In seventeen days, my first novel, Every Last Secret, is coming out. I’m a
nervous wreck. I’ve spent twelve months wishing time would move faster to get
to this point, but for the last month, I’ve grown more panicked.
I’ve guest-blogged, provided book give-aways,
and answered email interviews for other blogs, as well as recording radio
interviews and podcasts. My days have been filled with all these promotional
activities, tweeting, posting on Facebook, and responding to comments on guest
blogs or interviews. Then there’s my own blog and this group blog that must
also be fed. The commotion level has risen dramatically as the days have ticked
off on the calendar and my book launch has drawn ever closer. I’m starting to
feel like a runner on a treadmill that’s going faster and faster, a runner
who’s close to losing her footing.
This promotion craziness feels like
too much for me to handle while at the same time feeling like too little to
make a dent in the overwhelming indifference that any poor little first novel
faces. I’ve learned that all it takes is 15,000 pre-orders and first-week
bookstore sales to put a hardcover book on the coveted New York Times bestseller list. My book is unlikely to sell anywhere
near 15,000 copies. In fact, I would be very surprised if it has a print run
over 5-6,000. It is, after all, only a first book by an unknown author. Still, selling
15,000 books might be possible—a few books down the road. Except that those
sales all have to be at the particular bookstores from which the NYT list is
drawn—and no one’s quite sure which ones they are.
Add to that uneasiness, the flipside
fact that those pre-orders and first-week bookstore sales will determine my
publisher’s view of my book’s success, and I begin to hyperventilate. Oh, the
sales that come after that first week will count—just not as much. Every time
someone tells me she or he has pre-ordered the book, I want to kiss that lovely
person, even if we’ve never met. When my younger sister emails me to set up a
meeting so I can sign the ten books she’s pre-ordered to give as gifts, I’m
suddenly sure I’ve never been as good a sister to her as I should have been.
I wake in the night, thinking of
something I’ve forgotten to do. Sometimes I make a note of it. Sometimes I have
to get up and turn on the computer and do it right then. It all depends on my
panic level. Days go by in which I never set foot outside and hardly look out
the window. Then suddenly I’m traveling on business, disrupting my flurry of
book promotion and making me crazier with the fear that I AM NOT DOING ENOUGH!!
Back home with an overflowing email
inbox, I feel like crying until my dog starts barking and roaring at an
intruder. It’s the mail, I know, because even an armed rapist wouldn’t provoke
the fury in my dog that the postman does. The only person he hates worse than
the postman is the UPS driver. Two people essential to my sanity. The postman leaves
a padded envelope. I rip it open to find two pristine copies of my book to be
signed and sent for give-aways on big book-blog sites. I won’t get my own
copies of these for weeks yet.
They are the most beautiful books I
have ever seen. Hands down. I run my hand over the dust jacket and read the
blurbs with which I am all-too-familiar. They read as if brand-new. I open my
book and read the opening chapter as it was always meant to be read,
beautifully typeset and printed on paper with excellent body and hand in the
perfect typeface.
My breathing has slowed. I set the
books down—where I can easily see their beautiful covers—and return to my
squirrel cage of activities to prepare for my book’s launch. Somehow, though,
the desperation isn’t there the way it was.
In seventeen days, Every Last Secret hits the bookshelves
and my big launch event takes place at the main library branch in downtown
Kansas City, Missouri. Two days later, it hits a national crowd at the Malice
Domestic conference. No matter how I work, I won’t truly be ready. There will
always be more I could have, should have done to promote my baby. But the idea
I had three and a half years ago will be a reality in gorgeous hardcover, and
that will be enough.
Every
Last Secret can be pre-ordered in hardcover or ebook of various kinds here.
