• targeted promotion to universities and academics running courses on Appalachian industrial or labour history, with excellent potential for course adoption
• forthcoming release of Soul Full of Coal by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hamby shows interest in the subject and potential for coverage
• review copies and pitches to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Jacobin, the Nation, Current Affairs, the Guardian, Democracy Now!, LRB, LA Review of Books, the Ecologist, and specialist publications focused on Appalachia and the extractive industries
• publicity and promotion in conjunction with author events
• promotion through social media: Haymarket Books has 74k Twitter followers and 55k Facebook fans

Employment and production in the Appalachian coal industry have plummeted over recent decades. But the lethal black lung disease, once thought to be near-eliminated, affects miners at rates never before recorded.

Digging Our Own Graves sets this epidemic in the context of the brutal assault, begun in the 1980s and continued since, on the United Mine Workers of America and the collective power of rank-and-file coal miners in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields. This destruction of militancy and working class power reveals the unacknowledged social and political roots of a health crisis that is still barely acknowledged by the state and coal industry.

Barbara Ellen Smith 's essential study, now with an updated introduction and conclusion, charts the struggles of miners and their families from the birth of the Black Lung Movement in 1968 to the present-day importance of demands for environmental justice through proposals like the Green New Deal. Through extensive interviews with participants and her own experiences as an activist, the author provides a vivid portrait of communities struggling for survival against the corporate extraction of labor, mineral wealth, and the very breath of those it sends to dig their own graves.