Announcing The Mind Reels, and Why Only You Can Make It a Success

and if you're a subscriber you can win a free galley!

Readers, writers, friends, enemies, I’m very excited to share my new book with you and announce that it’s available for preorder. On October 7th Coffee House Press will publish The Mind Reels, my debut novel. It’s the story of a college student who slowly loses her mind and the life that’s left over for her. The book means a great deal to me and I’m very proud of it. I don’t know if I’ll ever get another opportunity to publish a novel, but I’m making the most of this one, and whatever the critical and commercial returns I can say that I’ve done exactly what I wanted to do in this book. I’m very grateful for the opportunity, and want to send thanks to Coffee House and to my agent William Callahan of Inkwell Management Literary Agency.

Of course, I would very much like for this book to sell well, which is where my readers come in. I understand the considerable risks of self-aggrandizement here, but it needs to be said: the way this book becomes a success is through you guys making it one. If it’s going to gain a large audience, it will do so thanks to a grassroots campaign. The book media is not going to be doing me any favors. It’s simply a fact that what’s left of the book media has very narrow political and cultural attitudes. The books that get covered come from a particular milieu, and that’s any coverage, not just positive coverage. The few remaining publications that can really move the needle with a review have real power to influence book sales, and that influence inevitably results in a sclerotic and limited range of approved ideas, attitudes, and authors. That’s particularly true of fiction. I again acknowledge that there’s certainly some self-flattery involved here. But the simple reality is that my political beliefs (and other baggage) make it much less likely that this book will be covered in the mainstream book media, with positive coverage even less likely. And I think that’s a shame, for me specifically of course but also for the industry and for books, readers, writers…. Books should be evaluated with as wide a critical aperture as possible. Also the book itself is good and could really be quite meaningful to a wide audience, if given the chance.

The good news is that Coffee House is a small (but very cool) press and I happily accepted a modest advance, so financial success is a lot easier to achieve, meaning that all of you can play an outsized role in the novel’s success. There’s about 65,000 people on this mailing list; if even 5% of you were to preorder the book, it would be a great start. To that end, here’s the link again! It’s still very early so some options might not be live yet, but rest assured that I will give you guys reminders as the book is listed on Amazon and similar. What bookseller you buy from, and in what form, don’t make much of a difference to me. (For the record it’s a trade paperback, which is to say that it’s coming out originally in softcover with no hard-cover run.) Yes ebooks are books and listening to audiobooks is reading etc etc! Read how you like and support independent presses.

Buuuuut if you’re unable or unwilling to preorder, I’ve got you covered. I’m doing a subscriber-only galley giveaway with Coffee House. (A galley is an advanced copy that, I’m afraid, contains a few more typos, but all of the important stuff is the same.) We’re going to send galleys to 20 subscribers who enter the drawing, chosen randomly. I’m afraid that, because of shipping costs, the giveaway is only available to readers in the United States. Sorry about that! To enter, please visit this link and put in your information and Coffee House will do the drawing. Because this is a subscriber-only competition, please use the email address associated with your Substack account. We’ll be checking those emails against my subscriber list. Deadline to enter is March 5th! I’ll let you know here when the books are being shipped out.

That’s about it for now. I’m unreasonably excited given that the publication date is eight months away. I will be running an excerpt here closer to pub day. Let’s go let’s go let’s go let’s go.