Mental Health Monday
Tomorrow my new memoir, Life B: Overcoming Double Depression, is out from Counterpoint Press.
I decided months ago that I would get a new website built (ta-dah! And THANK YOU Little Lion Creative — tell Emily I sent you if you want one this great for yourself). Along with the new website, I knew that it would be important to have a blog, and to ACTUALLY WRITE BLOG POSTS for that blog.
Did it happen before Launch Week? No. But is it happening? Yes! Here I am, writing my second blog post in a single day — and it’s a blog post that I plan to write on a weekly basis. #MentalHealthMonday, let’s get this started. . .
I had planned to center today’s post on something that happened recently, but I wound up writing an entire essay about that. Then I thought I’d center it on reading resources for #MentalHealthAwarenessMonth, but I did that in my new Book Wag newsletter (the one coming this Wednesday, 5/17/23, instead.
Therefore I’ll talk about something that’s been in the news — well, at least bookish news — recently, and that’s how the book-launch process affects authors.
First, a few links:
Bookseller Survey Finds Debut Authors Struggle with Lack of Support from The Bookseller/UK
“More than half of authors (54%) responding to a survey by The Bookseller on their experiences of publishing their debut book have said the process negatively affected their mental health.”
Publishing a Book Is Hard on Your Mental Health by Laura Stanfill on Catapult from 2022
“On April 19—pub date!—my dreams will come true, and yet I know it’s just one more day, just one more step in the life of this book. I can hold both of those things at once: the idea of the dream and the list of potential disappointments that could puncture my buoyant spirits.”
Jaime Green's TBD (Maybe Never) Substack
“So having a book come out isn’t laurels and all your heroes welcoming you into a secret club.”
Tajja Isen’s Creative Practice Substack
“Here’s what I say when people ask what it feels like to publish a book: You’re in a tunnel. Pitch dark. There’s a broken faucet dripping water somewhere. The droplets echo, which is your first clue that the space around you is cavernous. (It might be a sewer? Unclear.) Somebody hands you a flashlight. The flashlight is faulty. You can click it on, but it only illuminates a short distance in front of you—just enough to shuffle a few steps in the direction you hope is forward—before it flickers back into darkness.”
I understand how difficult it is out there for authors. I’ve worked in and around the book-publishing industry for over 20 years. I’ve heard hundreds, maybe at this point thousands, of authors relate their launch slings and arrows. It’s not just tough for debut authors, or midlist authors, or authors at small presses. Things are tough for all of us. It’s wonderful to see the two or three authors whose social-media posts about empty seats at their events have been responded to in viral fashion (including commiseration from famous writers like Margaret Atwood), but most people don’t get that attention. Many book releases sink unnoticed like pallets of
One of the reasons I’m sitting here the day before my book launch free of anxiety has to do with the content of my book, which is about mental health, so I’d like to share a few insights I’ve had through my process.
Remember, few of us will earn huge royalties, let alone “earn out” our advances. I’m focusing on the latter. I want to sell enough books to equal my advance money. It helps that I have a spouse with a fulltime job and benefits; I don’t have to pay our mortgage or fill our refrigerator from my book earnings. If you do, things will look different, or, as we say now, YMMV. But most writers I know also teach or work in communications or or or and and and. We all know that sales are wonderful and yet cannot be counted on too soon.
Spending five years writing about a lifelong mental illness, as I did, is hard. But it’s also a process that helps you work out a lot of anxieties and unproductive behaviors. One of those that I untangled was spending too much time in the future and/or predicting the future. I worked on that by staying in the present, and what worked for me was developing a daily meditation practice. People, yoga is wonderful (and necessary for my life), but meditation is transformative.
Other people will tell you many things about the book-launch process. You will do some of them. Try to at least do the things your publicist asks you to do! But you don’t have to do everything everyone recommends all at once. That way lies madness. Once you’ve done the things your publicist asks, try to carve out some space for things you know you’ll enjoy. In my case that was making sure I celebrated this book and its difficult, hard-won path to publication. I’m having a launch party and I got the book-shaped cake of my dreams and I cannot wait to see it and taste it and share it with my dear ones.
Until next Monday. . . stay well, stay healthy, and remember: You are not alone.
Namaste.