Kelp and Poop

does marketing matter? just have fun

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Hear me read this month’s essay:

When I was in California at the beginning of October, I saw what seemed to be a duck-gull hybrid that was flying into trees and sitting in nests. 

In Maine, the ducks don’t fly into trees and make nests (do they anywhere?). Turns out these were pelagic cormorants (Maine cormorants stay in the water, diving down for many minutes, and if they fly up into trees, I've never seen it). I learned more about pelagic cormorants at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.¹ One thing I learned is that pelagic cormorants build their nests out of kelp and poop. “Look over there,” said the aquarium person, pointing at a cliff face. “See all those giant streaks? That’s from the poop in the nests.” 

I mean, yes. Kelp and poop. It makes sense. There’s a sort of plaster-and-mud quality to those ingredients, and since pelagic cormorants don’t have access to forklifts and hardware store loyalty cards, they use kelp and poop. And while there is a knee-jerk response of “ew!” to thinking about someone building a house out of their own guano, what do I know. I’m not a bird. 

I have a sense, sometimes, that everything is filtered (especially these days) through a marketing lens, and any reaction of “ew” we might have about the pelagic cormorant’s nest materials is only because they also don’t have access to a PR firm. If the pelagic cormorant were more online, they’d have explainer videos, how-to posts, and someone would write a song called “Kelp and Poop.”² They’d take the weird “gross” things they do, and make them seem cool. But the cormorant doesn’t care. The cormorant is building its nest the only way it knows how, and it’s probably a great way to build a nest. They looked like they were having a good time.³

I recently got this book from a pile of free books on the side of the road, and it’s a wonder of marketing. I showed it to my 13-year-old Ramona, and she made the same face she’d likely make if I gave her a mound of seaweed-encrusted poo and told her to sleep in it. Cottage cheese can be a hard sell, so why not start with “Everybody likes it…” (plus this incredible drawing that I am personally obsessed with) and then say this:

Why, yes! One of the most delightful forms of cheese!

And here’s the thing. Cottage cheese is fairly polarizing. Many hate it; plenty of people really like it. And while a cottage cheese eater in 2023 probably doesn’t want cottage cheese rolled up in dried beef and pierced with a toothpick (really) or kneaded through a sieve (why), they are happy to eat this delightful (and inexpensive!) form of cheese. 

Even marketing that is trying too hard is going to ring true for someone. 

And here’s the other thing, then: no need to try too hard! If you love cottage cheese, if you love kelp and poop, great! You don’t need to sell it to us. You can talk about why you love it, and that should be enough.

Probably none of you are in the business of trying to get anyone to buy delightful forms of cheese or interesting bird nests (if you are, PLEASE TELL US!). If you’re writing or creating something to be sold, though, you’ll want to tell people about it at some point. Your particular creation might make someone else say “ew” – and it’s not your job to sell your work to that person. It’s fine. Tell us why you love it, tell us why you’re proud of it.⁴

There are, of course, huge amounts of discourse about the proper way to market yourself. I read with interest this post on The Creative Shift about how Matthew McConaughey is constantly working to sell his books to you, and make it seem effortless, and it’s fascinating and exhausting to contemplate (for me). If you can convince Jimmy Fallon to act out multiple skits and songs about your book with you, that’s awesome. DO THAT. But most of us aren’t able to do that.⁵ I am giving you permission to focus on writing amazing books, and then, when it comes time to sell them, just talk about why you love them and why it was fun to work on them, without worrying about being strategic or whatever. Without writing a song about kelp and poop.⁶ Without worrying about marketing tricks. Sell your stuff, yes, but if you know it’s great, you won’t need tricks.

Now all you need to do is write a great book.

Some of you might remember that I declared that 2023 would be the year that I let myself play around with writing. My intention was to be free! To write! To wander in the pressure-less meadows of fun and play, in order to then start 2024 as a better writer who could productively churn out piles of incredible books. 

It didn’t happen. I floundered. I wrote a lot of newsletter posts (and then realized that was something I was telling myself I should do, instead of writing books). And then I realized: it is exactly the wrong way of thinking, to set aside a calendar year for playing with writing. I should play with writing always. Like, forever, as long as I am writing, I should be playing with it. I should be having fun. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. If I’m having fun, it’ll be fun to read. If it’s a slog to write, it’ll be a slog to read. And sometimes it’s a slog while I’m getting ideas down, but if it’s always tough, then I need to put that book aside until I can have fun writing it. 

When I am playful, when I have fun, when I let myself write freely and follow the story where it leads me, I crack myself open to hear my intuition. And I do think it’s possible to put some pressure on the writing, to want it to be huge, and then to take that feeling and stick it to the wall with a pushpin for later, and let the story be what it wants to be. If it wants to be kelp and poop, great. If it wants to be cheap delightful cheese, you bet. 

I just finished what I’d call a zero draft of a novel (which was my third attempt at zero drafting this thing). This story has been following me around and pulling on my sleeve for years now, and I kept running into a self-made wall of “but this isn’t a Julie story.” It’s dreamy and full of magic, which is not what I usually write about. For two separate summers, the story stalled out in the middle because I couldn’t figure out what it was, and I kept putting pressure on it to be funny, to be something I’d write, or, if it wasn’t that, to be great enough to justify the off-brand storyline. The same thing threatened to happen with this year’s draft, until I realized I wasn’t letting myself have fun with it at all. All I was doing was moving from one chapter to the next, trying to pin the story down like it was something to check off my to-do list. Just story, no fun. Which is not a way I want to write, or read. My “wait, I should have fun always and forevermore” revelation came when I was about 70% done, but it sure made the last 30% a lot better. And, even more, inspiration for what I could do on the next draft to make it better, and to make it more of a Julie story, started to come to me, as soon as I released my grip on it and just wrote for fun.

The to-do list revelation was big, too. I love a to-do list! But I realized I can’t approach everything as an item to check off. I work better when I work at writing regularly, like adding a piece of string to a giant twine ball. As long as I’m regularly adding bits of string to the twine ball that is the story, or even just holding it in my hands and thinking about it, that’s good. A story is a delicate thing. If I put too much pressure on it, it breaks into pieces. That’s what happened with my first two attempts at figuring this story out. It was only when I surrendered to having fun with it, that it started to get good.

Thoughts and Links

• I have learned so much about how to write from my friend Lindsay Eagar, and her advice on fast drafting has helped me so much when I’m trying to get a book down. Her amazing and popular fast drafting course is finally back.

• I loved this profile of author Rebecca Yarros. What I took from it: keep going, and write the book you want to write.

• I love that Meat Puppets, one of my favorite bands when I was in college, is still making music. Their new album is Camp Songs.

• I am late to this party, but we just finished watching Derry Girls and I’m officially calling it as one of my all-time favorite TV shows. It made me realize that my favorite types of stories are ones where the characters are real but a tiny bit ridiculous and exaggerated, and their eccentricities are put to the test in what are generally normal situations. There is a tiny throwaway bit with Pop Tarts (Season 3, Episode 2) that is such a brilliant character joke and all I want is to write books that can carry bits like that, forever.

• This post from Nat Eliason is something I think about a lot: there are places now like Substack that provide another way for authors to make money, but what if they are just another distraction from the books we want to write?

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

• I fell so deeply into A Little Like Waking by

  Adam Rex
  , which is a completely unpredictable journey of a dream, with the funniest and scariest clown I’ve ever read.

• I just finished Erasure by Percival Everett, which is hilarious. I’m excited to see the movie next month.

• I’m intrigued by how the picture book Corner by Zo-O and translated by Ellen Jang makes excellent use of the gutter — the “corner” in this case.

• Tadpoles by Matt James is told the way a kid would tell a story, sort of meandering, but where every part of it is important because it’s what the storyteller is ruminating on. A story about tadpoles, and also about how to navigate a changing family life, with beautiful painted illustrations.

1. I learned about SO MANY ANIMALS at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, like that sea otters have one million hairs per square inch, and that there is a type of jellyfish that can’t control their own movements, but just go wherever the current takes them. Also I hung out with my excellent writer friend Casper Bryant, and frankly we could have been watching snails sleep in a box and we would have had a great time.

2. “They dive so deep / Fly and swoop / And make their nest / from kelp and poop”

3. The other thing I learned about pelagic cormorants is that they need to dry their wings by holding them out in the sun, which looked like a relaxing way to spend a few minutes after building a house with your own feces.

4. Here’s a good place for me to remind you that my next book is available for preorder, and it in fact has a reference to cheese. There is also coffee. So much coffee. It’s a write-what-you-know situation.

5. Despite my brilliant idea for a skit where I stand in a bookstore and try to convince shoppers who come in looking for Jimmy Fallon’s picture books to grab a huge chunk of the books, without looking, because surely they’ll grab mine too, if they’re shelved alphabetically. Jimmy! Call me!

6. Unless you really want to!