The Best Secret I've Ever Kept
THE BEST SECRET I’VE EVER KEPT
One of the problems with being an insufferable, constant gossip is that I am so bad at keeping my own secrets. The best gossip is a forbidden secret spread clandestinely. So the safest way to keep your own secrets safe, is to simply not have them. If I tell everyone everything, the everything can’t come back to haunt me. Is this a lack of boundaries? Not my business!
But in the summer of 2022, just as Normal Gossip began to rocket in popularity, I decided that I would keep one delicious secret all for myself.
And that secret (JUST BETWEEN US) is this:
It is a book! I have written another book! It is done!
You Didn’t Hear This From Me is a book about gossip: why we love it, what it means to us, and how we use and abuse it. It’s every (good) thought I’ve had over the past two years distilled into a bunch of chapters that cover everything from Britney Spears and Mean Girls (new and old versions) to Gilgamesh and West Elm Caleb.
I worked very hard on this book, and I’m really proud of the work I’ve done. It is my first non-fiction book: a different kind of debut, and I cannot wait for y’all to get to read it.
I wanted to email all of you (after not emailing for a million years) because the subscribers of this newsletter are the people who have been with me the longest, who have read all my weird thoughts for years. Some of you have been here since tinyletter for christ’s sake! And so I wanted you to know before I tell the whole world this exists.
We are announcing to everyone on Wednesday, May 1, so please (until then) tell only your friends! You can preorder SIGNED copies here. Or it will be on all platforms on Wednesday.
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I also wanted to send this email because I think what we are doing is rare, and I’m proud of it. This is not usually how a book is announced, and I want to explain why we did it this way.
In the summer of 2022, over the course of several weeks, many beers, a couple boxes of blessed Cheeze-Its and a color-coded Airtable, Dana (my miraculous, demented dream of an agent and friend)and I built the bones of a book about gossip. Then I wrote a proposal for something I thought could be great, and sent it out. We talked to what felt like every editor in the publishing industry about it, and sold it to my angel editor Maddie Caldwell at Grand Central Publishing.
And then we. . . told no one.
Usually, books are announced the minute they are sold. As a counter example, when we sold my first book (a novel!), we submitted an announcement to Publisher’s Marketplace, and then I posted a screenshot of that little blue weirdly-dimensioned square everywhere. I talked about the work of the book as it happened (the edits, the feelings, the fears).
As someone who has covered pop music professionally, this always felt insane to me. Why announce a book that doesn’t fully exist? Why announce that you’re working on: something that isn’t fully formed? Ideally, I thought, an author should get to announce a book with a cover, and a book that is basically done, and a completely realized idea of what she is trying to say before she is speaking to an audience.
And so that’s what we did. Grand Central let me take a chance, and wait. They let me write the whole dang book and edit it before we told anyone.
And so we are able to announce this book with a pre-order link.
I have written before about why pre-orders matter to a book. The short version of it is that pre-orders matter because they create buzz, and buzz is people talking. And people talking is what makes the world go round (see: the entire book about gossip I have written lol). Pre-orders matter so much to a book because they are the bellwether for how well books do. Truly the best thing you can do for a writer whose work you like, is preorder their book.
Publishing is an industry. And like all industries in capitalism, it is rigged against workers. In the case of this book, the game is easier for me. I have already published one book, that I still think is really good, and it sold a decent amount! I have been granted another shot. I am so, so grateful for that. I am thrilled to have been given the gift of space and time to think about this book, and work out what it would be, and write it without thinking about promoting it. It is so hard in this world to separate creative work from capital. Impossible, even. But for a little while, I have been allowed to try.
This week, the art becomes a product that I must sell. That part is my job too. But I’m so happy to have been able to spend time with this book actually writing it without trying to sell it, so that I could make it the best it could possibly be. And I think I did that!
And now, we get to talk about it together! A book cannot live alone forever! It goes away from me now, to you, to us.
xoxo,
Kelsey