Six Tasks to Keep Momentum in the After

Or, a few things I'm grateful for, six months after THE SKIN AND ITS GIRL's release

Last week, I read a Electric Literature piece by author Catherine Baab-Muguira about how “earning out” changed nothing in her life. There’s also Lincoln Michel’s helpful Substack post about book sales; a commenter knowledgeable about BookScan data shares that only 5 percent of titles published in a year sell more than 5,000 copies. In the wide world of distracting existential concerns, ones that deserve our bigger feelings, metrics mean very little. This offered some validation for my paying more attention to the few things I can control: teaching my classes, catching up on editing work that has been in my queue since spring, making small consistent efforts to keep Palestine in the spotlight of my small platform, and coordinating our household’s move to Austin at the end of January. When my classes wrap up at the beginning of December, I’ll return to work on my current manuscript.

Wherever you are in your literary journey, tending to whatever you can control is a valid part of the work. This post covers a few ways that this work has shifted since The Skin and Its Girl was released in April. The novel has connected with audiences young, old, and in-between, so my publisher will want me to mention that the hardcover might make a nice holiday gift. Consider purchasing it from my local BIPOC-owned indie, Loyalty Bookstore, which has a whole Bookshop.org page of adult and kiddo books about Palestine.

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Say you have a book out. What now? Here are six tasks you might spend your time on, once the dust (or your cortisol level) settles.

1. Virtual Connections

I’m grateful for virtual communities of writers, readers, booksellers, and librarians that have amplified book news, provided amusing distractions, and also shared information and resources of all kinds.

Cultivate the platforms where you want to keep in touch with readers and peers. Mine are Instagram and this Substack. I’ve set up a place on Threads, if you’re there and want to connect. (What other platforms have you had luck with since Twitter self-immolated?)

2. Teaching

I’m grateful for all the universities and literary organizations that do the hard work of building and nurturing healthy writing communities. I’ve spent most of this year developing class ideas and proposals, curricula, and prompts because, after twenty years of working one-on-one with writers, the group setting is a refreshing change.

If this appeals to you too, but your writerly education modeled the cone-of-silence approach, I recommend reading Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World and Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop. My more experienced teacher-friends have been extraordinarily generous in sharing advice and resources, too. I am at the beginning of my teaching journey, but this year’s experiences have helped me approach it as a learnable craft and give myself grace.

I’ll be offering virtual one-session classes on grants, revision, and debuting at the Center for Fiction and the Loft Literary Center in February and March 2024, and then resuming longer workshops and classes in the later spring.

3. Speaking

This year, I am most grateful for in-person events like lectures and readings: they’re human-scale and energizing, and I appreciate literally every single person I’ve met along the way. I don’t know how folks go out and actively find these speaking opportunities (tell me if you do!), but the ones that have come to me have done so through my longstanding literary communities. These are networks of existing friends whose literary citizenship includes some aspect of inviting writers to talk to colleges, and/or attending conferences like AWP where I built genuine rapport with people who do this work too.

Larger publishing houses like Penguin Random House have speakers’ bureau arms, but my sense is that you have to already have a platform or push pretty hard to be included, since they favor nonfiction writers.

4. Writing the Next Book

Your contract might have language about an exclusive option to buy your next book. (If it does, give thanks to your agent for favorable terms!) This means that while your first contract doesn’t automatically guarantee a home for your next book, you can submit early chapters to the publisher in hopes of a next deal. That’s my situation, and come what may, I’m glad for a few residencies and periods of other downtime to have generated new work amid an otherwise frenetic launch year. I’m keen to get back to writing more regularly, because when I don’t, I have no joyful little secret that makes adulting bearable.

5. Applying to Fellowships, Residencies, and Book Fairs

I’ve begun applying to different kinds of opportunities because having a book has shifted what feels useful—and for this, I’m grateful too.

Many opportunities for “emerging writers” specify that you can’t have a book out. Others, mostly fellowships, are open to established writers who do. Although I feel like I’m in a weird limbo of whatever comes after “emerging,” what I want out of these opportunities has changed. Before, I wanted vague “time to write” mingled with a need for validation. But (surprise!) imposter syndrome doesn’t go away after publishing a book, and it’s been a quirky relief to realize that this baggage is a constant. Now I can algebraically ignore it and focus on what’s actually useful: residencies near the locations I’m writing about, and fellowships that either (1) put me in community with other queer and/or SWANA writers or (2) give me a chance to develop my teaching and become a better mentor. I’ll still throw my hat in the ring for a platinum-level fancy-pants opportunity about as often as I buy a lottery ticket (once or twice a year), and with the same expectations.

6. Give Forward

Actions speak louder than words, and they feel better. No matter how genuinely you say thanks, or that you’re thrilled, grateful, excited, blessed, over the moon, etc., these words become weightless with overuse. Gratitude is momentum—pay kindnesses forward.

To booksellers and in-conversation partners, offer to repay the favor. Pitch reviews to your favorite media outlets. Share peers’ news on your platforms. Say yes to invitations to judge contests, visit high schools for career day, and guest edit any publication that truly supports its contributors and staff. Introduce other writers to the event coordinators who’ve invited you to read in the past. Share resources open-heartedly. Visit book clubs—for other writers. Write recommendation letters if you’re asked.

This can be mostly unpaid labor, but exercise your judgment: don’t be taken advantage of, but recognize that community is an empty word too unless the effort to sustain it is communal. We are more than just units of capitalism. An existence without generosity is bleak.

Thanks for reading, subscribing to, and sharing this Substack, and I hope you continue to find value in it.

This red morph Eastern screech owl is a charming ambassador bird for the Owl Moon Raptor Center. Injuries make her unreleasable, but she has a well-supported life inspiring people to consider wildlife and move through the world more gently. (Image copyright © Sarah Cypher, 2023. All rights reserved.)

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