What It Was Like to Publish a Book in This Crazy Year, 2025

Suffice to say, 2025 was not the most opportune year to publish a new book. It wasn’t the best year for art and culture in general, with disastrous cuts to the NEA, the firing of the Librarian of Congress, and the tech world’s endless crusade for AI usage over creative ingenuity and critical thinking. I could go on. It was a particularly tough time to promote a book, with book coverage being slashed across media while social media became more splintered and less effective.

Still, I don’t have many complaints about my book launch in July or subsequent efforts at promotion, in part because I started off the year with realistically modest expectations. Overall, it was a lovely experience. In the interest of transparency, I thought I’d recount the highs and the lows of what it was like to be “on the other side” of the book publishing process.

Good surprises:

I still have not checked the Goodreads and Storygraph pages for my book.
My biggest victory. I thought I would cave on some dark night of the soul, so I’m proud of myself for staying strong and minding my own business.

My book tour happened. And it was invigorating!
I know how lucky I am to have gotten to go on a robust book tour, but even so I was nervous beforehand. I’m not the best traveler, especially these days with numerous flight cancellations and a startling lack of dignity for customers not flying first class. I was afraid I would be tired and confused and wrung out by the time I got to where I was going.

But where I was going was worth the effort: how wonderful it was to get to see the inner workings of a bunch of indie bookstores, some of which also included readings with a room full of my friends. I even felt the love in a mostly empty room or two. I hadn’t taken into account how lonely it is to write a book, and how gratifying it would be to talk to readers afterward.

Recording my audiobook was a lot of fun.
I’m an avid audiobook listener, which is how I know how difficult it is to make a good one. The narrator has to be up for the task and the producer has to have a good ear for mispronunciations as well as tonal irregularities. I was so relieved to find myself in good hands. It was more physically exhausting than I’d expected—I’d end the day covered in sweat as if I’d just had a major workout—but entirely satisfying.

Bad surprises:

The fall-out.
Not everyone loved how they were depicted in my writing, a fact that haunts me every day even though I wouldn’t change a word.

I had zero Hollywood interest.
Alas, my daydreams about adapting an essay from my collection into a limited series TV show turned out to be just that. Oh how I wanted to take a few meetings and then for nothing to happen and then to talk about how fake those meetings were and how I always knew it was never gonna happen anyway. Maybe next time.

I was acutely aware of every list I didn’t make and every outlet in which I didn’t get coverage.
Which is really messed up because I got some great coverage! It will be my life’s work to learn to be grateful for what I’ve got rather than disappointed in what I didn’t get.

My handwriting stinks.
I was embarrassed to realize that when I was signing books I could barely read what I’d written. Also, Sharpies with adequate ink still left in them are difficult to come by.

What I really wasn’t expecting:

Being bombarded with emails from scammers.
It’s officially an epidemic. Almost anyone who’s written a book in the past year has received a slew of poorly written yet weirdly flattering pitches (Thanks, Chat GPT!) from strangers offering to lend their expertise with some aspect of book marketing, particularly on Amazon. This piece by Victoria Strauss details how the scams work (or don’t).

As long as you NEVER GIVE THEM MONEY, the scam emails can be weirdly entertaining. Please enjoy my favorite line from one of them, which emphasizes how far off LLMs are at being able to communicate normally: “Do we let your book keep simmering in obscurity, or do we toss it into my reviewer pit and watch the sparks turn into an inferno of visibility?”

I wanna do it again.
As a reader I know there are already too many books. I know how much love and care and hope goes into so many of them, and how so few of them get the attention they deserve. I also know how difficult it will be to write the next one and the next one after that and on and on, but still. This time around the joy of publishing far outweighed the pain, so why stop now?