The lowest common denominator of desireOn book promotion, selling the self, and middle school memories of trying to be what boys wanted.
I’m in the midst of strategizing around book promotion and I keep thinking about middle school. This weird business of trying to sell my work—trying to sell myself—reminds me of the weird business of growing up as a young woman in this world. I spent so much time trying to figure out what straight boys and men wanted. I wasn’t trying to figure out the wants of the boys and men that I wanted. I was trying to figure out a lowest common denominator of want—a wantedness with the biggest possible audience, because that seemed safe and prudent. I watched myself, as most girls do. I lived not so much inside my own head or body, but at the slight remove of a camera capturing everything. Granted, I never really pushed myself to physically embody that LCD desirability—there was always a resistant part of me that said “no, absolutely not.” But I played with desirability in ways that made me feel powerful. Mostly, I pushed myself to investigate and understand desire, and become an “expert” in it. There are plenty of parallels with planning to promote my memoir, My Mother’s Daughter, which comes out next year (I don’t have a pre-order link quite yet, but you can read more about it here and here). My promo planning involves trying to see myself and my work through other people’s eyes. It means trying to anticipate what they want and promote my book accordingly. It means trying to become visible to other people in the first place. I don’t really know how to go about such an endeavor in a chill or laid back way. Instead, I am approaching it like I’m creating my own little graduate course in Getting People to Buy Books. Over the past few years, as I was working on the proposal and then the book itself, I’ve been compiling dozens of relevant think pieces, and bookmarking authors’ preorder campaigns and various social media stunts, all of which I am now reviewing and synthesizing like I’m creating a slide deck. I will probably make an actual slide deck for myself, because again: I don’t know how to be chill or laid back. I like to feel powerful and in control, even if it’s 90 percent illusion. There is a lot of doom and gloom in those book-promo think pieces, mostly due to uncertainty about how to actually move the sales needle. This makes sense to me: With my first book, Want Me, none of the prominent media coverage I got (New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, NPR, etc.) moved books like this one viral video made by a young woman who read it and liked it. She identified with my book and found comfort in it, and she wanted to share it with others. Or, as she put it, “If you’re a young woman who has sex with men, you need to read [this book].” With that short video, my fundamental goal in writing the book (connecting with readers, introducing something meaningful, reassuring, and transformative into their lives) aligned with my practical aim (selling books). I am reminded of the kind of stuff my mom would tell me in middle school—all those bromides about how the right person would get you, see you, and love you for you. Looking back, I want to edit her advice to de-center romance and pluralize to “the right people,” but she was essentially right. It holds up. The thing is, waiting for the right people to find my book and read it is not a plan, even though I believe that this book will be just as meaningful, reassuring, and transformative for readers as my first memoir, if not more so. I also think that this book has a much bigger potential audience. It’s unpleasant to think about my writing in this way, gauging its possible reach and appeal. When I write from that place, I create my worst work. But when it’s time to sell and promote my work, especially something so massive as a book, it’s part of the game. This is the discomfort of art meeting capitalism, not unlike the discomfort of the self meeting the so-called “market” of sex and love. During the process of pitching my first book to publishers, a rejecting editor said that my sexual coming-of-age story wasn’t “relatable.” At the time, I didn’t take it as a professional rejection so much as a personal one; it underscored my every adolescent worry about being strange, unusual, and an outsider. Such are the hazards of memoir. The writing of the book is itself is so often a personal crucible, an existential reordering. And then you have to sell it, and yourself, as an it. It turns out that those feelings of being strange, unusual, and an outsider were part of what most resonated with readers of my first book. “It made me feel less alone” is one of the most common refrains I’ve heard from readers, which in turn made me feel less alone. Another common phrase: “It changed my life.” Such are the benefits of memoir. This project of developing my own little graduate course in Getting People to Buy Books risks recreating my long-ago attempts at mastering “straight men’s desire.” But that endeavor eventually showed me that our LCD assessments are often wildly off-base, misguided, and constraining, whether it’s lonely dudes in the manosphere ranting about “sexual market value” or teenage me clicking on the “most viewed” tube site tab to see what men wanted. These evaluations are liable to make you less yourself, less unique, and less available for real connection. They also tend to objectify and instrumentalize other people, reducing them to simple caricatures. I don’t think there’s any way to escape the capitalism of it all, and I don’t want to put a cheap be-yourself gloss on the formidable task of selling books. But this week I find myself landing on a couple questions that feel like a slight variation of what I might now say to my middle-school self. What is the thing that I have come here to say? How can I say that thing to those people that I most want to reach? Speaking of selling books, mine is called My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past. It comes out on May 5, 2026. Soon, so soon, I will have a pre-order link for you, but not quite yet.Paid subscribers make this newsletter possible. Will you upgrade to support the work I do here every week? It’s only $6 a month. (Or $5 a month with an annual subscription.) Paid subscribers get full access to my weekend roundups, as well as a discount on Dire Straights, my new podcast with Amanda Montei.
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četvrtak, 9. listopada 2025.
The lowest common denominator of desire
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