Tehrangeles is coming . . .

some words on my next book that's coming out in June 2024 & some more words about the words

Yesterday one of my worst fears came true: I cc’ed a bunch of people instead of bcc! Why is this a huge fear of mine?! I have no idea. Perhaps because I used to have the kind of desk jobs where you’d be fired for something like this; I also have friends who have for years talked about how violating it is when this happens. I get it! Anyway, I am a very neurotic immigrant who dreads doing the wrong thing every single day and here I did it carelessly because I have been so exhausted working so many jobs trying to survive in this ever-decaying dystopia of ours. I am sorry if this was you and now here I am again! Still, thankfully no one was upset and I lived through it, but whew it sure did throw me off and reminded me that my fragility is as fragile as ever. . .

I realized the fear was made worse because it was a promotional email about my next book and I always feel like just maybe death is preferable to doing those EVEN while preaching we must do it!! Emailing people when every day you see posts about people hating email so much? Getting back in touch with people you haven’t been in touch with for ages to say hi-support-me-again? Putting editors on an email who you aren’t even sure have a job anymore? And if they do, did they ever even like you or did they just tolerate you? Begging people to preorder a hardcover when you yourself struggle to afford those? Convincing people the sinking ship that is many of our careers is worth supporting? This is how it sounds inside my head too often. Being alive, especially being alive as a writer—a middle-aged writer (I just turned 46!)—feels wildly embarrassing and somehow it gets worse as I get older.

And yet I tell everyone—my clients, my students, old mentees and advisees, friends, etc.—you got to do these promotional emails! Put yourself out there, be proud of your work, connect with your communities! Not all the time, not constantly, but one or two before your book comes out is definitely a good idea. Four months before feels like crazy lead time but a third of a year is not unreasonable given that, for example, magazines plan that far ahead (most magazine editors I know right now in January are figuring out their late spring/early summer issues). I have had the great luck of magazine features in the past, and by even more bizarre luck have found myself on magazine covers a few times! Did it sell books? Who even knows but it made my parents who are rarely happy a bit happy!

I just finished teaching another installment of one of my favorite online classes—a newer class I designed last summer—called The Bad Parts and it got me back in touch with why we do all this anyway. And it goes beyond the usual feel-good platitudes. More and more, with students I go back to this: your success all depends on what your goals are. With each book I have different goals. My first book I badly wanted critical acclaim and awards lists and I got those—I was on lots of shortlists and longlists for awards and I even won the 2007 California Book Award in First Fiction which involved a very fancy award night experience I will never forget (somewhere on my social media you can find a photo of the fiction winner Khaled Hosseini and I smiling at each other at the book signing table in San Francisco, where the award was presented. He had a long line, I had pretty much no one, but with a debut you are simply amazed just to be there! I still I am amazed I was there, tbh! Michael Chabon was also awarded that night and I was like, Who am I that I get to be among these legends?!) For my second book, I wanted my dream cover and cool press that I never got for my first book thinking that might be the secret to success (I got lots of cool press, thanks). What I forgot to hope for both was book sales, which were not good as it turns out. As a truly terrible sales person (I have worked MANY retail and customer service jobs), I was not surprised that I was bad at selling. . . Anyway, by the time we got to my third book SICK, I had very little confidence in its craft, but I was more focused on getting its message out, as I wrote it to help sick people. I just wanted it to reach readers and it did—it was a hit, my only book that earned out its advance and sold pretty decent numbers (more than all my other books combined!) By the time my last book, an essay collection called BROWN ALBUM, came out I really did not know what to hope for. . .but it came out two months after the start of the pandemic (May 2020! eek!) and I felt just lucky to be alive in the heart of it all in Queens, New York. We had an amazing book tour planned with conversation partners and it became a bunch of Zoom events. Which was fine for me as a chronically ill person, but, at the same time, I felt very alone. The best part was getting all stars from major pre-pub review sites—which really felt like landing a triple axel in 1991 or something. I was grateful. Bad sales came again however!

(I have a whole post that I will complete one day about why Iranian Muslims struggle to sell in this country but let me give you a hint: it has to do with the words Iranian and Muslim, two identifiers that have not been a huge hit in the US, to put it very mildly. There have been a few exceptions of course, like the recent success of wonderful genius Kaveh Akbar who I have written about and gushed over and corresponded with for ages but only met in person at his hugely packed reading last week! I love him and his work so much!)

Okay, so back to The Dreaded Promotional Email I CC’ed: let me just let it do the talking here, as I have no better way to speak about this book than what I put in the email. Something about cc instead of bcc made me feel like I might as well put it all here too and hope/pray that some of you might have some interest in it! (But I think my plan is to also help deconstruct this coming-out-with-another-book-in-2024 experience with you all on this Substack so at least my failures can be of some use too?! If you are interested?) Anyway, here:

The Promotional Email A Bunch of People Got From Me:

Dear friends and people-who-tolerate-these-emails, 

We are just about four months til the publication of my next book, a novel called Tehrangeles. It's being put out on Pantheon and it will exist wherever people buy books on June 11, 2024. You may have heard my usual shrieks asking to be preordered! It's a huge help, always.

I am sending this because a) my algorithms have been pretty broken due to Iran and Gaza posts and b) maybe you are all sick of social media and an email might reach you better. As with every book, I do what I encourage other writers and students to do: reach out to their communities! Since these days galleys are more scarce than ever, I wanted to keep you in the loop. . .Attached you will find the galley jacket, a letter my editor wrote, and interior details of the galley. 

Although this is my 5th book, I last published a novel in 2014, and it was a very different world then! I have been working on this book since 2011. (I mentioned it in two of my old Arts & Leisure NYT essays of that era!) I sold it in 2018 when I was just trying to sell my essay collection, but Knopf Doubleday so kindly wanted to sweeten the deal and bought it off a 100 pages and a flimsy proposal. It was supposed to come out years ago, but I was fighting for my life with severe illness.

Some facts about it:

• It's being filed under women's fiction (as well as literary fiction), which is a first for me! Why not!

• It's more fun and hopefully funny than my other works! (I heard loud and clear people found me too depressing in the past.)

• It's a satire full of unlikeable people (but hopefully you will like them in the end some more like I did).

• It is a pandemic novel but not in the way you and I experienced it. It is about pandemic madness and people who cannot help but do the exact wrong thing often.

• It is about LA but not the LA you or I know. (Well, we know it a little bit. I was a Tehrangeles shopgirl.)

• It features Iranian-American multimillionaires, Los Angeles McMansions, Hot Pocket-Cinnabon-inspired snack heiresses, the perfect Persian cat who wants nothing to do with anything, Herve Leger bandage dresses, 5G conspiracies, Candyland, Kpop, astrology psychology, queer-coming-of-age in a culture of queer-baiting, disorders & disabilities, pandemic panic, influencer drama & cancellation anxiety.  And a cat psychic. 

• Pantheon’s Associate Director of Marketing gave it the best tagline ever: *In Tehrangeles, the Only Thing You Can't Trust is Everything*

Anyway! Do you or anyone you know want to do an interview? A review? An event? Do you want to assign me a piece to tie-in with all the publicity? Do you want to get involved in some less conventional promotional ideas? Do you have a friend I should be contacting to get the word out? Do you want to help me fake my own death before it comes out? Etc etc.

My sales are not good enough ever to be above needing help! I cannot afford those fancy outside publicists so many writers now have!  I even joined TikTok lol! Times are tough!  (I have only had one book sell decently and that was my memoir Sick!) I would love to see this book do okay, as I have a sequel (and even trilogy!) planned and a vision of adapting this for film or TV! It helped me write the book, thinking of it in this way actually. . .

You can see some of the great Most Anticipated lists and first batch of new blurbs here. (We are waiting on some more too!) Not to mention the beautiful cover which people online are loving very much!

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/598264/tehrangeles-by-porochista-khakpour/

I lost my editor and publicist in the last couple months (they left the publishing house) and we even had shifts in the marketing department. It's always a little bit rattling dealing with an all-new team so suddenly, but Pantheon has been very kind and enthusiastic and I believe in them. It's especially for this lovely team that I really want to deliver. Otherwise, I find it hard to deal with self-promotional stuff in a world like this. I am heartbroken for all the atrocities happening in the Middle East and I am extremely worried a central anxiety of this novel might actually happen: war with Iran.

As usual, I am still teaching online and still speaking and around in NYC for the usual shenanigans. Please let me know how you are, how I am, how anything is, and please excuse these emails! 

much love, 

much exhaustion, 

much joy & fear & insanity, 

always,

Porochista