Navigating Your Book-Baby Blues: A Panel
CANCELLED DUE TO LOW REGISTRATION
with Authors Alexis Paige, Laurie Easter, and Aileen Weintraub
Saturday, November 19th, 1:00 - 3:00 pm Eastern
Price: $60*
*Our Access Fund provides self selected Sliding Scale Pricing to residents of Passamaquoddy Territory, Charlotte & Washington Counties.
What happens after all our wildest book dreams come true? Once an author has endlessly drafted, revised, and has finally published their masterpiece, the buzz dies down, the speaking events fade, and their Amazon ranking skyrockets into oblivion. What then?
This panel will provide both guidance and real-world advice about navigating the book-baby blues, offering actionable steps a writer can take on their post-launch literary journey, including managing publishing expectations and establishing and sticking with a plan for promotions. We will discuss why it’s important to acknowledge post-publication blues, how to avoid burnout, and ways to capitalize on momentum to start the next project. We will also talk about second-book imposter syndrome—can we really create another masterpiece? And why it’s okay that we’re secretly still not happy even though we think we should be.
Aileen Weintraub is an award winning author, editor and journalist who has written for The Washington Post, NBC, Glamour, AARP and others. She is the author of Never Too Young! Fifty Unstoppable Kids Who Made a Difference, which won a Parents Choice Award, and We Got Game! 35 Female Athletes Who Change the World. Her book Knocked Down; A High Risk Memoir is a laugh out loud story about motherhood, interfaith marriage, and the risks we take. You can find out more about her at aileenweintraub.com
Alexis Paige is the author of two books: Work Hard, Not Smart: How to Make a Messy Literary Life, a craft memoir and ode to Adult ADHD; and Not a Place on Any Map, a memoir-in-flash about the geography of trauma and addiction—both published by Vine Leaves Press. Paige’s work also appears in many journals and anthologies, including Longform, Hippocampus, Fourth Genre, The Rumpus, and on Brevity, where she was an Assistant Editor from 2013-2019. Winner of the New Millennium Writings Nonfiction Prize, Paige has also received “Notable” mentions in Best American Essays and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Assistant Professor of English at Vermont Technical College, she holds an MA in poetry and an MFA in nonfiction. You can find her online @alexispaigeauthor.com.
Laurie Easter is the author of All the Leavings, winner of the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Memoir (Personal Struggle/Health Issues). Her essays, blog posts, and interviews have been published in Brevity, the Brevity Blog, SweetLit, Pithead Chapel, The Manifest-Station, and The Rumpus, among other literary journals, and anthologized in The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms and A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays. Her work has earned fellowships to Vermont Studio Center and Playa, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and listed as “Notable” in Best American Essays. For more info, visit laurieeaster.com.