Postpartum Publishing: On the Highs and Lows of Bringing a Book Into the World (2024)

Though I frequently joke with my husband about how our dog, Stevie Nicks, and our cat, Meg White, are my children, sadly, I did not actually give birth to them. I did, however, recently birth a book of my life’s work, and I’m still recovering from that labor. While there’s no official diagnosis for the way I feel right now, apparently, my symptoms reflect those of postpartum depression.

Dr. Jessica Vernon is a writer and OB/GYN who’s both personally experienced postpartum depression and professionally helps new parents navigate the bumpy terrain of matresence. “Postpartum depression may present symptoms like feeling sad, having low energy, crying a lot, lack of desire to do things you typically enjoy, or just feeling depressed, as well as symptoms of anxiety such as feeling panicky, overwhelmed, difficulty falling or staying asleep, or worrying a lot about something bad happening to the baby.” she said. By the time by book was six weeks old, I had been gripped by all of these symptoms.

I cried in between takes of the countless Reels and TikToks I made to promote my book. I punched a wall in my home while planning my book tour. My chest tightened while my breath shortened in an Uber, leaving a live podcast recording. I read Courtney Maum’s Before and After the Book Deal and asked countless author friends what they’d do differently for their first book, but I was still blindsided by the reality of debut author life.

Emily Lynn Paulson, author of Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing, is also a mom who’s experienced both publishing postpartum depression and actual postpartum depression, “The symptoms came on about a month after my book was released. I felt increased anxiety, a generalized worry about ‘what’s next,’ and unplaced energy that I didn’t know what to do with,” she shares, “After my third child was born, I had all of the above, along with even more intense symptoms of panic attacks and insomnia. It was severe enough that I treated it with medication.” I, too, upped my anxiety medication and therapy sessions shortly before my book tour began, grateful to have access to the resources I needed (and knowing those resources existed in the first place).

When your book comes out, there’s the professional pressure to be “on,” but there’s also personal pressure to be someone’s publishing oracle. “Everyone I know was filled with admiration and/or envy, and yet here I was dying inside,” says Theresa MacPhail, author of Allergic: How Our Immune System Reacts to a Changing World, “I couldn’t tell my loved ones how I really felt because I knew that I had won the literary lottery and was living their dream.”

Julia Bartz had similar feelings about her 2023 debut, The Writing Retreat, “People tend to underestimate the mental, emotional, and sometimes physical toll that getting a book published can take. While it’s usually an incredibly exciting time, there are also challenges that many authors don’t discuss publicly because they don’t want to be seen as ungrateful.” It’s hard for authors to match supportive, loving energy when our minds are swimming in anxiety and depression, and extreme overwhelm of our experiences in publishing vs. our friends’ dreams of publishing.

Many other authors I interviewed echoed MacPhail’s and Bartz’s experience of making peace with the fact that two things can be true at once: we accomplished a big goal, and we sometimes feel deflated by the process. My friends’ and family’s hearts are in the right place, but questions like “How are your book sales?” and “Is life just amazing now that you’re a published author?!?!” leave me feeling invalidated.

“Family and friends who aren’t writers assumed I was rolling in money and selling books like hotcakes, and that made me feel embarrassed about the truth—that sales were on the low side,” MacPhail continues. “This made everything so much harder to cope with because I felt like no one understood what I was going through at all, and if I tried to articulate it, I would somehow seem ungrateful for the great things that were happening to me.” Her supportive agent and the kind messages she receives from readers help her remember why she wrote her book in the first place. She said that the experience has made her keenly aware of external validation vs. internal validation and refocusing on what she loves: writing.

Low Expectations & Still Burned
I’m a debut author with experience in marketing, brand promotion, journalism, and rejection. Lots and lots of rejection. I have a supportive, responsive agent and publishing team who graciously answered my anxious debut author questions. Fellow author friends kindly warned me that a post-book slump might come for me as it did for them.

I’m also a woman in long-term recovery from substance use disorder, so I also thought that I had the whole “accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference” thing covered. In short, I thought I knew what I was getting into when publishing my first book. The more authors I talked to, the more I realized publishing postpartum depression is actually a thing whether you expect it or not.

I’m not the first person to analogize publishing a book to birthing a baby or feeling overwhelmed by the publishing process. Amanda Montei, author of Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, writes about both topics in her newsletter, Mad Woman. “It is harder to write a book than it is to make a baby or be pregnant,” she writes, “It is physically easier to push a book out into the world than it is to go through childbirth, but it’s emotionally far harder to release a book.”

I’m aware that birthing a human and writing a book are obviously incredibly different experiences, but there are some distinct similarities that lie in the center of this Venn diagram. “There are many other layers of new parenthood that differ from post-publishing life,” Dr. Vernon concludes, “however, I think a big similarity is that, for both experiences, expectations often differ from reality. This can lead to feelings of failure or not feeling good enough.”

Montei’s experience both as a mother and as a writer validated the confusing feelings I felt during my post-pub day slump. “The postpartum days for both book and baby have been some of the most complex, challenging, joyous, and formative months of my life,” Complex joy is a perfect way to sum up my emotional rollercoaster.

You know how at the end of a theme park roller coaster ride you can see all the candid pictures of people screaming with their hair flying in the wind? That’s how I felt while promoting my book: frazzled, terrified, and very aware that people were watching both me and my internet avatar as a form of entertainment.

The Neurotransmitters of It All
There’s a role that “platform” plays in the post-publishing blues. I spent years crafting my online persona as The Sober Sexpert by making reels and TikToks and shareable infographics and essays and podcasts about my topic until the almighty algorithm knew that I was the go-to for all things booze-free dating and relationships. Then, I leveraged said platform into a book proposal.

As you can imagine, there are some downsides to being both an actual human and an internet avatar—especially when that avatar exists at the extremely niche intersection of sobriety and sex positivity. People tell me things that they don’t even say to their therapists or close friends; it’s a lot to carry when I’m in human mode or avatar mode. Not to mention the toll that social media-fueled dopamine spikes and fleeting moments of validation took on my nervous system.

Perhaps unconsciously conditioning myself to “handle” those dopamine spikes as an Extremely Online person prepared me to be a published author. However, I could also argue that being an internet personality contributed to my neurotransmitter depletion.

Samantha Leach, author of The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia, had a similar experience during her publishing postpartum depression. She, too, felt reliant on the validation of others, doomscrolling through social media while trying to avoid GoodReads, “I felt desperate for the dopamine rush of a compliment. Or just some acknowledgment from someone out there in the world that my book existed,” she shared with me, “I came to realize that the validation is dessert. Delicious, indulgent, but it doesn’t fill you up. The only cure for my publishing postpartum depression was to get back to work. To read, to write, to start thinking critically about things again.”

Getting back to work and thinking critically came in many forms for me. I asked myself a lot of questions, but two in particular still come up: I spent years building my social media presence to get a book deal. What do I want my social media presence to be now? and How can I validate myself instead of relying on likes and comments and people posting photos of my book? I think Leach found the right balance, “I started thinking about ‘the work’ as the protein and vegetables of this whole process. The things that will actually nourish you—whereas the dessert was something I could treat myself to, every once in a while, when I’d earned it,” she concludes.

Dopamine release is a big part of Author Life, which explains why we also crash when preorder campaigns and book tours are over. “Dopamine is released when we cross a finish line like pub day and for a good month or so afterward. We’re riding on that dopamine high of everything we’ve accomplished and the people sharing it online until it all plummets.” says Gina Moffa, LCSW, grief therapist and author of Moving On Doesn’t Mean Letting Go: A Modern Guide to Navigating Loss, “Publishing a book is like pulling the plug on our neurotransmitters, It really does take mental recovery after doing something like this.” And that’s where my grief set in.

The Role That Grief Plays
Publishing postpartum depression reminds me of my party girl days when I was either hungover from drinking too much the night before or coming down from a serotonin and norepinephrine crash from staying up all night on ecstasy. As a person in recovery, those feelings are incredibly triggering.

“Sometimes with writing a book, the grief is in the fact that we can no longer change the manuscript, and maybe the outcome wasn’t what we had hoped for, whether that’s our book launch itself, or grieving the writing process,” Moffa continues, “You’ve prepared for something, you’ve trained for it. Maybe you focused your entire concentration on this momentous goal. And then once it happens, we think of what’s next.” This rings true in many of life’s big moments: finally getting that promotion, training for a triathlon, planning a wedding, climbing Everest, and of course, having a baby. At the end of the day, you’re just a human who did a really cool thing.

The Road to Recovery
Reconnecting with myself after being “The Sober Sexpert” for years is an arduous process, but it’s getting better now that my research lives in a physical book instead of floating around in my head.

I no longer have to sell me; I can just sell my book.

A book can also become its own avatar, Montei adds, “You spend years on a project, trying to fill it with nuance and detail, and in today’s virtual landscape, people will inevitably whittle it down to one idea or lump it into a genre category or trend, flattening it into an avatar of itself,” she shared with me after experiencing extreme vitriol from far-right conservatives after the release of her book Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control. “A book is like a child of yours who you constantly fear is being misunderstood or falling in with the wrong crowd…you want it to fit in but also have its own identity, and because you see it better than anyone, it can feel like others are not seeing it for what it is. As with kids, at some point, you have to let go and give up trying to control its interactions with others, and just let it be its own thing out in the world.”

And that’s exactly where I am now. Remembering the wisdom to know the difference between what I can and cannot change.

Years ago, I met Melissa Febos after she spoke on a panel where she discussed writing about sex and recovery in her first memoir, Whip Smart: True Stories of a Secret Life. She signed my copy of Whip Smart as I told her about being a newly sober writer. She lovingly signed my book with a note that said, “Writing a book is one day at a time, too.” Perhaps this is how authors should look at the entire writing process. From conception (the idea) to gestation (writing the proposal and finding an agent) to labor pains (writing, launching, and promoting the book) to having our guts on the table for the world to see. Publishing is one day at a time, too.