Book Marketing Now: Camille T. Dungy

Poet & essayist CAMILLE T. DUNGY talks about the evolution of her book, SOIL: THE STORY OF A BLACK MOTHER'S GARDEN, sowing seeds of community and marketing, writing as a parent, + trusting your reader

I’ve often looked to my own, nascent garden for a sense of understanding and inspiration. So it was with incredible joy that I had the opportunity to speak with award-winning writer and poet, Camille T. Dungy, whose work I first encountered through her poetry and essays on motherhood and writing as a parent. But she is probably most well known for writing about the environment through multiple lenses, both the personal and the political. Her newest book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden is a profound meditation that is at once about a garden, but is also about sustainability and family, race and erasure, climate change and growth. Tending to the things that matter most.

Camille and I talked about Soil’s origin story; how her approach to marketing has evolved along with her books’ reach; the power of a supportive editorial and marketing team; when to engage a speakers bureau; the conflict between marketing and parenting; and writing from a place of trust.

Your work, in general, defies categories, yet retailers and publishers demand that we have genres and categories for the books we publish. How would you classify Soil as a book, in terms of that marketing capacity, when the publisher's trying to sell it? Especially as it contains essays, poems, and visual components?

I call it a book length narrative. Which feels capacious, but there's no book-length narrative section in the bookstore. I've seen it under memoir and autobiography more often. I would prefer to see it in just the nonfiction section. But you know, people put it where they think it will find its readers.

I know you also have a very interesting story about how your book got picked up by Simon & Schuster working with Yahdon Israel. What can you tell me about that journey, how you pitched this book to him and it’s evolution now that you're pitching it to readers?

My first book was called Guidebook to Relative Strangers and was published by W.W. Norton, who did a lovely job. They had first dibs on my next book. They got a version of Soil that was shaped really differently. It had a really different title, it was not this book in any way. When they came back with their marketing plan and all that, it reflected the ways in which that book was very much just a draft.

I was aware of the fact that the book wasn't what it could be. I knew it had something in it, but I didn't have the space at that moment to be able to figure it out. As the ability for me opened to think about other options for the book, it just happened to coincide with the time that Yahdon started at Simon & Schuster. Presented with two different possibilities for what to do with the book and how to move forward, the options with Yahdon had vision, there was possibility, there was a way into really thinking about how to make this book what it was. Once I signed with Simon & Schuster, I had four or five full revisions that we did together.

It sounds like the relationship that you developed with Yahdon, that trust that you built with him as an editor, really impacted the direction you went with this book.

I would absolutely say that that's true. This book really challenges a lot of norms in a lot of different ways, and I am grateful to have an editor who supported me, who doesn't even really care about norms. That freed me up to be able to see all new ways of approaching this material and to do it in a space where I knew I would be supported when I took big risks.

That's wonderful. I would imagine that part of the evolution of this book came with a deeper understanding of who you were writing the book for. Who do you see as the audience for this book and how has that evolved for you?

The one really fundamental change that happened for me between that draft version that we were talking about and the version that you have, is that the draft version was written from a defensive position.

I understood that I was beginning to really challenge norms and ways of thinking, ways of being on the page and ways of writing environmental writing. I understood that I was doing this somewhat differently, but I was still working from a stance where I was defending myself and my position and being pretty argumentative about it.

This is so funny, because I talk to my creative nonfiction students about this all the time. In the early stages of drafting, particularly of personal narratives and politicalized material, there's a stage at which the drafts are "I know I'm right. I know that you need to see the world my way, but I know you're gonna fight me on it!" This kind of awareness that everybody's gonna be like, "No, you're wrong." That defensiveness of the stance of the narrative can be really hard to read.

When I read that from my students, I'm like, well, what if I don't think that that's horrible? What if I want to be with you on this journey? What if I actually agree with you or want to learn how to agree with you? How can we write from a space of assuming that our reader wants to listen and wants to love us and wants to come along with us on this journey? Or has been on this journey already and is happy to have us join?

So when I think about audience, that's the biggest shift that happened from those early drafts, where I was still in that really defensive state, to what I hope, with Soil, is much more welcoming. My assumption is that the people who are going to take the time to read this book trust me and are going to be gracious and excited to learn what's in it. Once I switched from antagonism to love and community and connection, the book really changed too.

I think a lot of times we're thinking about community and it's like, I'm writing to black gardeners, or I'm writing to other mothers. All of those are true, but I can be significantly more inclusive in terms of the demographics of who that audience is, if I am just writing to a loving community.

How have you seen that community and that trust manifest for you in the different events and marketing outreach that you've done, either on your own or supported by Simon & Schuster?

You know, I hadn't launched a book in the Instagram era. It’s different and beautiful. I get tagged in Stories. I see people who I don't know personally, or people who I do know personally, but didn't know that they would go out and buy three copies of the book to share. Then they have their Instagram post and my handle's on it, so I see it; that's a lovely thing. People have a lot of bad things to say about social media and its randomness, but I have to say that's a delightful piece of it.

The Simon & Schuster publicity and marketing team are a bunch of hardworking geniuses, so I've been really honored to work with them. It’s a little bit like gardening, right? They just scatter a lot of seed and some takes and some doesn't. They happen to all be women-identified people, so all these women just patiently keep spreading the seed and waiting and tending. It's been calming, really, to watch them do their work.

What do you see as some of the similarities or differences when it comes to marketing your book-length narratives versus your poetry?

It's really a question of scale. I'm a very good seller for my poetry presses. Top 10% of sales for all of them, even the far backlist books still sell. But with the exception of my Black Nature anthology, in the first three weeks of my book launch, Soil outsold my entire backlist of poetry books. With Soil I feel like I’m hitting that space where the scale is different.

Marketing is different. Early on, I was frustrated with the tour that was being created for Soil. I felt like there were a couple places I wasn't going. I was surprised because I was sure I could draw an audience of 30 to 40 people at these spaces.

I finally figured out, to add those other places would've made it impossible to tour and come home and be the mother that I need to be in between, because my daughter's still in school and I couldn't just be gone for a month and a half constantly. So really, the team was helping me preserve my energy.

In the past, I used to essentially hand sell every book. I would have to be there, get the book in the people's hands, get the people interested because of my reading, in order to sell the book. Now here I am talking to you on Substack. I've been on All Things Considered. I have been on a couple of radio shows, a bunch of podcasts. It's a different time. It's post-COVID. We figured out how to do things remotely. There is a different way of making connections so that I don't have to sell every book out of my suitcase like I literally did with my first book. That's not how it's working anymore.

I think a lot of authors often miss that scale piece. That you can still be a bestseller within a very specific market and that's an incredible measure of success. But a lot of times they’ll think because their not a New York Times bestseller, they haven't “made it.”

What I'm seeing in what you describe is that it's more of a ladder. The way you're getting to know one space and filling out that space really well, then using that to translate into other areas.

I've been thinking a lot about Cheryl Strayed. When Wild became wildly popular, people were like “breakout writer, Cheryl Strayed!” and she had published multiple books. She had learned how to do this from writing other books where she was a known quantity within a certain community. I was very much a known quantity, not in just one community, not just the poetry community, but also the environmental writing community and writing about motherhood, right? There were a number of intersections.

I also remember, back when I was early pregnant, like Why am I outside of the house?I could be throwing up at any moment kind of early, a friend of mine invited me to a concert. Just imagine: a free concert series, under a redwood grove in the East Bay of the Bay Area of California, with this musician my friend loved, named Janelle Monáe. I went and there's like, 180 diehard, mostly black, lesbians excitedly singing along to every song on this album. I thought: this musician is amazing. So I began to follow her career. Now I feel like I can say that artist's name and everybody knows who Janelle Monáe is.

That's what I think happens with writers. You've got your audience, you've got your crew. They will go anywhere, in any condition, and bring people along. My friend who brought me to that concert was so convincing. So I went and I became part of that audience. It's a growing effect and as it grows, it becomes exponential.

I understand you've engaged a speaker's bureau to help with marketing. Tell me a little bit about that decision and how that's influenced your ability to scale some of the marketing that you've been able to do.

Blue Flower Arts is the speakers bureau I've worked with for probably five years. I get a lot of invitations to colleges and universities; that used to be my primary income. It just got very difficult to be the one negotiating the terms for a visit. I knew what my rate should be in terms of what peers at my level were commanding for that amount of work. But it's not just the five hours that you're doing there; it's the hours it takes me from my house to getting on the plane; the amount of time on the plane ride; dinner and the hotel room. Because I live in the West, anything on the East Coast means I almost always have to fly out the day before. So really it's three days for a five hour event.

But I’ve run a reading series; I know what budgets look like. I know what I need to ask to make leaving my house and my family and my desk worth its time, but I also understand, from their end, how they only have so much money. That conversation, some people are perfectly fine with it, but I always found it pretty awkward and it would very rarely work out beneficially to me. Then sometimes other people who had speaking agents would let it slip what they were earning for the same work. And it wouldn't be the same amount of money. Because they had somebody advocating for them.

The other piece is just time. Figuring out the flight, booking it, getting everything lined up, choosing the hotel, and then, come tax time, pulling everything together. Seriously, when I started with Blue Flower and Alison Granucci told me “What we do is we send you a consolidated 1099 form that has all of your information on one” I was like, where do I sign? Somebody else doing that, that was completely worth the 20% commission.

Then Allison retired and Anya bought Blue Flower, and then it was COVID and I was like, What can I do? How can I help you? Because that consolidated 1099 is invaluable. I need to make sure that your company makes it through this!

They did a really good job of pivoting and figuring out partnerships and online workshops. So I sailed through. I thought I was gonna take a hit, but I actually didn't. I stayed at the same rate. To have marketed myself in those ways would've been more difficult, so it was completely worthwhile. I think you do have to be able to command a certain rate to make the 20% speakers bureau commission worthwhile. But I was at a rate where it made sense.

You’ve clearly built a powerful support system! Who else is on your marketing team?

I have my literary agent and I have my booking agent, and then I have the publicity and marketing team at Simon & Schuster. My email chains get really long because Anya at Blue Flower is building my itinerary to make sure that I get to all the places, but then the people at Simon & Schuster need to know who they need to make sure gets the books. And then somebody wants to do an offshoot broadside printout and my literary agent needs to be involved to make sure that the rights are okay.

The other person who I did hire was a former student who has worked as my assistant in a variety of capacities, for about 10 hours a week. She makes my Canva posters so I don't need to spend all the time making them. I'll include her sometimes on these threads, if it's something that's gonna drop out of my mind.

I just want to be thinking about the writing, stay on the higher end of the conversation about marketing, and still have space to be drafting other new work. And I couldn't do that if I were booking all my plane tickets and doing all that stuff the booking agency does and figuring out how to make that reel look pretty. If you look out into the world, the people who are face-forward in this way, they all have teams of people who do this work and those people are invisible most of the time.

Soil is so much about the importance of interconnectivity, the importance of community, the importance of acknowledging family and not just like acting like solitary geniuses who do all this in complete isolation. It feels completely right for me to say: look at this like crew of amazing women and a few guys who are my backbones. My husband, oh my goodness, we joke he's my chief of staff. He keeps me together.

I think acknowledging the fact that I am not doing this by myself will help somebody who's trying to do it, to understand that you can't do it by yourself.

In terms of acknowledging family, you often write about the balance and dichotomy of being a writer and parent simultaneously. It’s initially how I discovered your work! What is the seed, as it were, for the way you talk about writing and motherhood in Soil?

I feel like we could talk about this question from a marketing angle. A lot of women, in particular, don't write about being parents. This is one of the key questions in Soil: why is it that so many of these foundational environmental writers just disappeared their families from their writing? Even if they had families, the families just didn't show up in the work. Why?

Part of it had to do with what people said would sell, right? Or what people thought would sell, or what they were told was irrelevant, or what they were told was gonna relegate their work to a different category and diminish the reach. Because then only people interested in family and domestic stuff would want to read their work, right?

I just don't think that's true. And the responses that I'm getting from people as they read Soil affirm my doubt that it’s true.

Many of us are hungry for work that integrates these realities of our lives. We're seeing it in some of the work that people love most. One of the things that’s fascinating about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass is the way she weaves her family life into that work. Aimee Nezhukumatathil, in World of Wonders, again, included her own family as well as her family of origin. People have eaten these books up, right? This is not something that has to be separated. But I think years of training and years of hearing people tell us that anything that makes it ChickLit or MotherhoodLit or whatever, diminishes its value, that can be hard to unlearn.

That's why in the beginning and early drafts, I myself was super defensive in my writing. Like, this is important, dammit! As opposed to: come on into my house. You're welcome here.

Those are two very different stances. And I landed on the second stance, but I definitely started on that first stance. Hearing from writers who have chosen to integrate that work can really revolutionize the freedoms that writers, in earlier parts of their journeys, might be willing to take. I'm happy to be part of that.

With writing Soil, I thought I would have a whole year where my daughter was in school to write a book, which would've probably looked a lot more like that conventional book that we were talking about. My kid would've been in school and I would've been able to separate those parts of my world.

Then it was 2020 and that didn't happen. But I had Guggenheim dammit! I wasn't gonna not write. I couldn't write as much; there were some days where I wrote for 20 minutes, that's all I had. I just did radical recording during that time, where I was super conscious of things and got it down, then went on and dealt with putting out 17 dumpster fires, as were our days in those times.

But I just insisted that I was going to write. If I erased the realities of my life at the time, I wouldn't have anything to write about. I wouldn't be writing. So those realities showed up in the work because I insisted on writing.

Finally, is there a tea or beverage that has gotten you through launch season?

Make sure that you put into the interview that, before you even asked the question, I lifted up a glass of water!

Let's not underestimate the value of water, just straight water.

During launch, you're doing so much talking and then a lot of flying. And I live on in the West, so it's really dry here. So as far as pure hydration, I dehydrate small thin slices of Meyer lemon and take a little baggie of them to put in my water bottle. Then over the course of a day, that lemon juice gets into the water and, kind of like a green tea, I don't drink past the mother, and I refill it a few times. It makes a nice flavored water. You can do that with dried ginger and dried mint too. That way, I get my water but it's a little bit more flavorful.

I try to avoid caffeine as much as possible, but I also like a good hibiscus tea, like a hibiscus mint, to boost my energy.

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Follow Camille T. Dungy:
Linktr.ee | Website | Instagram | Upcoming Events

To order Soil:
Bookshop.org | Old Firehouse Books | Barnes & Noble | Audiobook (read by Camille!)

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Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. She has also written Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. Dungy is the poetry editor for Orion magazine and the host of Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.

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Book Marketing Now is a monthly feature of Books, Marketing, & More, spotlighting writers releasing books into the current market + the inside scoop on marketing and publishing. The rest of the time we talk writing, personal marketing, books and the book industry + tea.

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~Allison

Writer & Marketing Coach
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