Then I met D'Souza last week, and he proved there's no magic formula. It happens with lots and lots and lots of work.
Welcome to the first installment of my interview with novelist and journalist Tony D'Souza: five long essays full of no-nonsense, nuts and bolts writing advice. It's long part of my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.
Jason Boog:
Your life sounded incredibly busy while writing Whiteman, do you have any advice for the fledgling writer balancing a day job and a writing project at the same time? Once someone finishes their first book, do you have any advice about book tours and other ways to promote the book?
Tony D'Souza:
Develop a discipline. Do whatever it takes to get yourself seated before the paper. If you have to drink, drink. If you have to divorce your husband, divorce him. If you have to dump your kids at your parents’, dump them. Decide what you want to do with your life.
Otherwise, you will look back with regret...
I wrote Whiteman while teaching a 4/4 comp load with 35 students per section. Meaning I had to grade 140 two page essays every two weeks. I wrote Whiteman to escape that, as well as many other things.
I look at myself at that time with a sense of fright. How frantic I was, crazed, impassioned, desperate. I was a terrible teacher; my students loved me. They were co-conspirators. When the writing got really hot and heavy toward the end in October ’04, I was canceling so many classes.
Not officially. I’d ask the students if they wanted to have class that day, they’d say ‘No’, I’d look out in the hall for the Dean, and then we’d all hustle out to our cars on our tiptoes. I’d get home and calm my nerves with a bolt of gin, light a cigarette, sit down, inhabit that village in Africa.
There was ink all over my fingers, wadded paper all around my ankles, the manuscript getting taller and taller, oh but I could feel it, telling this story so good, trusting this story to give back to me as much as I was giving to it. I’d see this one girl every Tuesday, another every Saturday.
I stopped calling them, seeing them. I’d given the Saturday girl a key, she came in one night drunk and expecting that I was having an affair.
And I was, but it was with the Muse. I took the key away, escorted that girl out. When I finished Whiteman late that November, I sat back and sighed and knew I’d never feel that way again. Just completely spent, body & soul. But you rest.
Now what is practical advice is that if you do sell that first novel, you have to transition into another kind of hard work: going on tour and promoting your book. First novels are long shot bets for all publishers, meaning they don’t expend much money on what for them is a very high risk.
It’s more like ‘push some out there, see who catches on’.
You can help your book catch on by promoting it. Don’t rely on your publisher for this. Do whatever you can think of to get the word out about your book. Let your friends, family, acquaintances, affiliations, alumni groups, and on and on, know about it.
Don’t be shy. Be proud. You wrote a good book. So go to bat for it. That said, try to have some class. Don’t bang a drum and blow a whistle at AWP while wearing a red clown’s nose.
You can’t force people to buy your book. But if it’s good, people will come. Get in touch with universities, let the English department know who you are, that you are trying to set up a tour, that you’d like to come in and speak.
Start working on this five or six months before release. It takes time and is logistically demanding. And once you are on tour, think of the best parts of your book and inhabit them, share your love for them with your audience.
Sure, read a bit, but this can be so much more than that. And they want more. Tell some stories that belong only to you. They’ll buy your book. And then your publisher might even print your second one.
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