"Why am I seeing that one book everywhere?"
In which I explain why the novel LOST LAMBS is *really* getting so much media coverage.
I recently read something wrong on the internet—or, well, mostly wrong.
It was an essay in which a cultural critic—let’s call him “Doug”—questioned the authenticity of the media blitz for Lost Lambs, a debut novel by Madeline Cash (FSG, January 13).
Posting a screenshot of Cash’s closely-clustered hits—Vogue, The New York Times, LitHub, The Washington Post, The Atlantic—Doug concluded that someone powerful must have orchestrated the whole thing “from above.” He saw it as proof of a rigged cultural economy in which access and not merit determined whose books got what kind of attention. (Doug hadn’t read the book, but he made that part of his argument: its quality was irrelevant.)
You might be wondering why I’m not naming Doug or linking to his piece. I have many reasons for this, including but not limited to:
1. it’s hard to be a person;
2. I’m feeling particularly tender today, as I’m sure are a lot of you; and
3. I just don’t feel like picking on people for seeing specters of their own powerlessness everywhere they look right now.
Plus, picking on Doug would risk personalizing my response to what is in fact a widespread anxiety among authors:
Why is that book getting so much more attention [than mine]?
If you’re an author who already feels lonely, uncertain, or overlooked, seeing a rollout like Madeline Cash’s can hurt—even if your book came out long ago (or isn’t coming out for a while yet).
If you were an author who happened to be my client, part of my job would be to ameliorate that hurt as best I could, clearing your confusion with real talk that is reassuring in a Sarah, Plain and Tall kind of way. (You know: when she arrives at the train station, she’s a lot to take in and not really what you wanted to see, but in the end, in her plainspoken way, she brings comfort to life on the farm.)
That’s what I’m going to give you today: real talk—hopefully comforting—on why select debut novels in general and Lost Lambs in particular get disproportionate media attention. To do this as accurately as possible, I’ve talked on deep background with a handful of industry experts: book reviewers, publicists, booksellers. Some of them had a direct hand in writing about or stocking Cash’s novel; most didn’t.
What I haven’t done is talk to anyone directly involved on the publisher’s side with Lost Lambs, although in a rare gesture in the direction of actual journalism, I did ask. They said no—kindly—because they had to. (Publishers’ PR and marketing commitments vary widely between authors and are subject to change at any time; discretion is prudent and merciful for all.)
Which is all to say: what follows amounts to a combination of outside observation and educated guessing.
Any of the Lost Lambs-related particulars could be wrong, and I’m sure some of them will be. But I know for sure that the general picture I’m about to paint will be more accurate and professionally educative than Doug’s take, so there’s that.
OK? OK.
Here goes.
