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Southern Comfort Blogs Women’s Books, Writing and Marketing

Girlfriend Cyber Circuit

Joshilyn Jackson author of the much-anticipated Southern novel Gods in Alabama is now on tour. I caught up with Joshilyn while she’s touring the Southeast, and she agreed to have a little Q and A with Southern Comfort. (She has a hysterical blog called Faster Than Kudzu)

I’ve been looking forward to Joshilyn’s book ever since I heard the first line: “THERE ARE GODS in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.” And I know once you get a taste of this excerpt you’ll want to mosey over to Posset, Alabama and find out what happens to Arlene Fleet when she breaks her bargain with God by going back home to the South and facing her past.

Q. I know "Gods in Alabama" wasn't your first novel. How did you know this was "the one" and how did you keep yourself from getting discouraged and continue you writing when your first efforts were rejected?

A. I just knew. Seriously. Arlene's voice lifted and soared above the roaring in my head, so strong and compelling. I was unable to stop listening to her as I was writing it. She out-yelled every other voice in there, and let me tell you ---- inside my head lives the working definition of cacophony. If you've ever met me, you know I am pretty high strung and easily distracted, easily derailed. If I see something shiny I will go bouncing into traffic after it. And I have so many stories I am concurrently telling myself to keep myself entertained that I have to pick what I want to tell other people and try to follow it through the din of all the others that are running in my head. When I am READING, a really good book can drown out my own stories and transport me. Arlene was like that. She silenced everything. I knew if I could help her make that long, long, long journey from my head to the page intact, if she could read even half as vivid and complex and funny and dark and endearing as I heard her, this would be the book.

As for not getting discouraged...well, quite frankly, I did. I got VERY discouraged. Not about WRITING. If gods in Alabama had not sold I would STILL be writing what I am writing now. I can't not write. I've been story telling from the time I had enough language to make sentences. But I did get very discouraged with how hard it is to break into the industry. I had to grow calluses over my soft parts to keep from bruising and dying. I had to learn to absolutely separate the business part from the work. I am now learning to separate the promotion and marketing from the work.

I remember reading a review and crying because it was SO harsh and awful and OH WAIL EVERYONE HATES ME. Um...yeah. Reading it again, a couple of weeks later when I had a grip on things, I realized it had ONE line of criticism in the whole review. He quibbled with ONE element, and I was destroyed. The rest of the review was a LOVE POEM. But all I could see was that one line where it seemed he was confirming everything you think about yourself in the long dark tea time of the soul. You know, Those nights -- I think everyone has them---where you lie awake thinking "I'm-not-good-enough-pretty-enough-thin-enough-smart-enough-talented-enough."

But I am learning to separate them. Other writers who have been down this road are helping me. EVERYTHING has to be separate from the work, or you cannot write. And I can't NOT WRITE, because other than my family, doing the writing is the greatest pleasure in my life.

Q. What has surprised you the most about the publishing experience?

That it is a business. The first time I went to Warner, I think I was expecting sentient glowworms and hobbits sprinkling magic powders to make a book tree grow. But Warner has CUBICLES And ACCOUNTANTS and XEROX COPY MACHINES. Freaked me out.

A. You have young children? How do you balance writing and motherhood?

I married the right man. Scott has always taken my career as seriously as he takes his own---even when I was spending more money on postage and copying than I was making with my writing. He does more than his share around the house to make sure I have writing time, and he gives me huge chunks of the weekends...If I get desperate, I'll thrust the children at him and say, TAKE THESE CREATURES YOU SPAWNED UPON MY HAPLESS BODY AND GET OUT! and he will gather them up and go to his mom's or my folks' house for the whole weekend. He's amazing. When gods in Alabama sold, I spent a lot of time screaming and jumping up and down with my screaming, jumping friends, but he just smiled calmly and said, "Well, of course." He wasn't at all surprised. That's the nicest compliment in the world.

Q. Your first book has gotten more attention than most debuts. How does it make you feel to have such an anticipated debut?

A. Fabulous. And terrified. And then fabulous again. Then terrified. It's a neat process, how a book gets this sort of attention. I didn't understand how it worked before it started happening to gods in Alabama. It's this organic thing, where the excitement felt by your editor and agent is palpable, and then a few other people at the house sniff that excitement and get curious, so they pick up the book, and if it hooks them, they read the whole thing, and at the end, if they have the same kind of passion for it, it begins to spread from there, like that old shampoo ad... they tell two friends, and they tell two friends.

I get the idea that people feel it is this sort of RANDOM thing, that one powerful person picks some book via the eeny-meeny-miney-mo method and gives it a million dollar ad campaign and then just rakes in the dough while snickering at the masses. But that's just not so. A book that gets a big push from marketing is a book that moved over the course of a YEAR down a very long chain. Excitement and love for the book has to spread from your agent to an editor, from your editor to your publisher, then from the publisher to other editors and assistants in house, then to marketing and publicity and the BUSINESS end folks, then from marketing/publicity/business end folks to the reps, then from the reps to the booksellers. That's where gods is now, at the link in the chain that matters most...hoping the excitement will spread to readers.

The chain can break ANYWHERE along the way. Maybe the marketing/business people will sniff at it and say, "Yeah okay, you lit-heads like it, and sure it is brilliant and all, but there is no way to market it." That would be it then. Or say the reps (who are all over the country) don't see whatever it was that got everyone IN house all in a froth, and they'll say "Um, maybe this book really appeals to New Yorkers but...not so much in Florida and Oregon, K-Thanx-Drive-Through." Then the buzz just dies wherever it dies.

Q. You've been involved a lot with promotion of your book. How do you feel about the marketing side. Do you enjoy it or consider it a necessary evil?