7 tips for surviving your publication day

Here's how to share your work without blacking out from sheer panic

Me at THE LOST NIGHT launch party in 2019, on the brink of hyperventilation

My friend Jenny Hollander’s USA Today bestselling debut thriller Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead came out in paperback this week! The event reminded me that, shortly before her thriller hit shelves last year, she reached out with an extremely relatable request:

Any tips about how to handle the overwhelm of debut week would be wonderful. As with the bloody wedding, everyone keeps telling me to enjoy it and soak it up and I'm like, OK, yeah, but how do I not black out from sheer panic? 

Ugh, I very much know the panic-blackout feeling (#plackout). You’ve dreamed of this day for so long and built it up so skyscraper-high that you’re kind of sure (yet petrified!) it won’t live up to expectations.

It’s scary on many, many levels—you want sales to soar, you want people to like the damn thing you poured your heart into, and oh God oh God, people are going to read it, they’re going to soak your words into their brains and judge it and you and oh, this little dollhouse world you’ve been playing with won’t be yours alone anymore, and that’s terrifying, akin to watching your tot toddle off to school for the first time (I would think).

I sent her some advice back, and when looking over my tips, I realized they aren’t only applicable to publication days; the #plackout (shh just go with it) looms whenever you’re going to put your work out there, whenever there’s a date on your calendar that makes your stomach twist.

That could mean releasing your first excerpt, loosing a short story on the world, or a traditional book birthday. (My friend

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

just shared some great tips for getting over authorly stage fright, too.)

Here are 7 hard-earned, extremely specific, tried-and-tested tips for remaining lucid when your work hits the world.