Six Months of THE SUN WON'T COME OUT TOMORROW
Some real-talk reflections on the book's life outside of my laptop
Six months ago today, Donald J. Trump began the first full day of his second stint in the Oval Office, and my debut work of narrative nonfiction found its place on bookstore shelves. As I’ve written here before, releasing The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow in that political moment was queasy and stressful, but also hopeful. That mixture of feelings has been a constant through the ups and downs of the past half-year of the book’s life outside of me.
I went into the process of releasing and promoting a book pretty clear-eyed about the dysfunction of the publishing industry. My years of experience as a book critic and as a copy editor cleaning up book deal reports for Publishers Marketplace, home of the most coveted screenshot in publishing, made me all too aware of a key truth. Even though it’s very difficult to get a book deal from traditional publisher, there are too many books published each year (shout out to Maris Kreizman).
I see that in the 50 to 100 book deal reports that I copy edit every weekday for Publishers Marketplace, most of which are for genre . And I see that as a critic who is on the receiving end of dozens of pitches from publicists per month on forthcoming books. Each year, I keep a spreadsheet of books that I’m interested in reading and potentially covering. This year’s is 162 books deep already and I have barely looked at November and December titles. So far, I’m only writing about 16 of those books. It would be difficult for me to cover a much larger proportion, not just because I’m but one person, but because the market for substantive criticism has shrunk, and very few outlets pay sustainably.
The problem with this volume is that for the vast majority of authors whose books are not chosen as lead titles—the ones bestowed with huge marketing and publicity budgets that give them a serious leg-up on the path to becoming best sellers—it is difficult to break through the noise. The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow was not a lead title. While I loved working with my in-house publicity and marketing team at Bold Type (Hachette), I also knew there were limits to what they could make happen for me, both because publicity and marketing is such a crapshoot these days and because the imprint had only invested so much in my book.
It is easy to feel cynical about all of this, and to get hung up on what I have found disappointing about putting out a book: the reviews that were not written, the sales that haven’t happened, not seeing it on the shelves in some favorite bookstores. Tougher still is that now that The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow has begun its life outside of my laptop—and now that the excitement of its release day and the attention it garnered in its first few weeks out has long passed—I have vanishing little control over the path it takes out in the world. That is queasy and stressful for sure.
I keep thinking of a line in Miriam Toews’s forthcoming book A Truce That Is Not Peace, from a letter she wrote to her sister Marjorie after her first book was sent to the printer’s in 1996: “I hope the book doesn’t die too quickly on the shelves.” So much pressure is put on a book’s publication year these days. What I hope for most is that over time, The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow will continue to find its readers.
I have received truly touching emails from readers who have family connections to this history and have told me that the book helped them understand their relatives and lives better. I have been so moved that the adoptee community on Bluesky has embraced the book and that folks there are now recommending it alongside titles like Relinquished by Gretchen Sisson and Torn Apart by Dorothy Roberts. (Also, I am still blown away by Gretchen’s WaPo review of my book.)
And, more personally, I was deeply moved by how many people from different eras of my life came to support me on my little book tour: high school friends who I haven’t seen in more than a decade, the girl I nannied when she was a kindergartener who is now going off to college (!), new friends here in Philly, pals from writing residencies. Plus total strangers! What a world!
Six months out, it still is sometimes crazy to think that this piece of me in the form of 352 pages and a hardcover binding (or an ebook) exists for public consumption. It’s all I could have dreamed of in college and graduate school. I hope I get to write another one.
Here’s where I ask for your support: if you haven’t already, maybe you want to buy a copy of my book from a place like Bookshop.org, which gives a portion of sales to independent bookstores? They have it in hardcover and ebook. Or maybe you want to order it from your very own local independent bookstore? Or from Barnes & Noble or truly wherever books are sold? Or borrow it from the library? If you’ve read it, maybe you want to review it on Goodreads or Amazon or Storygraph?
Or maybe you just want to tell a person in your life about this book, especially if they like revisionist histories and cultural criticism and books that form a treatise about both Boy Meets World and our country’s child welfare system.