Holding my book for the first time
*feelings*
Hi, I’m Kate. Ask an Author is a reader-supported newsletter providing advice and support for authors at all stages of writing, publishing, and hand-wringing. If you know someone this applies to, you can forward them this email and encourage them to sign up. Have a question? Fill out this form and I’ll answer it in a future response.
News:
My debut novel Greenwich will be out July 22!
Adrienne Brodeur, bestselling author of Little Monsters, calls Greenwich “A stunning debut…Fast-paced, beautifully written, vividly peopled… impossible to put down.”
Publisher’s Weekly says it’s “[An] insightful debut…Fans of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere ought to take note” and included it as one of their “buzz books” for summer 2025.
Pre-ordering early is the best way to support a novel and help get Greenwich into stores and in front of other readers! Order now and it will ship to you on release day.
NEW UPDATE: I’m excited to offer SIGNED COPIES if you pre-order from P&T Knitwear or from Oblong Books. Makes a great gift!
“Care and Feeding” is out in The Rumpus
“Good Dead Girls” is out in No Tokens
More work is forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, The Brooklyn Review, Fourteen Hills, and Baltimore Review.
My hardcovers arrived!!!!!
This is it. Not a bound manuscript or a PDF or a mockup or even an ARC but THE BOOK. The same book that will go out to booksellers across the country and be on sale July 22. The book that you’ll crack the spine to when you start to read. The book that will live on people’s shelves and bedside tables and get passed from hand to hand. The book I hope will be dog-eared and tea-stained and reread and loved.
When the package arrived, I couldn’t open it. I kept staring at it like I was afraid to peek inside and make this all real. It sounds dramatic, but for so long, I didn’t think this day would ever come. I’ve been writing for years. I’ve thought seriously about quitting. I knew I’d never get a book published if I stopped trying, but I also didn’t know how long I could keep this up.
I don’t have any magical words of wisdom or “10 steps to ensure your book’s success.” I wish there were those kinds of answers! Holding my own hardcover doesn’t make me believe publishing is a meritocracy and I finally wrote something “good enough” to be let in. It only makes me more convinced that everything is made up and the only thing any of us can do is keep writing, keep doing the work, and keep loving the process enough to stick with it regardless of the outcome.
I’m excited and more than a little pukey thinking about the next four weeks until pub day. At this point, all the work is done — there’s nothing else I can do to the book, and even most of the marketing and publicity is in the hands of my publisher and totally outside my control. (This is a surprisingly hard mental adjustment to make!) All I can do is tell you that I love this book, I’m so grateful early readers are loving this book, and I hope you’ll love it, too.
Every hard part, every 5am panicked revision, every deleted scene, every scrapped word, every “final_final_FINAL_READ THIS INSTEAD” version, every phone call with my agent, editor, and closest reader friends, every tough note to absorb, every scrap of research, every new Word doc, every fresh start — I can finally say that it was worth it. I’m going to try to remember this feeling when new hard parts inevitably hit. And I’m bottling it up to send your way, wherever you are with your writing and publishing. It will be worth it for you, too.
Here’s what Greenwich is about:
Summer, 1999. Rachel Fiske is almost eighteen when she arrives at her aunt and uncle’s mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her glamorous aunt is struggling to heal from an injury, and Rachel wants to help—and escape her own troubles back home. But her aunt is oddly spacey and her uncle is consumed with business, and Rachel feels lonely and adrift, excluded from the world of adults and their secrets. The only bright spot is Claudia, a recent college graduate, aspiring artist, and the live-in babysitter for Rachel’s cousin. As summer deepens, Rachel eagerly hopes their friendship might grow into more.
But when a tragic accident occurs, Rachel must make a pivotal choice. Caught between her desire to do the right thing and to protect her future, she’s the only one who knows what really happened—and her decision has consequences far beyond what she could have predicted.
A riveting debut novel for readers of Celeste Ng and Liane Moriarty, Greenwich explores the nature of desire and complicity against the backdrop of immense wealth and privilege, the ways that whiteness and power protect their own, and the uneasy moral ambiguity of redemption.
Careful readers will notice a change from the summary I shared in the earlier post about blurbs. Hint: my publisher cut a line that went into more detail about the choice Rachel has to make, concerned it was too much of a spoiler. Revising happens all the time!
It’s hard to ask for pre-orders, but now is the time to order a signed copy of Greenwich from P&T Knitwear or Oblong Books. Let your local indie bookstore know to stock it, and ask your library to add it to their collection. Publishers decide now, before a book is out, how well they think a title is going to do and how much muscle (ie money) to put behind it, so every bit of support a book gets pre-publication makes a major difference for how things go once it’s out.
I’ve been writing this Substack since well before Greenwich sold, and you’ve all been a key part of this journey for me. Thank you for being with me from start to finish, and for all the support you continue to give!
Keep writing!
Kate