Why We’re Embarrassed to Announce Our Books

A special kind of shame around self-promo in a hostile and collapsing world

Book announcements are logistically hard. Never mind logistics, for the moment. Authors, given our awareness of a torrentially collapsing world, often simply feel embarrassed to self-promote.

It Has Happened to Me

In 2018, I scheduled a launch day for a book I’d spent two decades writing. The book had taken me so long because of the twinned difficulty of making an analytical thesis about a transgender-adjacent topic and finding my voice, readiness, and resolve as a transgender person.

On launch day, I woke up early, eager to announce that my book was available to purchase. I had gathered my confidence. I was finally ready, so surely the world would be ready to receive me.

But no. I found my Twitter niche in a state of emotional meltdown over this headline.

These sorts of hostile legislative campaigns are designed to infantilize, delegitimize, invisibilize, and disempower people. They don’t always succeed legislatively, but they have a psychic effect on the populations they intend to marginalize.

It was into that Big Grief Noise I had to insert myself: Hey, I wrote a book. It’s…