I Wrote a Book!
A note about Spoilers and what comes next
Earlier this month, my debut book, Spoilers: Essays That Might Ruin Your Favorite Hollywood Movies, was officially published! The entire planet rejoiced — children danced in the streets, babies were conceived, bells rang triumphantly in town squares around the world and people looked up and said “Ah! Spoilers must have just hit the shelves. I better go buy my copy before they’re all gone.” And just like that, a billion copies were sold, and millions continue to be sold each day.
Okay, not quite, but it still felt pretty damn great.
I’m going to be writing about the process of self-publishing Spoilers in detail (more on that in a minute) but for now I want to let folks know about a couple very exciting upcoming events related to the book!
October 23rd, 9:30pm — Book Launch Party at Caveat NYC — Tickets here (Today before 9:30pm is the last chance to get the early bird discount!)
October 27th, 5:00pm — Book Signing + Happy Hour at Rozzie Bound Co-op — Roslindale, MA
October 28th, 3:00pm — Book Signing + Reading at Frugal Bookstore — Boston, MA
I’d love the chance to see you in person if you’re available!
What’s next?
People have already been asking me what I’m working on now that Spoilers has been published, and the short answer is I’m working on letting more people know that Spoilers even exists. I’m very grateful to McSweeney’s, Paste Magazine, WritingWorkshops.com, The Official Dream Dinner Party Podcast, Talkward,
, , all of my blurb writers, and everyone else who has posted about the book.And yet, I still have friends and family texting me saying “Hey, when’s that book of yours coming out? I haven’t heard a single thing about it in months!”
That’s just to say that getting the word out about a book is HARD, so if you have a moment, please post about the book on social media, email the book to a friend, tell your book club about it, or find an intersection with a lot of foot traffic and just start screaming about it to anyone who will listen. Any word of mouth is a huge help!
You can say something like:
My friend/cousin/twitter mutual Carlos Greaves wrote a hilarious book called, Spoilers: Essays That Might Ruin Your Favorite Hollywood Movies. The book uses movies as a way to satirize pop culture, politics, and movies themselves. In the book, Superman’s Green Card application gets denied because he doesn’t have any documentation from Krypton, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants rethink their rules about shipping (and washing) the pants, and Forrest Gump gets investigated by the FBI for mooning the President. All that and more! Carlos did not tell me to write this. These are MY words. Check out my book, err, I mean Carlos’ book at the link below!
Introducing: The Numbers
One of the biggest challenges about self-publishing has been finding examples of how other authors have gone about promoting their self-published books, what tactics worked or didn’t work, how their sales tracked over time, and so on. So I have no idea, for example, what a “good” first week of a book launch looks like, or how many copies of books other indie authors have sold, or how to get The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, my local NPR station, my college newspaper, my mom, etc. to stop ignoring my emails (my mom did finally agree to review my book but said she wasn’t going to hold back just because she had “personal ties” to the author).
With that in mind, one thing I’ll be doing over the next couple months is chronicling how the self-publishing process has gone for me, from crowdfunding the book, to writing the book, to marketing the book. I’m hoping that providing actual, concrete data might help other self-published authors avoid the mistakes I’ve made like spending precious hours of my life emailing The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, my local NPR station, my college newspaper, and my mom (I should’ve just called her)!
That series of posts is going to be called “The Numbers” and it’s going to live right here in the Shades of Greaves newsletter-verse, so if you already subscribe to my Substack, you’ll get those posts as well. And like my newsletter, you can expect new “The Numbers” posts on a semi-irregular basis.
In the meantime, hope to see those of you in the New York area next Monday!