By Louise Rachlis
If you publish a book and no one reads it, are you still an author?
It’s like that Seinfeld episode where Jerry yells at the rental car company about the car reservation:
Seinfeld: I don’t understand. I made a reservation. Do you have my reservation? Agent: Yes, we do. Unfortunately, we ran out of cars. Seinfeld: …See, you know how to take the reservation; you don’t know how to hold the reservation. And that’s the most important part of the reservation—the holding. Anybody can take them!
Is it like that with books? Anyone can write a book, but can anyone sell the book?
I love the idea of books, I love the writing of books, I don’t love self-promotion. Hence, my book Feeling Good II on lulu.com has sold about a dozen copies, most to myself. I have $5.71 in unpaid revenue coming to me.
When I overcame my reticence and actually posted on Facebook about publishing the book, I got dozens of hearts and thumbs up—and no requests to buy the book. I have a friend who published a personal memoir about adoption. When she told the people she worked with that she had copies of her book to sell, one co-worker handed her a $20 bill, and said, “Keep the book.”
It was fascinating to read recently about a Vermont man, Lloyd Devereux Richards who spent 14 years writing a book, a thriller called Stone Maidens, and after 11 years, he’d had no sales. His daughter made a TikTok video about his book, and it suddenly became a viral sensation and a bestseller on Amazon.
And then there was an article in the Globe and Mail about the book On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche, who says that timing is key to a book’s success. Reviewing On Writing and Failure, Sandra Matin writes: “While writing starts with one person, an empty page and an urge to say something, it ends with another person reading your words, digesting them and making a judgement. In the process the reader owns your words and makes something of them, an insight, a pleasure, or—and this is the fate every writer fears—the realization that this book is a sham, which should be thrown aside.”
Maybe that fear is why it’s so hard to promote our own books. But at least we know we’re not alone.
