Jessica Dettman - A Beginner's Guide to Book Launches

Read an article penned by Your Friend and Mine author Jessica Dettmann.

In two weeks’ time [from writing], my book Your Friend and Mine will be released in shops and a day later I will have my first promotional event. It has occurred to me that perhaps not everyone has been to one of these and might not know what to expect. Unlike me, it is likely that you were not the child of a book publisher (nepo baby right here), so you were not taken to book launches as a small child when a babysitter could not be found. Then you might not have grown up to be a young teenager who was charged with pouring wine at book launches*, or handing around canapes on little trays**. And you probably didn’t get to be an older teen who was allowed to sit and sell books at a table, taking cash, making change, or – most fun ever – being allowed to carefully place people’s credit cards on top of a triplicate slip, then run the whole lot over with a slidey-cruncher. This slidey-cruncher had more in common with the metal foot-measuring device at the shoe shops of the day than it did with modern tap-and-go card readers.

But I did, so I can not only tell you what book launches were like back in the day, I can also tell you what they are like now and we will not be using judging words like ‘better’ and ‘good old days’.

The very first launch I ever went to was in 1983 at Taronga Zoo, and the book, Ralph the Rhino by Tony Edwards, was launched by none other than Noni Hazelhurst. Noni from Playschool. Everyone’s favourite aunt who wasn’t their aunt. Baby’s First Parasocial Relationship. This launch was notable for several reasons. Firstly, I was four, so it was the first launch I remember. I had also observed the book being produced over the preceding year or so. My mum was the publisher and the editor, and most of the work was done from our house. I remember Tony, the author and illustrator coming over quite often, with his incredible pictures, for meetings with Mum and John her business partner. It was my first experience of the making of a book, from start to finish.

More importantly, in the book there was a chocolate plum rainbow cake that Ralph the Rhino was eating when he received word from his friend Captain Seaweed that the dangerous madman Count Calimari had emotionally manipulated a cloud called Lulu into stealing the moon for him (it’s a wild and excellent story), and there was a chocolate plum rainbow cake at the book launch. I can distinctly remember Noni and Tony being involved in the cutting of the cake, beside the rhino enclosure.

Finally, and most mind-blowingly, that launch was the day I learned about the Magic of Television. For after my brothers and I had been at the launch for a while, we were taken home to our friend Clare’s house to play with her kids. When we walked in, Clare plonked all the kids down in front of the TV to watch Play School. And there was Noni, on the screen, with long hair. The Noni whom I had seen not half an hour earlier cutting a chocolate plum rainbow cake beside the rhinos, with short hair. What was this witchcraft? This witchcraft was pre-recorded television. I felt equal parts betrayed and let in on a very clever secret.

Since then I have been to many launches – books my mother worked on, books my parents’ friends had written, then books published by my employers. Finally, there have been my own launches, and those of my author friends.

My first launch was overwhelming. My children presented an Acknowledgement of Country, but Garnet was not quite five and could neither read nor memorise lines, so he just echoed everything May Blossom said, which made her furious, and then they tussled over the microphone and had to be carried offstage, each under one of Drew’s arms, like two angry cats. The room, in the back of a bookshop, was extremely crowded with soggy family and friends, on a hot and stormy December night. Frank Moorhouse launched the book, but I can’t remember anything he said because my brain was buzzing too loudly.

Signing my name with all its wretched double letters.

Covid had struck when my second book came out, so I cancelled the launch and had an online one instead, at lunchtime on a weekday. New York Times bestselling author Sally Hepworth hosted it (she is very down to earth yet insists I address her by her full title at all times), and we drank margaritas in separate states and tried to make it as festive as we could for the small number of people who joined in to watch the Facebook Live event.

There is no way to stop my father making puns during my book launches, either virtual or in-person. I am resigned to this now.

My third launch was a lot of fun, and Tim Minchin said lovely things about me and my book, but when I was handed the microphone I didn’t do as well. I don’t remember what I spoke about, except that I one hundred percent did not mention my new book, even once.

This time, I am going to get it right. The first Sydney event is being hosted by Better Read Than Dead (which is a bookshop) in a room in a pub in Newtown. This means there will be drinks available. And maybe even some food. (I have not confirmed this.) NYTBSA Sally Hepworth will be there to launch it in person, and we will have a conversation, which always goes better for me than a monologue.

I expect we will have to sit on high stools, which everyone should be warned about before they write a book. I was not warned, nor had I noticed in all my years of launch-going that authors are often made to sit on high stools so they can be seen by the seated audience. Stools by definition have no backs, so as well as performing the part of ‘author’ you have to perform the part of ‘back of a chair’, using only your weak core muscles, softened from years of slumping in front of a computer. It’s a lot to ask.

NYTBSA Sally will ask me clever and insightful questions and I will respond, and we will laugh a lot and go very off topic. Our conversations, whether public or private, are far-ranging and unmanageable. This will be no different.

After that, we will take questions from the audience. Usually these are from my dad, though that’s not the law. Other people can also ask things. Often someone asks what I am working on next, which is when I make something up on the spot and then that becomes my next book so I don’t look like a liar.

Then you will be shamed into buying a copy of the book and I will sign it, all the while regretting the length of my name, which takes six months to write out, even if you leave off the last n.

The whole thing will be over in two hours, including chatting time with people you will meet there. If you don’t know anyone who would like to go to such a thing, please come anyway, on your own. There will be an intimidatingly good-looking group of women who are also authors. They travel around from launch to launch like the most supportive gang you can imagine, seemingly not aware that we are each other’s competition and should be trying to sabotage book launches, not make them successful. You will meet my other friends and family, who will be on their best behaviour. My children have promised not to have to be removed from the stage by riot cops with high pressure hoses. We shall see.

After the Newtown event, there will be a similar one in Melbourne, and then another in Sydney, with Kerri Sackville instead of NYTBSA Sally. I would love to see you at any or all of them. You can get tickets though this link, if I haven’t adequately put you off.

*Not illegal at the time. Illegal now.

**This was the 1980s. We are lucky books still exist now, let alone canapes.

***No longer available in stores but I know where a few boxes are so hit me up if you want one. It’s unreal.

Your Friend and Mine by Jessica Dettmann is available now.

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Your Friend and Mine

by Jessica Dettmann

A warm, witty and wise novel about second chances, friendship and romance.

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