I'm Pushing the Release of The Fractured Mirror Back Until March of 2024
When I wrote a blog post about taking a week off to work on The Fractured Mirror, my mammoth upcoming tome about the long history of American movies about filmmaking I got some interesting and thought provoking responses.
That tends to be the case. I am perpetually impressed by the commenters here. I’m not just saying this to be sycophantic but there are days when I feel like I might actually be the least eloquent and informed person to comment regularly on Nathan Rabin's Happy Place. Maybe I should remove myself from the equation and this can be a website called The Happy Place where you delightful folks can have conversations amongst yourselves.
In the blog post I wrote that I wanted to grind out as many blurbs for The Fractured Mirror as possible in the upcoming two months in order to make my self-imposed deadline of late October/early November.
For the last few years I've labored under the delusion that if I only release a new book in the thick of the Christmas season it’ll be a big success. That has historically not been the case.
I put out the original version of The Joy of Trash in December 2021 and a book that I hoped would be a game-changer for me and this website sunk like a stone.
I love that book! I love it so much! It is so good, particularly the extended version. Yet The Joy of Trash sold almost nothing off the bat and I sunk into a deep depression that made it harder to muster up the energy and optimism to try to promote my book to a world that seemed indifferent to my unfortunate continued existence, if not actively hostile.
I didn’t want to repeat that experience last year so I made sure to put out the extended versions of The Weird Accordion to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al during the Christmas season. They did fine, although Amazon predictably did a much better job of selling them than I did through my store.
The book business has done nothing but break my heart as of late. Yet when people responded to the post saying that I should not rush the release of my book, and that it is standard practice in the publishing industry to have a six month cushion between the completion of a book and its release for the sake of getting blurbs, building buzz and scoring media attention I got weirdly defensive.
The Fractured Mirror will be my ninth book in the fourteen years since the release of 2009 debut memoir The Big Rewind so I like to think that I know a little something about how to be successful as an author.
Or do I? Every book that I've released independently that isn't about beloved entertainer “Weird Al” Yankovic has under-performed at best or failed at worst.
So maybe it's time to stop trusting my own deeply flawed instincts and listen to other people that might know better.
The more I thought about it, the more sense the idea of postponing the release of The Fractured Mirror made. I am very bad at multi-tasking. My stupid broke brain can only really concentrate on one thing at a time.
At the end of 2021 I was monomaniacally focused on finishing The Joy of Trash in time for a Christmastime release. I was convinced that once people read the book they’d recommend it to their friends, who would recommend it to their friends and so forth. Good buzz would be the wind that would send it soaring into the stratosphere.
That did not happen. I devoted 95 percent of my energy to finishing The Joy of Trash and making it awesome and five percent of my energy towards promoting the book to an audience outside of die-hard Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place readers/commenters/patrons who already bought the book years ago during its Kickstarter campaign. Sure enough, I finished the book and it was awesome but that did not seem to matter.
That's the tricky thing about Kickstarter campaigns. The people who preorder books aren’t giving you desperately needed money so much as they’re essentially lending you money upfront that then needs to be paid back years later in the form of books and perks.
Those books and perks can be very expensive, in the five or six thousand dollar range. The Fractured Mirror will probably be at least 600 page long and it is not cheap to publish a high quality 600 page illustrated paperback.
So I have decided to take the advice of readers who encouraged me to not rush the release of The Fractured Mirror and will put it out in March of 2024 instead of late this year.
I want to take the time to do this right and have as many people read the book and give me feedback on it as possible before I go to press. I have done so much work on The Fractured Mirror. I want to give it the best possible chance to succeed.
Right now that means giving myself a few months after the completion of the book to switch into promotion mode and sell The Fractured Mirror wherever and however I can.
So if you were eagerly anticipating the book coming out in a few months, I’m sorry. I’m similarly sorry if you planned to give The Fractured Mirror to a loved one as a Christmas or Hanukkah gift.
I really wanted to put out the book as quickly as possible because I love it and want to share it with the world but I also don't want to fuck over my book or myself by rushing things.
I am in a very precarious place financially, professionally and emotionally. The stakes are high. My spirits are low. I really can't afford to fail again.
So I am officially pushing the release of The Fractured Mirror back until March 2024.
It will be worth the wait. That’s the Nathan Rabin promise.
Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, my next book, a massive, 600 page exploration of the long and distinguished history of American movies about the film industry at https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Check out The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included! Or, for just 25 dollars, you can get a hardcover “Joy of Positivity 3: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop” edition signed (by Felipe and myself) and numbered (to 50) copy with a hand-written recommendation from me within its pages. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind collectible!
I’ve also written multiple versions of my many books about “Weird Al” Yankovic that you can buy here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Trash-Nathan-Definitive-Everything/dp/B09NR9NTB4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= but why would you want to do that?
Check out my new Substack at https://nathanrabin.substack.com/
And we would love it if you would pledge to the site’s Patreon as well. https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace