Hello Loves,
Pre-orders for my memoir are live on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and should be on Bookshop soon!
I have a book cover!
I have a book release date! I have a book release party planned.
Whew!
This letter will be short, since longer meditations and reports on the trails we walked this spring break in the last snows and early blooms are all waiting for when the dust settles. Seriously, the trail was pretty this week.
But look at what is prettier than anything, this stunning cover!
I mean, seriously. Row House Publishers hired two amazing folks to do this, Martha Kelly and Calvin Platt. And the collaboration of images does everything I hoped it would.
This book, my book, my memoir, is a story about a family illness that for generations killed all of us before we hit fifty. It is about the fastest-warming marine ecosystem on the planet, the Gulf of Maine. But it is also about what happens if you decide that humans and non-human creatures are linked, that ecosystems and bodies are the same, and that if we believe in the inherent worth of every being and every place, we can change the future.
There is optimism baked in, the cover conveys that. There is joy baked in, the cover gets that too.
I was told at 23 that I would be dead by now, I was told I would never have a child. And here I am, alive, about to send my kid off to college, and still using my native kidneys without dialysis. When I was a teenager, the ocean in the place I’d grown up nearly died, hypoxic and extirpated of all life. Now, humpback whales have returned to those waters.
None of that would have happened if a lot of people hadn’t believed that my life matters. None of that would have happened if a lot of people hadn’t believed that the life of all creatures matter. I had to believe both too.
There are people holding on to the future all over the globe doing the same work, and we all need to have a book that reminds us that, while shit is really bad, we still have plenty of power.
I needed that book, so I wrote it. Now, I think you should buy it.
Here are some reasons that you should pre-order books, not just mine, but anyone who you want to have a voice, a platform, and publishing success.
Pre-orders count towards the sales figures in the first week of a book’s release. This can transform a book into a bestseller by some metrics.
Publishers need to know that a book is going to sell. It helps them to plan print runs, and also helps them to adjust how much of a publicity push a book will get.
If you go into your favorite bookseller and pre-order or request a book that is about to be published, that means that they start to get excited about word-of-mouth.
Pre-orders change the algorithm at online sellers, both big places like Amazon and Barnes and Nobel and also at independent booksellers. That helps a book pop up into more feeds, creating the kind of buzz that sells more books. I often describe the blurb economy of writing as an ouroboros, but, damn, pre-orders have that beat.
You can participate in this even if you don’t have the money to buy a hardcover (and I totally get that, as do all your favorite authors). Just go to your local library, or your college or university library, and ask them to get the book for you. That kind of pre-ordering from libraries is transformative! And free to you! Win win!
I’ve paraphrased this from several online articles that I had to read to understand this myself. I loosely knew to do this for friends’ books, but I didn’t get the gravity until now, when I am doing it myself.
Courtney Maum also talks about it in her great book Before and After the Book Deal which I recommend to anyone who is trying to get their own book into the world. She’s incredible and that book is like talking with your best friend writers around a dinner table at a residency and just sponging up their wisdom.
Here are some reasons to pre-order my book specifically—I mean, beyond the fact that I love it, and Gina Frangello edited it beautifully, and Esther Bergdahl fact-checked the hell out of it, and that so many people came together to make it happen, to make it honest, to make it urgent and true.
One, I’ll just remind you that the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant judges believe that I am “beguiling” and “idiosyncratic” which my oldest friend made into a t-shirt that I adore. Here’s their full citation:
“Beguiling, idiosyncratic: Eiren Caffall makes an original contribution to the growing genre of memoirs that explore illness and healing. The Mourner’s Bestiary draws a poetic parallel between the body’s experience of chronic disease and the marine ecosystems Caffall knows well—an unexpected juxtaposition that gives new dimension to climate hazards we face and opportunities to address them. Caffall writes with plangent intensity about our responsibility toward the planet, and her eye for the wonder and beauty of ocean life pierces the illusion of disconnected existence. Water becomes an element that draws us together.” ― Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant judges’ citation
And two, Naomi Klein told me to write this book when I was just starting it five plus years ago, and then she gave me this blurb:
"Eiren Caffall has produced some of the most powerful writing on the ecological crisis that I have read anywhere. By looking at climate change through the lens of her own illness, and through the eyes of her unique son, problems that we so often push away because of the enormity of their size and their apparent distance from daily life suddenly become intimate and human-scale. We can suddenly allow repressed and suppressed truths to enter us, and we are forever changed. Caffall is a gifted writer, and this book is strong medicine." — Naomi Klein
OK! Now back to the madness of trying to put out two books back-to-back. If you want to see what that looks like, just go see Dune II and watch the part where Paul rides the sandworm. True facts.
And, finally, here’s a place we walked in the last snows of the Midwestern spring. It was so lovely. Forests are keeping me sane.
I’ll write soon.
Love,
Eiren