Don't Nuzzi Your Launch

And Happy Holidays!

Are you as obsessed with the Olivia Nuzzi book launch as Ryan Lizza and I am?

If your response to that question is, “Who are these people you speak of with all these z’s in their name?” here’s the short version: Nuzzi was the young, glamorous star political reporter at New York magazine who was fired for having an emotional affair with RFK (when he was still in the running for president). We, the public, were told that her ex-fiance Ryan Lizza had found out about the affair and told the higher-ups at New York.

Turns out, according to Lizza’s play-by-play of the entire sequence of events, he had nothing to do with the truth getting out there and was essentially blackmailed by Nuzzi and her CAA agents.

But that’s not the fascinating part to me, even though Lizza has now exposed the role Nuzzi played in helping RFK to his current position of authority. The fascinating part to me is…her book, American Canto, which came out earlier this month.

It makes sense that Nuzzi got a book deal. She’s a great writer and publishers know that scandal = sales. But everything after the signing of the deal has truly been a master class in How Not to Launch Your Book. And with that I give you:

How Not to Launch Your Book (Lessons from Nuzzi’s Publisher):

1. Do not give a book destined to get attention a pretentious title. Truth? I actually had to Google “Canto” because I thought it was some political word I didn’t know. Turns out it’s Italian for song, which made me feel kind of dumb. But you know what’s dumber? Using a title made up of the word that’s Italian for song after the word “American,” thereby couching an affair that consisted of one in-person meeting to sound epic, like the song of a nation! I guarantee that no one at her publishing house polled potential readers to get feedback on this title because if they had, it would have been harshly rejected. (I’ve run a bunch of these polls and trust me, the people interviewed for them do not hold back.)

2. Do not wait over a year to release a book focused on a scandal. Especially if you know the author can write quickly—if she has, say, spent years as a reporter accustomed to writing lengthy pieces under tight deadlines. Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill and Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury both came out within a year of their respective acquisitions and I guarantee that both required more legal checks than Canto. Was it really more important for her publisher to focus on Convent Wisdom, a book with five Amazon reviews, when they could have been rushing a book as highly anticipated as Nuzzi’s? (While how highly a book is anticipated directly correlates to a book’s advance and Nuzzi’s advance for Canto hasn’t been released, the fact that her previous book deal with Lizza was for seven figures and that CAA brokered the deal certainly suggests that S&S paid plenty.)

3. Do not let your writer write her high-profile book by dictating voice notes but if she does, make sure she doesn’t tell the New York Times all about it. Nuzzi is a brilliant political reporter! Voice notes? Great writers make writing look effortless but making something look effortless is a lot of effort and publishers and writers know that can’t be done with voice notes.

4. Do not present a book as some sort of a tell-all when it tells nothing and does so rather pretentiously. Nuzzi’s political reporting was the opposite of vague and pretentious; it was clever and specific. As the publisher, you should know if your author is too caught up in an obsession or stymied by wanting to protect someone or didn’t have enough of a relationship with the person to justify a book deal. If any of these things are true, then you should do everything you can to squash the release so the book goes off into the night quietly, like most books. Do not, in other words, go after the most high-profile media a book can get. (See # 5.)

5. Do not secure a glam New York Times Style story pegged to the release. Sure, you can’t control what the Times writes but you can guide your author to not present herself as a blond minx tooling around Malibu in her convertible when she’s promoting a book with a title that sounds like it’s about the song of a nation.

6. Do not abandon your writer if the launch seems to be going off the rails. In other words, guide your writer through the best way to handle social media by gently suggesting that she either stop posting on Instagram or, if she wants to stay active, to post something to address her ex’s accusations. Tell her that continuously posting stories showing other people’s photos of the book isn’t helping at all¹.

7. Do not give Vanity Fair a lame excerpt destined to get ridiculed. If the excerpt was the best the book had to offer, well then you didn’t do their job. Nuzzi is incredibly talented; if her writing wasn’t up to par, you should have guided her to do better.

My final point in this “what not to do” list is most relevant to all of us (because, frankly, most of us don’t need to worry about Vanity Fair excerpts and New York Times profiles going awry). And this is my most important point of all.

Do not set yourself up for an emotional bomb to detonate at launch. In other words, make sure your author has cleaned everything up with the guy she filed a restraining order against. We advise our authors to let anyone they’re writing about know the details in the book—even when those people aren’t named—and even to share pages with them.

In other words, do the exact opposite of all this and you should be more than fine.

For now, have the happiest of happy holidays and maybe avoid reading about people with lots of z’s in their last name. (That was really just a note for me.)

1. She did post one hilarious note sardonically referencing everything going on, but the rest of her posting has been really tone deaf.