Boo hoo... sounds of wailing and gnashing of teeth...
Today Night Blind finally slipped into the dreaded seven digits on the Amazon rankings. I knew the day would come. I'd been saved by those blessed single sales time after time, just when I got to 800,000 or even 900,000, somebody somewhere in the world would buy the book and swing me back into the Elysian Fields of five digits for a few exhilarating days, and then I'd watch, philosophically expecting the scoops and scallops of the long climb back up, up, up. But today there was no last minute reprieve.
Like a colonoscopy, the dread is worse than the event. To my surprise, I'm not in a funk. What do the Amazon numbers mean anyway?
Instead, I feel an invigorating and cleansing sense that something's over and done with. Almost exactly a year after its publication date, the book has made its venture into the market. And, thanks to the Internet and POD publishing, it is still in the world, its fruit available to be plucked. I suspect from time to time somebody will find the book and pick one up, and that will be fun to see. But perhaps I'm letting go of the obsession.
So (taps playing on a cheap boombox) one last dirge: here's goodbye to that dream that the book would magically climb into the world's embrace.
Now it's time to move along.
Thanks to everybody (there are more than 500 of you) who bought it so far; thanks to all who've written to say you stopped everything to finish reading it; thanks to all who've told me Gabriel Bonner was an irresistible cad; thanks to all who've said, "I felt like I was right there." Thanks to Theodore, gift of God, who made me do it. Here's to the dancing nuns of Brunswick, Maine. Here's to pelicans, a clear view of Catalina, seals barking at midnight, Fred, Ethyl, Einstein, Pink, silver moons, the early bird special at Chicago, a pox on Blackthistle, and thanks oh thank you goddess for the SST.
And thanks to the immensely supportive and not at all comatose Gary at East Village Magazine for harassing and needling me into writing, writing, writing again -- and for giving my new writing a beautiful home and lots of readers.
Thank you all very much. And now to whatever comes next.
2 comments:
Dear Macy - That was about as fine a riff about saying thanks to your book's readers, letting go, and moving on as I've ever seen. A book out in print is something that never goes away. I have a cousin (Tom Forbes) who published a book about his troubled boyhood in the late 1970's (Quincy's Harvest). Written mostly for teenage boys, it sold a couple of thousand copies and then vanished into obscurity, but he still runs across it here & there and even hears from people about it now, some 30 years later. And I'm sure you'll experience similar events and encounters about Night Blind as long as you're residing on this planet. Heck, maybe longer; who knows?-)
Thanks, Lopeti. I like your story about your cousin.
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