September 16, 2020: Book Debut and Beach Combing


Halloween Die-ary #7

Yesterday my phone vibrated nonstop while I was ankle deep in brackish mud catching horseshoe crabs. Continued vibrating while I was taking photos of the graves of ship captains in an 18th century cemetery.  Vibrated while eating lobster rolls. While watching a seal poke its dog-like head from the surf of the Atlantic Ocean as my kids drew jack-o-lanterns in the sand. Vibrated while I explored the spot where the Pilgrims first met Native Americans. Vibrated while I watched Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn in Seems Like Old Times.

It was my fault. I didn’t turn my notifications off. Also, I’d inadvertently scheduled a Cape Cod vacation on Publication Day.

But it also wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know Publication Day could be such fun.

This was my seventh book debut, and I don’t think I’ve had such a blast or such a public showing of support before. And I wanted to thank everyone involved in that.

I had a plan to do my part. The night before as my family slept I scheduled a series of tweets and Facebook posts spread across the day, updated my social media banners, and posted a new article on OTIS, all so that Publication Day could run automatically while my family and I explored the peninsula.

But, man, people were so kind to this book on its birthday. I couldn’t keep up with everyone who posted photos about it, amplified tweets, offered well wishes, and said amazing things to me or their followers about that year of my life squashed into a stack of paper. I wish I could name everyone, and I tried yesterday to acknowledge what I could as I could. But I’m sure I missed some of you and was probably too superficial in my responses to the ones I did thank.

Now that the excitement has a day’s worth of crust overlaying it, I wanted to thank everyone and get all the press pieces together, both from yesterday and the runup to yesterday, for anybody that missed any of the excerpts, reviews, and interviews:

Much love to the team behind this book, both the group mentioned in the acknowledgements for making it, but also those who worked hard after the “make a book” part was done, namely my editor, Rebecca Gyllenhaal; the book’s publicist Jennifer Murphy; my agent, Alex Slater; and authors Lydia Kang and Lisa Morton for their beautiful blurbs.

And thanks to all of you who bought the book and mentioned it on the socials yesterday. Thanks to everyone who has reviewed it on Goodreads and Amazon or is planning to. It helps so much. I know books (and especially my books) are marathons when it comes to getting it into the hands of readers, but yesterday you all made that starting gun so much fun.