Yay Team FAT TALK!

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Signing preorders this week for Split Rock Books. My heart!!

Hi friends!

Thank you so much for signing up for Team FAT TALK. This is a little newsletter-within-the-newsletter for folks who are especially excited to support the book launch and I couldn’t love you more. You won’t get a ton of extra emails, I promise, but I will have a few specific favors to ask. And this is the place to be if you’d like to know a little more about how a book launch works. Maybe because you’re an author or aspiring author yourself, maybe because you’re a reader, maybe because you’re just nosey like that? Me too!

In this week-before-launch, there are two big things on my mind: Maximizing preorders and getting people to come to book events. I have talked quite a lot already about why preorders matter, and I’m guessing if you went to the trouble to join this list, that you have already preordered. But! If you haven’t! And you do literally nothing else/never read another one of these emails, please do preorder the book! (Or request it at your local library if preordering isn’t in the budget.) Here are all your options:

• You can preorder a signed copy from Split Rock.

• You can get it from your local independent bookstore.

• You can get it from Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Target (where they still don’t show the cover, just why!), or Amazon (where the ebook is, at this minute, the #1 New Release in Child Development and the hardcover is the #1 New Release in Children’s Eating Disorder Health; Amazon categories are an utter mystery but I guess that’s nice?).

• You can also get the audiobook from Audible or the independent-friendly Libro.FM.

• You can get the UK version, which will also eventually come out in Australia, New Zealand, and the rest of the Commonwealth.

And whatever version you buy/wherever you buy it, you can enter the preorder swag giveaway and the bookclub giveaway!

But now let’s talk about events.

They are the part of a book launch I most enjoy in the moment and really enjoy having done, but absolutely dread beforehand. I love talking to an audience, but I get weirdly fixated on random details, like what if the microphones don’t work, or I’m late, or I wear the wrong shoes for the weather. (Sometime I’ll write a whole essay about my trauma around seasonally appropriate dressing.) And obviously I worry about the possibility that nobody will come! Probably all of the random details will be fine, including my shoes, or they won’t and I will survive. But the nobody showing thing is a thing that happens to lots of authors! This is the best-ever Twitter thread because a first time author experienced this totally legit trauma and then every famous author on Twitter wrote her a nice note about it. But now Chelsea had that moment and if nobody comes to MY event, I can’t also tweet about it and have Stephen King say nice things.

So! If you’re local to the Hudson Valley, you should come to the Desmond-Fish Public Library at 3pm on Saturday, for my official launch event with

Julia Turshen

. (Register here.) We are hoping to hold this one outdoors, FYI, so dress accordingly!

And! If you’re in or near New York City, you should really, really come to McNally Jackson at the Seaport on Tuesday at 7pm, for my conversation with Kelsey Miller. This is my official pub date AND I am extra nervous no one will come because they only put the registration link up yesterday, gah. I mean, it’s fine, Kelsey and I will just go to dinner, looking great in our seasonally appropriate outfits. But also, please come.

We have three more events coming up so far; full book tour details are here.

One last assignment.

I know, I already told you to buy a thing AND get dressed and leave your house. But this one is super easy: If you use GoodReads, please go mark FAT TALK as “want to read.” If you are one of the lucky ducks with an advance copy, you can even go ahead and write a review! Actually, look, they don’t quiz you, so you can write a review whenever you want. Here’s an excerpt of part of Chapter 5 that just ran in TIME, and tomorrow you’re going to hear all of Chapter 1 on the pod, so you can totally write a review based on that if you feel so moved? Like what even IS “reading a book,” right?

GoodReads’ ratings and reviews matter because they are tied to the mysterious Amazon algorithm that controls so much about a book’s fate. And you can review a book there before it’s officially released, which you can’t do on Amazon. So! Giving the book any amount of love on GoodReads is greatly appreciated. (Related, there will be a GoodReads Giveaway for finished books starting Tuesday, don’t worry, I’ll remind you.)

Thanks again!

PS. If there is any particular aspect of the book launch process that you’re curious about, hit reply or drop a comment. I’d love to make these little missives fun and useful for you to read, as well as full of all these favors.