knew, to a set of marketing and publicity points, consumed and lauded by fans who think they know them, but don’t really, but understand this also, and celebrate them regardless? I watched all this happen with Athena the year after we graduated college, in the run-up to the launch of her first novel. Athena was a Known Entity at Yale, a campus celebrity who received regular declarations of love in that year’s iteration of the Secret Valentines Facebook group, but she wasn’t yet so famous that she had a Wikipedia page, or that the average reader’s eyes would light up with recognition when you said her name. That changed when the New York Times ran a hype piece on her titled “Yale Graduate Lands Six-Figure Deal with Random House,” centering a photograph of Athena in a low-cut blouse so sheer you could see her nipples, posing in front of Sterling Memorial Library. They ran a quote from a famous poet then adjuncting at Yale dubbing her a “worthy successor to the likes of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston.” Everything ramped up from there. Her Twitter follow count shot up to the mid–five figures; her Instagram numbers hit six figures. She did puff-piece interviews with the Wall Street Journal and HuffPost; once, while driving to a doctor’s appointment, I was startled to hear her crystalline, unplaceable, occasionally suspiciously fake, somewhat-British accent drifting through my Uber. Cue the mythmaking in real time, the constructed persona deemed maximally marketable by her publishing team, paired with a healthy dose of neoliberal exploitation. Complex messages reduced to sound bites; biographies cherry-picked for the quirky and exotic. This in fact happens to every successful author, but is weirder to witness when you’ve been friends with the source material. Athena Liu writes only on a Remington typewriter (true, but only after her senior year, after she got the idea from a famous visiting lecturer). Athena Liu was a finalist for a national writing competition when she was only sixteen (also true, but come on; every high schooler who can string sentences together places in those competitions at one point or another; it’s not hard to beat out other kids whose definition of art consists of plagiarized Billie Eilish lyrics). Athena Liu is a prodigy, a genius, the Next Big Thing, the voice of her generation. Here are six books that Athena Liu can’t live without (including, invariably, Proust). Here are five affordable notebook brands Athena Liu recommends (she writes only on Moleskines, but check these other brands out if you’re poor)!
This is so wild, I’d texted her, along with the link to a recent Cosmo shoot. I didn’t realize Cosmo readers were, like, literate. HAHAH I know! she’d responded. I don’t even recognize that girl on the front page, they’ve airbrushed me to death. Those are not my eyebrows. It’s the hyperreal. Back then it was still cool to quote Baudrillard as if you’d read him in full. Exactly, she’d said. Athena.0, and Athena.1. I’m a work of art. All construct. I’m Athena Del Rey. So when it was my turn to release a novel, I had wild expectations that publishing would do the same thing for me and Over the Sycamore, that some well-oiled machine would build my public persona without my lifting a finger, that the marketing department would take me by the hand and coach me on precisely the right things to wear and say when I showed up for all the major media interviews they had set up for me. Instead my publisher threw me to the wolves. Everything I learned about self-promotion I learned from conversations on a debut writer’s Slack, where everyone was as lost as I was, throwing out outdated blog posts they’d dredged up from the corners of the internet. One absolutely had to have an author website, but was WordPress better or Squarespace? Did newsletters drive sales, or were they a waste of money? Should you hire a professional for your author photographs, or was a selfie taken with Portrait mode on your iPhone sufficient? Should you create a separate Twitter account for your author persona? Could you shitpost on it? If you got into public beef with other writers, would that tank your sales or drive up your visibility? Was it still cool to have public beef on Twitter? Or was beef now reserved only for Discord? Needless to say, the high-profile interviews never materialized. The closest I got was an invitation by some guy named Mark, whose podcast had five hundred followers, and which I immediately regretted saying yes to when he began ranting about the overpoliticization of contemporary genre fiction and I began to worry that he was maybe a Nazi. This time around, I get far more support from Eden. Emily and Jessica are on hand to answer all my questions. Yes, I should be active on all my social media platforms. Yes, I should include preorder links on every post— Twitter’s algorithm reduces visibility for tweets with links, but you can get around that by including links farther down the thread or in your bio. No, starred reviews don’t actually mean anything, but yes, I should still brag
about them because artificial hype is still hype. Yes, the book has been sent to reviewers at all the major outlets, and we’re expecting at least a few to run something positive. No, we’re probably not going to get a profile in the New Yorker, though perhaps a few books down the road we can talk. I have actual money now, soI hire a photographer to take a new set of author photos. My old set was done by my sister’s friend from college, an amateur photographer named Melinda who happened to be in the area and charged me a fraction of the rates I’d found elsewhere online. I contorted my face in a number of different ways, trying to evoke the sultry, mysterious, and serious vibes of the photos of Serious Famous Woman Writers. Channel Jennifer Egan. Channel Donna Tartt. Athena always looked like a model in hers: hair floating loose around her face, skin porcelain pale and glowing, full lips loose and slightly curled up at the edges as if she knew a joke that you weren’t in on, one eyebrow arched as if to say, Try me. It’s easy to sell books if you’re gorgeous. I made peace a long time ago with the fact that I’m only passably hot, and only from the right angles and lighting, soI tried for the next best thing, which is “tortured in a very deep and brilliant way.” It’s hard to transpose those thoughts to the camera, though, and the results horrified me when Melinda sent them in. I looked likeI was trying to hold in a sneeze, or likeI had to take a shit but was too afraid to tell anyone. I wanted to take them all again, this time with maybe a mirror in the background soI could see what the fuck I was doing, but I felt bad for wasting Melinda’s time, soI picked the one whereI looked the most like a human being and the least like myself and paid her fifty bucks for her trouble. This timeI drop half a grand on a professional photographer in DC named Cate. We shoot in her studio, where she employs all sorts of lighting equipment I’ve never seen before, and which I can only hope will wash out my acne scars. Cate is brisk, friendly, professional. Her instructions are clear and direct. “Chin up. Relax your face a bit. Now I’m going to tell a joke, and just react however you want, just don’t pay attention to the lens. Lovely. Oh, that’s lovely.” She sends me a selection of watermarked photos a few days later. I’m amazed by how good I look, especially in the photos we took outside. During golden hour I come off as nicely tanned, which makes me look sort of racially ambiguous. My eyes are cast demurely to the side, my mind full of profound and cryptic thoughts. I look like someone who could write a
book about Chinese laborers in World War I and do it justice. I look like a Juniper Song. At Emily’s suggestion, I start cultivating a social media presence. Until now, I’ve only tweeted random shitposts and jokes about Jane Austen. I had barely any followers, so it didn’t matter what I was tossing out. But now that I’m drawing attention for my book deal, I want to give off the right impression. I want bloggers, reviewers, and readers to know I’m the kind of person who, you know, cares about the right issues. I study the Twitter feeds of Athena and her mutuals to see which community figures I should follow, which conversations I should be a part of. I retweet hot takes about bubble tea, MSG, BTS, and some drama series called The Untamed. I learn it’s important to be anti-PRC (that’s the People’s Republic of China) but pro-China (I’m not terribly sure how that’s different). I learn what “little pinks” and “tankies” are and make sureI don’t inadvertently retweet support for either. I decry what’s happening in Xinjiang. I Stand with Hong Kong. I start gaining dozens more followers a day once I’ve started vocalizing on these matters, and when I notice that many of my followers are people of color or have things like #BLM and #FreePalestine in their bios, I know I’m on the right track. And just like that, my public persona springs into being. Farewell June Hayward, little-known author of Over the Sycamore. Hello Juniper Song, author of this season’s biggest hit—brilliant, enigmatic, the late Athena Liu’s best friend. IN THE MONTHS BEFORE THE LAST FRONT COMES OUT, EDEN’S PUBLICITY team does everything it can to make sure all of America is aware of its existence. They send ARCs—that’s “advanced reader copies”—out to other bigname authors at Eden, and though not everyone has time to read it, a handful of bestselling writers do say kind things like “Engrossing!” and “A compelling voice,” which Daniella will have printed on the jacket cover. The cover art was finalized about a year before the release date. Daniella asked me to put together a Pinterest board of ideas for the design. (Authors usually get some input on themes and general design ideas, but otherwise, we accept that we know nothing about cover art and leave the process alone.) I tooled around Google for some photographs of the Chinese Labour Corps and found some nice black-and-white photographs of the laborers themselves—there’s one in particular that I thought was
charming: eight or so laborers crowded beaming around the camera. I sent it off to Daniella. What about this? I asked. It’s in the public domain now, so we wouldn’t have to get the rights. But Daniella and the art department didn’t think that was quite the right vibe. We don’t want it to look like a nonfiction history book, she responded. Would you pick that up if you were strolling through the bookstore? In the end, we went with a more modern theme. The words THE LAST FRONT are printed in massive block letters, against an abstract duo-chrome rendering of what looks like some French village on fire. We want colors that emphasize bold, epic, and romantic, wrote Daniella. And you’ll notice the Chinese characters on the edges of the inner jacket—that’ll let readers know they can expect something different with this one. The cover felt hefty, serious, attractive. It was somehow simultaneously every World War I novel that had been published in the last ten years, and also something new, exciting, and original. Perfect, I wrote to Daniella. That’s perfect. Now that we’re much closer to release, I start seeing ads for it everywhere—Goodreads, Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram. They even get an ad for the subway. Either they didn’t tell me about it, or I forgot, because when I get off the train to Franconia-Springfield and see my book cover plastered on the opposite wall, I’m so stunned that I stand frozen on the platform. That’s my book. That’s my name. “The Last Front,” a woman behind me reads out loud to her companion. “By Juniper Song. Huh.” “Looks good,” says the man. “We should check it out.” “Sure,” says the woman. “Maybe.” A thrum of joy comes over me in that instant, and though it’s so trite you’d think I was imitating an actress in a CW pilot, I ball both hands into fists and jump high into the air. The good news keeps piling up. Brett emails me with updates on foreign rights sales. We’ve sold rights in Germany, Spain, Poland, and Russia. Not France, yet, but we’re working on it, says Brett. But nobody sells well in France. If the French like you, then you’re doing something very wrong. The Last Front starts making it onto all sorts of lists with titles like “Ten Best Books of the Summer,” “Debuts We Can’t Wait For,” and incredibly, PopSugar’s “15 Must-Read Summer Beach Reads.” Not everyone wants to read
about World War I at the beach, I joke on Twitter. But if you’re a freak like me, you might enjoy this list! My book even gets chosen for a national book club run by a pretty white Republican woman who is mostly famous for being the daughter of a prominent Republican politician, and this gives me some moral discomfort, but then I figure that if the book club reader base is largely Republican white women, then wouldn’t it be good for a novel to broaden their worldviews? In the UK, The Last Front is chosen for the Readaholics Book Box. I didn’t know book boxes were such a major industry, but apparently subscription services like Readaholics send books out in cute crates with accompanying merchandise to tens of thousands of customers a month. The Readaholics Book Box edition of The Last Front will have special deckled edges, and ship out along with a cruelty-free vegan leather tote bag, a collectible key chain featuring various jade Chinese zodiac animals (for a special fee you can take a personality quiz online to determine your zodiac affinity), and a selection of sustainably sourced, single-origin green teas from Taiwan. Barnes & Noble decides to do an exclusive special signed edition, which means that four months before release date, I get eight giant packages delivered to my apartment containing tip-in sheets, which are blank title pages that will be inserted into the printed books once I’ve signed them. Signing thousands of tip-in sheets takes forever, and I spend the next two weeks doing “wine and sign” nights, whereI sit in front of my TV with a pile of pages to my right and a bottle of merlot, watching Bling Empire as I write “Juniper Song” in big, looping script. Are these the signs of a bestseller in the making? I wonder. They must be. Why doesn’t anyone tell you, right off the bat, how important your book is to the publisher? Before Over the Sycamore came out, I worked my ass off doing blog interviews and podcasts, hoping that the more sweat I put into publicity, the more my publisher would reward my efforts. But now, I see, author efforts have nothing to do with a book’s success. Bestsellers are chosen. Nothing you do matters. You just get to enjoy the perks along the way. EARLY REVIEWS START POURING IN TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE RELEASE date.
I make it a nightly habit to scroll through new Goodreads reviews, just for that little boost of serotonin. They tell authors never to look at Goodreads, but nobody follows that advice—none of us can resist the urge to know how our work is being received. In any case, The Last Front is killing it; its review average is a healthy 4.89, and most of the top reviews are so gushingly positive that the occasional ambivalent three-star review hardly fazes me. One night, though, I glimpse something that makes my heart stop. One star. The Last Front has received its first one-star review, from a user named CandiceLee. No way. I click over to her profile, wondering if it’s just a coincidence. Nope—CandiceLee, NYC, works in publishing. Favorite authors: Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and Jhumpa Lahiri. She’s not particularly active on Goodreads—her last review is for a poetry collection from 2014 —meaning this was no accident. Her thumb didn’t just slip. Clearly, Candice went out of her way to log in and give my book one star. Fingers trembling, I screenshot the rating and send it to my editor. Hey Daniella, I know you said not to look at GR, but a friend sent me this and I’m a bit concerned. It seems like a pretty large lapse in professionalism. I guess technically Candice has the right to review my work however she likes in her off time, but after what happened with the SR this feels intentional . . . Best, June Daniella gets back to me first thing in the morning. Thank you for letting me know. That is quite unprofessional. We will handle this internally. I know Daniella’s email voice well enough by now to tell when she’s irritated. Curt, choppy sentences. She didn’t even sign off. Daniella is pissed. Good. Hot vindication coils in my gut. Candice deserves it—putting the sensitivity read kerfuffle aside, what kind of psychopath would fuck around with an author’s feelings like this? Shouldn’t she know how stressful and terrifying it is to launch a book? I bask for a moment, imagining what kind of chaos I’ve sown over at Eden’s office this morning. And though I would
never say this out loud about a fellow woman—the industry is tough enough as it is—I hopeI got that bitch fired.
Six MONTHS BECOME WEEKS BECOME DAYS, AND THEN THE BOOK is out. Last time, I learned the hard way that for most writers, the day your book goes on sale is a day of abject disappointment. The week beforehand feels like it should be the countdown to something grand, that there will be fanfare and immediate critical acclaim, that your book will skyrocket to the top of all the sales rankings and stay there. But in truth, it’s all a massive letdown. It’s fun to walk into bookstores and see your name on the shelves, that’s true (unless you’re not a major front-list release, and your book is buried in between other titles without so much as a face out, or even worse, not even carried by most stores). But other than that, there’s no immediate feedback. The people who bought the book haven’t had time to finish reading it yet. Most sales happen in preorders, so there’s no real movement on Amazon or Goodreads or any of the other sites you’ve been checking like a maniac the whole month prior. You have all this hope and energy bubbled up inside you, but none of it . . . goes anywhere. There’s no single, crushing moment of realization when your book tanks, either. There’s only a thousand disappointments, stacked on top of one another as the days tick by, as you compare your own sales numbers to those of other authors, as you keep seeing the same signed, unbought copy sitting on the shelf of your local bookstore every time you pop in to check. There’s only a slow trickle of “sales are a bit lower than we’d expected but we hope they’ll pick up” emails from your editor, followed by total, inscrutable silence. There’s only a growing sense of dread and disappointment, until the bitterness becomes too much, until you start to feel stupid for believing that you could be an author at all.
SoI learned, from the release of Over the Sycamore, not to get my hopes up. But this time feels special. This timeI learn again how vastly different the world is as experienced by writers like Athena. The morning of my launch day, Eden has a massive crate of champagne delivered to my apartment. Congratulations, reads the attached handwritten note from Daniella. You earned it. I extract a bottle from the wrapping, take a selfie as I hold it up, and upload it to Instagram with the caption: TODAY’S THE DAY! Feeling grateful, overwhelmed, and nervous. Blessed to have the best team in the business. It gets two thousand likes in an hour. Watching those hearts pile up gives me the flood of serotonin that I’ve always hoped for on launch day. Throughout the morning, strangers keep tagging me in congratulations posts, reviews, and photographs of my book on the New Releases pile at Barnes & Noble, or face out with a recommendation tag at their local indie bookstores. One bookseller tags me in a literal pyramid of her books, captioned: DETERMINED TO SELL 100 COPIES OF THE LAST FRONT ON DAY ONE! WITNESS MEEEE Common wisdom says that social media is a bad metric for gauging how well a book is doing. Twitter doesn’t reflect the larger book-buying ecosphere, for example, and books that seem to be getting lots of hype are usually explained by an overactive Twitter presence by the author’s team. Likes and followers don’t necessarily translate into sales. But shouldn’t all this hype signal something? I’m reviewed in NPR, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. With Over the Sycamore, I’d felt lucky to even get a Kirkus review, and that had been little more than a plot summary. Meanwhile, everyone’s talking about The Last Front like they know it’s going to be a hit. And I wonder if that’s the final, obscure part of how publishing works: if the books that become big do so because at some point everyone decided, for no good reason at all, that this would be the title of the moment. Arbitrary as it is, I’m glad that it’s working for me. That night, I have a launch event scheduled at Politics and Prose near the Waterfront. I’ve been here a dozen times as part of the audience. It’s the kind of bookstore that ex-presidents and celebrities speak at on book tours; a few years ago, I came here to see Hillary Clinton give a reading. Athena