... a peek behind the curtain

who decides what goes on the back of a book?

Now that I’ll Stop the World has been available to readers for a couple months, a trend has emerged throughout many of the reviews, from the readers who hated the book to those who loved it. This one sums it up pretty succinctly.

(Warning, slight spoilers for the first act of the book ahead. The marketing copy kind of spoils it anyway, but if you’ve managed to avoid that until now, maybe skip this newsletter until after you’ve read the book.)

If you’ve read the book yet, or even just paid a medium amount of attention to the marketing, you probably know exactly what this person is talking about. The first third of the book alternates between the point-of-view of Justin in 2023, and all of the other characters in 1985… but that doesn’t really become clear until around 100 pages in, when Justin and Rose meet for the first time.

A lot of readers have been critical of the fact that it’s not obvious that we’re alternating between two different time periods in the first act of the book. I’ve seen suggestions that I should have put dates at the beginning of every chapter, or that I should’ve peppered in a lot more clear ‘80s references in order to make it obvious to the reader what year each chapter was set in.

Which is interesting to me, because the truth is, I never intended for readers to know they were reading two separate time periods until that fateful meeting between Rose and Justin. When I was writing the book, I very intentionally obfuscated references to the year in the ‘80s chapters, and actually wove similar events into both timelines to make them seem like they were occurring simultaneously. So that inability to differentiate between timelines? It’s a feature, not a bug.

(Whether or not that feature works for you is another thing entirely; reader experience and author intent are often two very different things, so while I’m addressing my intent here, it’s totally fine if your experience did not match up with my intentions.)

I’ve said over and over in interviews that I truly did not believe this book would sell when I was writing it, and probably the greatest evidence of that is that I treated the basic premise of the book like a twist. It worked really well for friends who were emailed a word document and read it without knowing anything about it, other than that I wrote it.

But of course, once a book becomes a book, that’s not really how anyone experiences it.

I knew in the back of my head that if this file on my computer ever became a real book, there would have to be some sort of public synopsis, and that it would almost certainly have to give away the fact that it was a time travel book, and that Justin is from the present and Rose is from the ‘80s. Yet even when my agent took the book on submission, we tried to keep that aspect of the premise under wraps, knowing that the best reading experience for this book would be one in which that Act 1 reveal comes as a surprise. This was my agent’s original pitch for the book, which went out to editors in early 2022:

I’m so excited to be knocking on your door today on behalf of a fantastic YA submission, I’LL STOP THE WORLD by Lauren Thoman. Mary HK Choi meets We Were Liars in a smart novel I couldn’t put down.

I don’t know about you, but my brain has felt a little… mushy lately. On a good day. (On a bad day, it’s more like soup.) So the zing of joy I felt when I sat down with Lauren Thoman’s I’LL STOP THE WORLD–and felt my brain actually working? It was delicious, and I’m so excited to share it with you, in hopes this clever, thinky multi-POV murder mystery with a dash of timeslip will leave you similarly lit up. 

All Justin Warren needs to do is make it through his senior year, and he’s golden–if you adjust your definition of “golden” to mean living in a tiny nowhere town and working at the Buford County Dollar Tree until he dies, but without the hassle of school. Besides his strictly platonic best friend Alyssa, there’s nothing Justin feels passionate about, and he’s sure his ADHD and troubled family history make him the opposite of college material. His life feels destined to go nowhere, and the worst part is that he can’t bring himself to care.

Rose Yin, on the other hand, cares so much that it hurts—not that it ever seems to make a difference. Whether she’s fundraising for her best friend Noah’s grandmother, whose garage was mysteriously set afire, or trying to keep up with her popular stepsister Lisa and Lisa’s golden boyfriend [Shawn], her efforts always seem to go unnoticed, as if she’s a side character in her own life.

Then one night, Justin leaves a party drunk, and drives his car off a bridge. But rather than dying, he wakes to find himself still in Buford County—but a version that’s not quite the home he knows. When his path crosses with Rose’s, the two become conspirators in a sequence of events that will reverberate through two lifetimes—and put each of them firmly in control of their own futures.

I fell wholeheartedly for this heady examination of fate and the nature of existence, the power of forgiveness and second chances, and the intricately crafted reveals (if, in the first third, you think something’s… off… you’re absolutely right, and I can’t wait to hear what you thought was happening versus what actually is happening) that made me want to hop back and re-read looking for all the perfectly crafted Easter eggs Lauren tucked in along the way.

Other than the “dash of timeslip” she mentioned in the opening, that pitch makes no mention of multiple timelines or the fact that the bulk of the book takes place in the ‘80s. And it worked; we heard from multiple editors that they loved the experience of getting to the end of Act 1 and realizing that what they’d thought was one timeline was actually two.

Even when the book sold, it took my publisher a while to figure out exactly how they wanted to market it. This was the original deal announcement, which you’ll notice again makes no mention of time travel or the ‘80s.

As a matter of fact, for the first couple months after the book deal was announced, while I was deep in edits, I was under strict instructions not to say that it was a time travel book. Lots of conversations were happening behind the scenes in which very smart folks tried to figure out how to balance the artistic integrity of my big reveal with the best way to get people to actually buy the book. Which is why, for a while, vague tweets like this were the closest I could come to telling anyone what my book was about.

https://twitter.com/LaurenThoman/status/1544712790815940613

But eventually, the marketing team decided that we actually did need to tell people that this book was, in fact, a time travel book, and that Justin and Rose were from two different time periods. By the time we were ready to reveal the cover, it was accompanied by a short synopsis that effectively spoiled my big Act 1 twist. Which I knew would happen, much as I wished it wouldn’t. It was inevitable, really. After all, you need people to actually read the book in order to enjoy a twist, and most people need to have a basic idea of what a book is about to convince them to read it. So as much as it hurt me in my creativity, it was a solid marketing decision.

But the thing is, by the time that marketing decision was made… the book was written. And edited. My part on the book was pretty much done before we ever decided how we were going to present it to the world. So for the entire time I was in charge of the creative direction of the book, I didn’t know what direction the marketing would take. That all came after the inside was 99% set.

I’ve made peace with the fact that there’s a not-insignificant portion of readers who think I messed up the beginning. That’s okay. I wrote the book in a way that felt right to me, and then my marketing team marketed the book in a way that felt like it gave it the best possible chance to actually sell, and I think we both made the right decisions. They’re just serving two different goals, and it turns out what is best for one isn’t necessarily best for the other.

It’s been an interesting lesson in trying to keep all aspects of a book in mind as I craft the next one, not just what’s on the page but what the cover might look like, what the promo copy might say, what questions I may be asked in interviews. Because once you cross that line from simply “writer” to “author,” where there is a public out there who will consume your work after forming an impression based on all of the things about your book that aren’t writing, that actually come after the writing, it can’t just be about the words on the page. It’s also about all the words and images and outlets that were utilized in order to get people to read those words on the page.

I have no regrets in where we landed for I’ll Stop the World.

But I’ll definitely be doing things a little differently next time.

Until then, here’s to twist, turns, and the infinite complexity of the art we love.