PUBLISHING IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS: Jo Case on staying sane

The next entry into our staff diary series on working in publishing in the time of coronavirus features Marketing and Publicity Director Jo Case, talking about staying sane in a world that is very much ... not sane.

In my new home office, across the hall from my bedroom, I am looking through a wide, lace-curtained window, past an iron-lace-edged verandah, to leaves shivering in the light breeze. It’s a beautiful view.
At Wakefield Press, my desk is in the windowless office where we store the glasses and wine for events. The view is a wall, and a home-made calendar where I write due dates and appointments. To the amusement of all the office, my calendar is emblazoned with a different photo of my husband for every month. (In my defence, he’s very handsome, and we’ve only been married six months.)
Now, I’ve reversed the equation, and the room across the hallway from our bedroom is packed with Wakefield Press paraphernalia and equipped with my desktop Mac.

And I can’t stop working. Not properly, anyway.

I sit on the couch and check social media – either Wakefield’s, or the bookshop I work for one day a week (also now from home), Imprints. I answer emails in the kitchen, waiting for the pasta to boil. On Sunday morning I got up and sent myself an email detailing all the things to put in an e-bulletin for bookshops. I’m writing a book review for the Age, painfully slowly.
I feel sorry for my husband, who comes to kiss my head and offer glasses of water or cups of coffee throughout the day, and overlaps with me in the office for a few hours, a couple of times a week.
In our first days of working from home, when we were choosing social distancing as a precaution and the rest of Adelaide was still to catch up, my mum came by with a carload of garden tools, soil, manure and seedlings. Like our senior editor Julia, I was going to seek solace in gardening.

‘Social distancing, social distancing!’ Mum chirped at me, laughing, as we hauled sacks of cow manure and straw from her car into the shed. ‘1.5 metres away!’

The next day, she came back to prune our citrus trees in the courtyard while I worked. She yelled to me down the hallway to come to the back door while she explained through the screen, in several steps, how I should prepare the space behind the back shed for the kale and carrot seedlings.
I’m watering the seedlings, and the pots of basil and bougainvillea, on my back verandah each evening before bed, using the shiny new hose Mum bought me. Every day, I tell myself tomorrow will be the day I take a gardening break, and plant it all.

But the world won’t stop changing, and it feels like I’m running at full speed just to keep up with yesterday’s conditions. Events, publicity, sales – all the ways we get our books to customers – are adapting at speed, as physical spaces are restricted and then close. We need new ideas, and then we need to make them happen.

Our marketing team – me, Poppy Nwosu and Maddy Sexton – are communicating all day on Facebook chat, having Zoom meetings, and we’ve just started a Trello board to keep track of what we’re doing. We’re ramping up our social media efforts and email marketing, figuring out how we can support the bookshops who are struggling, working out how our sales reps are communicating with their customers now that they’re off the road, running web sales, and making the transition to organising online events.
Meanwhile, Ali Whitelock’s spiky, funny, sad, whip-smart new poetry book, the lactic acid in the calves of your despair, had its launch cancelled – but Ali’s making video poems and reading her book launch speech from her bedroom.
Poppy Nwosu – yes, that Poppy who is also our marketing & publicity coordinator – has her second novel, Taking Down Evelyn Tait, published this week, and in her joint role as author and WP social media guru, she’s throwing herself into the new way of doing things, taking part in Amie Kaufman’s Twitter chat for YA authors whose launches were cancelled, #kidlitgoesviral, and running an adorable Q&A video series from her house with her very own handsome husband, Gus, as interviewer.
The indomitable Tracey Noah, events manager at Marion Libraries (responsible for last year’s mini literary festival, Wordfest), contacted us last week to organise a series of Zoom events. They'll feature Ali Whitelock, Poppy Nwosu, Lisa Walker and Annette Marner (whose literary crime novel set in the Flinders Ranges, A New Name for the Colour Blue, is going as gangbusters as is possible right now, with SA bookshops ordering more every day). We’re partnering with Imprints as the online bookseller for this Library Through the Lens program.
And we’ve decided to move Gina Inverarity’s stunning dystopian YA retelling of Snow White, Snow, set in a survivalist New Zealand where society has broken down and life has shrunk to the local and immediate, from May release to … right now! Gina talked to us from isolation in Wellington yesterday via Zoom, and we hope to get her talking to audiences online this month.
There’s something extra special for me in working with Gina, as there is in working at Wakefield Press, which gave me my first job in publishing, aged 21. Gina was an editor at Wakefield then, and yesterday we reminisced about the days of Friday night drinks in an office where Michael smoked at his desk, and regular boozy Chinese dinners on Gouger Street.

Part of the reason I can’t switch off from work, I know, is that I’m channelling all my anxiety into it. If I stop, I might feel too much. Working is safer.

The other reason, though, is that I deeply love my work. I love the book industry, where I have worked for (I realised this week) 27 years. I love Wakefield Press, which gave me my start, as a work experience student hauling books from a cellar in Kent Town, then a marketing assistant faxing media releases. I love bookshops, and I love my Thursdays behind the counter at Imprints, talking to strangers about menopause and Peter Carey and George Pell and amputating toes (true story) and helping them choose their next great book.
I want it all to be here on the other side of all this.
But I want to be sane, too. So one day (maybe tomorrow), I will turn off my phone, close the home office door, and go outside to prepare the veggie patch and plant the seedlings my mother brought me, the last time I saw her.
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