My Most recent book, The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom (St. Martin’s Press, 2025), took me nearly eight years to write, so as publication approached I was eager to start planning events where I could share it. As a poet I’d attended and hosted countless readings, and I knew the drill: You invite another writer or two to read or be in conversation, everyone reads for a couple of minutes, you do a Q&A with the audience, composed of well-intentioned folks who have been politely listening, then everyone goes on their way. Some readings are great, but most are merely fine. For my first book of nonfiction, a researched memoir about the shaky science beneath our bad ideas about how to be a good mom, I wanted to do better.
At the center of the bad ideas I explore in my book is the belief that being a good mom means doing it all on your own. I’d been inspired by anthropologist Margaret Mead’s insistence that what children need is not one perfect mother but love and attention from “many warm, friendly people”—and I wanted to host events that would create that feeling of community and connection. In other words I wanted to reimagine the book event not as a performance or a recital but as a gathering.
As Priya Parker defines it in The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters (Riverhead Books, 2018), a gathering is “the conscious bringing together of people for a reason,” and the most meaningful gatherings are profoundly attuned to and shaped by that reason. The art of gathering, according to Parker, “begins with purpose.” She cautions that we too often confuse category—baby shower, birthday party, book launch—with purpose. Many book events have an implicit purpose that is something like “listen to me read from my new book and hopefully be persuaded to buy it,” but the occasion of the gathering can be an invitation not only to be more intentional, but also to get more creative. Your purpose might be to bring together experts who can speak to the book’s themes, or to engage your audience in conversation about particular topics related to the book. You might want to host a party to celebrate the people who supported you as you wrote, or you could invite audience members to share their own stories. If the concept of purpose feels nebulous for your book, you can start by asking yourself who you’re aiming to reach and what kind of experience you want to offer them. Instead of starting by thinking about what you’ll do once you get your turn at the mic, in other words, start by thinking about how you want your guests to feel and what you want them to be inspired to do with that feeling.
Last summer, to promote her novel The Sicilian Inheritance (Dutton, 2024), Jo Piazza was hosting “Cocktails and Cannolis” at bookstores across the Philadelphia area, and when I saw that she was coming to the bookstore in my small South Jersey town, I texted a friend and quickly grabbed two tickets. I was happy to pay $18 for a negroni, a cannoli, and what I knew, from Piazza’s exuberant online presence, would be a lively evening. We were welcomed into the store with cocktails, and Jeannine A. Cook, the bookstore owner and author of the novel It’s Me They Follow, published by Amistad in September, led a zippy conversation with Piazza about her writing life and the novel, based on a family legend about the unsolved murder of her great-great-grandmother in Sicily more than a century ago.
But then Cook did something I’d never seen happen before at a reading: She paused her conversation with Piazza and said, “Now we’re going to turn and talk.” She posed a question to the group—who in your family could you write a novel about?—and told us to talk to a neighbor. It’s the kind of thing I do all the time in my classroom, but I’d never once seen it happen at a reading. And it worked. With the tiniest nudge, my friend and I were sharing family stories with the couple next to us, and all around us the room lit up with chatter and laughter.
That “turn and talk” encapsulates what I’ve come to believe is an essential component of a successful book event: giving your audience a chance to connect with one another. So often readings are structured as if the only people who have something to say are at the front of the room, in front of the microphone. But I believe that books can open up conversation about the issues that matter most to us, and that’s equally true for everything from spicy historical fiction like Piazza’s The Sicilian Inheritance to poetry and memoir. Readers come to book events not just because they want to hear the writer, but also because they want to feel connected and they want to be seen.
I’ve used Cook’s “turn and talk” technique at nearly every book event I hosted this spring, tweaking the question to fit the event. At an event in partnership with novelist Clare Beams and two women who work in maternal mental health, I asked, “What images did you have growing up of how to be a good mom?” For a Galentine’s Day party I cohosted with romance novelist Xio Axelrod, we asked the audience to talk about a time when a friend had shown up for them, or when they’d supported a friend.
Those rooms full of friends and strangers engaged in conversation have been among the most meaningful parts of publishing this book. I’ve heard stories from strangers about traumatic births and pregnancy discrimination in the workplace and the judgment they faced as a poor single mom. Women I’ve known for years have opened up about parts of their lives they’d never shared at school drop-off. And for me, as a lifelong teacher and writer, there’s such joy in being in a room full of people sharing their stories. There’s a term for the magic that happens when we come together like this: collective effervescence. Coined by French sociologist Émile Durkheim, the term is most often used to refer to the experience of being at a concert or dancing in a crowd, but those of us with a slightly nerdier bent can find collective effervescence in a bookstore, too.
The “turn and talk” isn’t the only way to help an audience connect, of course. You could pose a question or prompt as people enter and invite them to write answers on a Post-it, slip of paper, or poster tacked to the wall. At an event for Minna Dubin’s Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood (Seal Press, 2023) hosted by the Pennsylvania chapter of Postpartum Support International, attendees were invited to write their “mom rage” triggers on a slip of paper as they entered. The hosts gathered these notes in a basket, which they passed around the audience at the beginning of the event, so that each audience member read aloud someone else’s contribution. Samantha Mann, author of Dyke Delusions: Essays and Observations (Read Furiously, 2025), reminded me that something as simple as offering snacks and drinks before a reading can set the stage for conversation before the event formally starts.
If going outside the frame of a typical reading in this way makes you nervous, another term from Parker’s influential book might help: generous authority. Parker argues that it’s the host’s responsibility to shape the gathering. In other words embrace a little bossiness in the interest of helping your audience connect with your book and with one another. It’s helpful to plan ahead for structured ways your audience can engage, whether that’s through talking to each other, calling out responses to questions, or writing their thoughts on a poster or slip of paper. I’ve found that even if I feel a little awkward at first giving other adults directions like this, people are generally eager to have opportunities to strike up a conversation with other readers around them.
Several of the writers I talked to for this piece have gotten even more creative about the venue or format of their events. When she was getting ready to launch her first book, the novel-in-stories Choose This Now (Noemi Press, 2024), Nicole Haroutunian attended a workshop led by Eleanor Whitney and Catherine LaSota during which Whitney posed a question: Who is your reader, and where are they? Haroutunian knew that one audience for her book would be new parents, and that question got her thinking about the story times that libraries and bookstores often host for babies and caregivers. “Why is it always baby-centric when it could be a book for the adults?” she wondered. That question led her to reimagine that story time as an opportunity to share books that are for the parents.
She now hosts the monthly Story Time for Caregivers at Astoria Bookshop in New York, where each month a visiting writer shares a bit from their book before opening up conversation for the group, facilitated by Haroutunian. By dint of its time—11:30 AM, as soon as the store opens, a time chosen to work with babies’ naps—it reaches a crowd that often can’t make it to an evening event, including people who might not even think of attending a reading. Haroutunian said she’d encourage other writers to think about changing the format, timing, and even location of their events to reach new readers. “You don’t have to do it the way it’s always been done, because that really shuts people out,” she told me.
The early pandemic forced many writers to get creative with virtual book events, and many of those online parties showed that it’s still possible to gather through a screen. The December 2020 Zoom launch party for Laura Cronk’s Ghost Hour (Persea, 2020) is an early example of how virtual events can be energizing gatherings too. Guided by the book’s themes of haunting and unresolved memories, Cronk reached out to Roberta Boyce, a practitioner in spiritual and energetic activation, who led “a visualization followed with a writing prompt inspired by the idea of a séance—for the brave and mysterious among us.” That visualization was followed by a toast, music, and celebration. Cronk’s friend Liz Ellinghaus Weidhorn led the group in a cocktail- and mocktail-making session using ingredients linked in the invitation. Folk musician Jolie Holland joined the group from her camper in Texas to perform her song “Ghost Waltz.” The event also included a brief reading by Cronk and opportunities for guests to chat in breakout rooms, something Cronk said friends still remember as a favorite part of their virtual gathering. “It didn’t feel like gross self-promotion,” Cronk told me. “It felt like I was honoring my responsibility to the book, to do some nice things for it to lift off.”
This kind of interdisciplinary collaboration has long been a feature of young adult novelist Kern Carter’s book events. For the 2017 launch of his self-published Beauty Scars, he enlisted the help of an artist friend who created an art installation by printing the book, ripping each page in half, and taping it around the art gallery. Questions like “What do you think the book is about?” and “What’s your favorite part?” guided guests’ interactions with the installation, and attendees all signed a huge piece of construction paper that became the book’s acknowledgments page. For his third book, And Then There Was Us, published by Tundra Books in 2024, Carter continued that multimedia experience, hiring a friend to play guitar, curating a photo exhibit related to the story, and enlisting an actor to read scenes from the book. “It’s really, really hard to earn a reader,” Carter says. He told me that he’s focused on connecting with those potential readers through multiple art forms, noting that when people are engaged and entertained, “there’s an opportunity to connect much more deeply with the reader and help them become fans.”
Carter offered a simple piece of advice that’s useful for anyone planning a book event: “Think about how you can create a memory.” If you start by thinking about making your book event a gathering and let yourself get creative, you’ll be well on your way.
Nancy Reddy is the author of The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom (St. Martin’s Press, 2025). Her previous books include the poetry collection Pocket Universe (Louisiana State University Press, 2022) and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (University of Georgia Press, 2022), which she coedited with Emily Pérez. Her essays have appeared in Slate, Poets & Writers Magazine, Romper, the Millions, and elsewhere. She writes the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful about why writing is hard and how to do it anyway.
Thumbnail: Yusef Daniels