This week I had the pleasure of attending the Library of Congress National Book Festival in DC. My book The Meth Lunches was chosen as the adult book to represent the state of Nevada. (The children’s pic was by Northern Nevada icon, Sophie Sheppard, The Moon's Tear: A Desert Night's Sky.) This was a huge honor for me. I love Nevada and am proud to represent.
The funny thing is, these events are usually challenging for me. I don’t look forward to them. As an author, there is - totally understandably - a hyper-focus on selling your book.
There’s pressure from NY publishing. You have to sell an obscene number of books to have your book be viewed as successful. You fill your feeds with marketing for your book, the mentions, the reviews, the celebrity endorsements, until you get to award season and then everyone gets to watch you fumble through that, and whatever drew these people to you in the first place - your IG photos of your family, or your inciteful micro-essays on pressing topics, your community work telling the stories of people in vulnerable places - well, you no longer have time to post those things anyway. The very thing that drew readers to you, you’ve had to stop doing, so you can sell, sell, sell the book.
People who love you, also secretly hate you.
You secretly hate you. LOL.
Last week, someone asked me to speak at an event here in Vegas and I knew who their audience would be and I had to say: You know, people have really had enough of me for awhile. Let’s do this next year!
Obviously, selling is important for the book business. We are all in the business of keeping the lights on. Publishers are not charities. Writers are not not-for-profits. If we want to write, we have to sell. If we want to make art we have to sell. But the selling is not a natural thing for many writers and artists. (Me.) We (me) want(s) to squirrel away in our our writing dens and make more books and essays and not have to commune with people unless they are part of our crazy matrix of story, fragmented and pre-born in our heads.
You must leave the long glorious winter of the den. You have to sell.
So it feels, sometimes, like every event has to open the door to new sales and new exposure and new leaps and bounds. Otherwise, it’s not worth the effort, energy and exhaustion to do it.
Except there are flaws in this thinking. It’s like a silo you find yourself in. How many copies sold last night? How was the turnout? (Are we all concerned with crowd size? Yes, yes we are.) What kind of marketing will I have to do to get people to come out?
And then there is what happens when no one is looking: You might be the type of person to check other people’s stats to get a sense of how you are doing, or you compulsively check your own stats frequently throughout the day, or take on an “enemy” colleague in your imagination, where you secretly track their caeer and their amazon rankings and boo when they win and smile when they lose, or you worry at 2am about subscriber numbers, or monetizing, or just assume you suck and are the suckiest writer ever and stare at the ceiling in agony all night.
Whatever your poison, it happens.
I kinda thought this Library of Congress/National Book Festival event could be tough. Exhausting. Futile. A lot of emotional work selling to people.
So I prepared myself. I said: Okay Kim, (Yes, I talk to myself) the goal is to have fun, meet a bunch of people, talk about all the books, not just your own, listen to people’s stories, have more fun, hug people, and then get on a plane and go home content with all the connection and ready to re-enter the den.
I decided that selling a book, even one, wasn’t even the goal.
Politics and Prose sold my book at their onsite shop at the festival, but whatever. Fuck it. If they had to send them all back, it wouldn’t be about that. As my therapist, Megan, likes to remind me: It’s about the why. Why did you write the book? Why are you out there talking about this stuff? Why is it important? Why does talking to affluent people about vulnerable people matter? (Also, I love my therapist - Thank you, Megan.)
Let me tell you, focusing on relationships and listening as they tell their stories changes everything. It works to move you outside of yourself. It gives perspective. You stop angst-ing about your life and bring focus to other people. Using your position so other people, besides you, have agency.

The event itself made it easy. People had maps of the US and had to go to every table to get a stamp, adults and kids, so everyone was forced into interacting with everyone. This wasn’t a room of tourists who happened in. This was room after room after room of book lovers, teachers, librarians, writers and readers.
I mean the very best people.
Every table had cool book swag from that state. Nevada humanities made these cool recipe cards (above) and people loved picking up the ratatouille recipe.
I talked to a chef from Naples about his decades of pizza-making, and counseled a young couple on how to make the dish for a weeknight dinner. Earlier this week, someone sent me a photo of the ratatouille they made.
We also had free first chapters of my book, a host of Nevada-based magazines, book marks and lots of handouts on how to support vulnerable people in our communities. I put out fliers that broke down Matthew Desmond’s Poverty By America and Andrew Fisher’s Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups and why these books matter. People started talking to me about poverty in our communities because they recognized those books and wanted to know about mine, or they knew my book and wanted to know more about the others.
I met people who had already read my book and were - and this still shocks me - gobsmacked and excited to meet the person who wrote a book they loved. There was hugging and happiness.
I saw every kind of funny, inspiring, radical book loving t-shirt, and we openly talked about them. Kathleen, the Nevada Humanities superstar who arranged the whole event, said the bookish T-shirt would win the day and she was right!
And that brings me to the people of the humanities: I met and got to spend the day with George Tsz-Kwan Lam and Kathleen Kuo of Nevada Humanities. It was completely my pleasure to work with two smart, creative, organized, thinking-outside-the-box people.
They could also stamp a mean map and handle unruly readers crowding the table. I would hear them say: And the author is right here! and people would be like: Really? You are the author? You write this book? They did the selling for me.
I was so grateful. What a gift to an author whose natural habit is a den.
Kathleen had this brilliant idea to put up a tri-fold poster board up and ask people to write down the foods that bring them comfort. This was a simple interactive device that really spoke to people.
Kids spent a lot of time writing down their favorite foods, but also adults. And each time it lended itself to talking about food, comfort and discomfort. From the four-year-old who loved parsley and ate it raw, and explained the texture to me in shockingly accurate detail, to the Ethiopian lady whose comfort food was injera (bread), which led to a long talk about making injera from scratch, where she gave me tips and spoke to how complex it is. To the amount of people from all walks of life who take comfort in eating pupusas, so many, and a lot of kids like papusas too. I learned a lot and loved seeing the answers.
I don’t think I would’ve seen such a simple project leading to so many conversation, more sharing of stories and recipes, and more discussion of comfort and discomfort. It is a reminder that sometimes, simple is best. (Stop overthinking, Kim)
BTW, every state (or most) have a funded humantities program under the umbrella of The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Shelly Lowe, the Chair, and a Navajo woman, who I got to meet at the event, oversees the funding of projects covering our history, linguistics, law, culture, philosphy, language, ethics, all the big bedrocks of our way of life.
Our state humanties org, Nevada Humanities, is robust and engaged.
I suspect there might be other very active state programs as well. (Shout out to our next door neighbors, the Humanities folks from the North Marianas, who came with a fun, fully-loaded table, too. And costumes. I need to get Kathleen and George onto the costumes. LOL) If you are in the humanities, check out your state orgs. The NEH funds all kinds creative and important work.
Maybe even yours…
I feel like I came to a kind of solid place, a balance with selling the book and enjoying the conversation around the book. What I really gained was a template of how to move into these spaces in which I am not organically comfortable.
I’m going to TRY to NOT sell a fucking thing. Really.
What I’m going to do is what my therapist, said: Focus on the why.
Why did you write this book? What was the fucking point?
Focus on that….
In the end, it isn’t even about “changing hearts and minds” or proselytizing your cause. This is a sell, too.
Instead, the goal now for these events is to shut up and listen. To give other people agency with my silence and attention. To take their words back to my pages in the den.
It is not quite so lonely in the writing den when you bring people back with you.
PS: Politics and Prose sold all of my books
(This is lovely frosting, but it’s not even remotely the cake.)
Of course they sold all the books, it’s excellent and powerful.
When I read people were gobsmacked and excited to meet you I let out a happy sob and laugh. I would be gobsmacked and excited to meet you, and want to give a big hug. You wonderful, big-living person, with your powerful voice, just giving and giving. Glad you're in the world.