustrophobic. I was a little nervous to go back to Brooklyn in 2020, too soon and all, but, Regina Porter is an adroit guide. And there’s an interesting premise: on a hike near their vacation home upstate, a pregnant woman named Darla gets into a terrible fight with her husband and disappears. Darla is rich and white, so her disappearance gets a lot of attention from law enforcement and the media. But this isn’t Gone Girl. Porter widens her lens to include stories told from a variety of perspectives by a diverse group of people surrounding Darla, and it’s these character portraits that are the heart and soul of the book. Covid is the impetus, but The Rich People Have Gone Away explores who gets to escape from their everyday lives, and who must stay behind.

On placing today’s supervillain in literary historical context

On being on “the other side”

I get about 40 book pitches over email per day, plus two or three galleys in the mail. Which is simply to say, I know how difficult it is to capture the attention of people who cover books. We are overwhelmed all of the time.

So it’s daunting to be making tweaks to the marketing copy and cover image for my own upcoming book, which will be published a year or so from now. It’s an essay collection about how and why I’ve been moving politically leftward, and it’s called I Want To Burn This Place Down. And I had very specific requests for the cover (no literal fire! no pink!), which the book design team at Ecco/HarperCollins followed to a tee even as they added their own flourishes. My editor has fine-tuned the marketing copy to really get to the heart of what I’m writing about. It’s exciting. (I obviously know better than to share any text or images with you until they’re entirely ready to go and all of the book commerces sites—yes, even Amazon—have a product page. Can’t properly talk about a book without an active “buy” link, after all. Stay tuned…)

Over the past few weeks I’ve read a variety of different pieces about the role of marketing in corporate publishing today and whether it’s crass and overblown or getting in the way of “art” (Patrick Nathan’s take is worth checking out), so it feels kind of liberating to be approaching book marketing from a practical perspective rather than a theoretical one.

I want the cover and copy for my book to communicate to potential readers what I’m all about, and the talented people at my publisher are helping me to do so in an elegant, considered way. I want to celebrate them. It’s easy to paint all of corporate book publishing as a cynical, rapacious system of art devaluation (I am very much guilty of doing this myself) so it’s nice to be able to appreciate the people on the ground who really do care about books and who are consistently doing great work even under difficult circumstances.

I’ve really been enjoying this new meme format

New releases, 8/6

Big week! Conventional wisdom says that publishing is dead in August, but this is a lively bunch. Including lots of great stuff from some excellent indie publishers.

Yr Dead by Sam Sax

The Murmuring Grief of the Americas by Daniel Borzutksy

Villa E by Jane Alison

Hum by Helen Phillips

The Age of Loneliness by Laura Marris

Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adèle Rosenfeld

Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church by Eliza Griswold

The Singer Sisters by Sarah Seltzer

House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias

The Rich People Have Gone Away by Regina Porter

Unspeakable Home by Ismet Prcic