Category Archives: small town USA

The Bookshelf Con

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(Jack and Wendy have headed off to the first book-signing today, leaving Andrew Whalen, shopsitter, extraordinaire in charge. Here’s Andrew’s guest blog for this weekend.)

I have a big secret:

I’m keeping a little list on the side, like a mob bookie running numbers outside of The Family. The list contains books I’ve found on the shelves here at Tales of the Lonesome Pine, and desire… AND I WILL HAVE THEM.

I wrote earlier about the perils of alphabetizing, and I’ve continued to  tackle a shelf a day. It makes me look dutiful and pragmatic. Section by section I can be sure that the shop is in an order I can navigate. It even helps me get to know the stock more, so I can help customers.

WINK.

THE-STING-NOSE-RUB.

You see, I was actually running a long con. Alphabetizing is just the excuse for eye-balling books that I super want to filch. Books that I want to transform from books into possessions.

The thing is, I could probably just hide them. But that would be unsportsmanlike. And the classic gentleman con-man values honor above all else. He also dresses really dapper. Still working on that one. Okay, no I’m not, that’s a lie… or a CON. So I’ve left them in place, visible and perfectly alphabetized. It is up to the whims of the bookstore to determine whether they get sold or not.

At first I figured that my tastes ran weird enough that I was safe. I would not hoard gold, like a dragon, but leave it out for all to see, and still I would win the day and walk away with my reward. But then, justhours after placing one of my beloveds, in comes a customer. He pulled MY book off the shelf. If he had seen me stroking the cover and purring, “YES MY SWEET YES YOU WILL BE MINE,” less than an hour earlier, well, he may have been too grossed out to touch it. But no, he flopped it onto the table and handed over his filthy lucre. “Going to use this for toilet paper… for my incontinent iguana,” he said, in my mind, where I imagined him being an awful person.

So the game’s afoot. The books are out on the shelves. I’m not going to tell you what any of them are, but there are several in the Sci-Fi section, one in General Fiction, and one in History. OR THIS IS A DOUBLE BLUFF.

And now, with this blog post, I’m definitely spilling the beans. The jig is up. Unless this blog post is all part of my elaborate ruse…

THE-STING-NOSE-RUB… AGAIN.

12:01 The Day After

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Book launches are funny things – and fun ones. You spend a year going over with a fine tooth comb every nuance and gerund of what you’ve written–first with your editor, then with the copy editors, then with the publicity team–and then there’s this short period of silence, followed by more bleedin’ marketing work than you ever knew could exist.

Amid the flurry of learning the secrets of social media (that there aren’t any) and the hoopla of “getting your web presence increased” you find that the book drops back to a distant reason for why all this is happening, but not the core of what you’re working on.

And then, this date that’s been on your calendar for weeks and months, or even a year, is tomorrow, and you haven’t got party hats or a plan. But you just move through the day, and then it’s midnight and your book goes off into the world. (Since we own a bookstore, and since some friends asked us to, we stayed up until 12:30 so we could sell books at midnight. I don’t recommend this as a lifestyle, but it sure was fun as a one-off brief party!)

And then the eye of the storm passes directly overhead…. all through the weeks leading up to publication, there are bloggers and GoodReads reviewers and other worker bees in the publishing world, getting your book presence in the big world. But once anyone can buy it, who does? How?

Sitting in that eye, the day after publication, it’s good to know a couple of things: that you meant what you said, and that what you said means something to others; and that you are part of a vast eternal library of all people, in all time, who have put out words that can be read by other people.

That first one makes you happy, especially when you see reviews from readers who have identified with, understood, even challenged what you said in a way that you think opens a healthy discussion. I feel like I’ve contributed something nice to the bookselling world. That second one keeps you balanced, and reminds you of your place in the grand scheme. Like the machine Douglas Adams invented that tells you your importance to the proper functioning of the universe (.01%) all you have to do, the day after your book gets published, is walk into a bookstore and look around.

As Masha Hamilton said in The Camel Bookmobile, “You are a part of this dance. You are not its center.” That’s a good thing to remember, because to your friends and family, you are the center of something, and it’s all too easy to mistake your small world for the big one. That would hurt. And be unwise.

So, my little book about our little bookstore is even now, knapsack over one shoulder, wending its way through the twists and turns of the Great Wide World’s path. It is navigating the mountains of China (got a foreign language contract in Mandarin!). And it is, I think, whistling a cheerful tune. Because it says what I meant, and it says things that mean something to other people.

Good.