As I wrote in my art book/memoir, The Sum of Its Parts, 2016 is a year that will live on in infamy, though at the beginning of the year, I was feeling pretty optimistic because that was the year I published the YA novel I had worked on for many years, A Bitter Pill to Swallow. Five years ago today, I uploaded the final version of my book to be published after a long and stressful process that involved numerous rejections and disappointments. In the months leading up to publication, I tried to stay hopeful, but all around there were signs that the political situation in the United States was becoming more and more dire. As the months leading up to the election passed, the horrible man who would eventually become our horrible president was beginning to take up all the space in the discourse about just about everything, it seemed. And I was trying to promote my debut novel in spite of him.
Those worlds collided March 11th, which was both the day of my opening reception/book signing and also the day Chicagoans ran a certain candidate's hate rally out of town. (If anyone missed the reception because they were at the protest, I completely support that, by the way.) Since this is inauguration day, I can't help but think about this. And sometimes I also wonder if things would have been different had I published at a time when people's attention wasn't so consumed by the election.
Still, I am grateful that I was able to find bloggers who were enthusiastic about reviewing my book, and that I won a 2016 Chicago Writers Association's Book of the Year award for it as well. And 2016 was also the year that the Book Expo of America was at McCormick place, so I had the opportunity to have my book on display in one of the booths and also attend the expo and network there. Publishing my book myself opened up opportunities to speak on and moderate panels and meet a community of authors and booksellers I would never have met before. Illustrating my own book covers led to illustration projects for other authors, and I have been able to parlay my book layout experience into projects as well.
I also think that the political turmoil of this era led to more discussions about diversity in publishing. Though it still doesn't reflect the diversity of the population, the roster of books published about African-American teens has increased since 2016. And I would also like to mention that though it helped launch and support new traditionally published authors, I felt like the movement for diverse books left independent authors on the sidelines.
At the time that I was working on my book cover designs in the previous year, there weren't many Black characters on YA book covers. That's changed a lot now, and I'd like to think that I was at the forefront of that change.
Five years later, there are still a few milestones I had hoped to reach but still haven't yet. Hopefully one day I will finally be able to afford to record an audiobook edition. And I still don't have my book in as many libraries as I would like. In fact, one of my goals last year was to get a booth at the American Library Association's annual conference because it was supposed to be here in Chicago, but was canceled due to the pandemic. But in spite of these things, I'm glad I published my book when I did because I'm not sure how well I would have been able to concentrate on writing it had I attempted to do so during the past four tumultuous years. And though one reviewer described my antagonists as "cartoonish," perhaps now they might seem more realistic after we have have had to endure four years of a cartoon villain in the White House.
Though my book is now five years old—ancient by industry standards, I know—because it's set in the 1990s, in some ways it was always "old" to begin with. But it's still new to all the readers who don't know about it yet, and that gives me a reason to keep promoting it. So what that means is that I'm still open to doing interviews about it and giving free ebook copies to reviewers, and of course, virtual classroom visits.
Here are all my posts about A Bitter Pill to Swallow:
Judging books by their covers and learning from them
Book Cover Design, Part 2
The Other Doll Project, Part 1
Book Cover Design Part 3 - Back Covers Need Love, Too
My new stores for A Bitter Pill to Swallow
And here are the podcast interviews I did:
Open Ended, Episode 74, "Petty or Not"
Shelf Addiction, Episode 35, "Diversity in YA with Featured Author Tiffany Gholar"
The official site for A Bitter Pill to Swallow is here:
http://www.abitterpill2swallow.com/
If you're looking for something to read, check it out.
My YA novel includes:
— Tiffany Gholar (@tiffanygholar) July 19, 2020
- a girl who is afraid to go outside
- a boy who is an extreme germophobe
- a quarantine
So even though it was published in 2016 and is set in the 90s, it might feel very timely right now.
Find out more here:https://t.co/DYh3hvmkGC
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