on Jane Friedman site:

In September 2023, I opened perhaps the most shocking email of my life to date—Madville Publishing, a traditional house, accepted the manuscript of my short-story collection, Hurricane Baby: Stories, which is set during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for publication in the summer of 2024.

I was astounded, ecstatic, excited, amazed—all the words that go along with realizing the culmination of a long-held dream of being a published author.

In that blur of big emotions, I sprang into action to next steps: revising, editing, choosing a cover design, proofreading (so many little errors!), approving fonts, and—the biggie—devising a marketing plan for my book.

You would think I’d have a head start on this task—I worked in the marketing department for a scholarly university press. I aided the publicists, the exhibits manager, the course adoptions manager, and the director of marketing in setting up marketing plans all the time.

But what I realized over the course of my debut author journey was that the best marketing hack lay not in my own knowledge of how to write a press release or what email contacts I could glean in researching podcasters across the internet.

Instead, I needed to do more of something I already was invested in: being a good literary citizen and collaborating with others in the writing and publishing world.