This past
week I was reminded again of the virtue of patience, and of the fact that it
takes people a while to get around to something they’re meaning to do.
At my
Rotary Club meeting on Wednesdays, people frequently get up and pay a “happy
fine” to support the club’s community activities. Last week, for instance, I
paid such a fine because I was happy that our son, Nick, had called for the
first time since he began basic training at Fort Jackson, SC, and that we had
actually been able to talk to him. One of the other happy fines that day caught
me by surprise.
One of our
longtime members rose to pay a fine for having read and enjoyed my mystery
novel, The McHenry Inheritance, and
for having enjoyed my use of names drawn from the local community. I even
offered to pay his fine, but he insisted.
Good Intentions Take Time
Until that
moment I had forgotten that my fellow Rotarian had mentioned last year that
he’d bought the book , then never said any more about it. More than six months
passed between his buying it and reading it, but please don’t think I’m
complaining. I’m thrilled to death if anybody reads it anytime.
What I have
to remember is that while my book is one of the most important things in my
life right now, for everybody else, it’s at best a to-do item. And it can take
a long time for a to-do item to rise to the top of the list. If it ever does.
When I’m thinking about it rationally, I figure that the best case is that half
the people who mean to read the book actually crack it open to the first page
and read it all the way through.
There are
authors whose first book meteorically soars to the top of the best-seller
lists, but most of us, if we ever succeed, do it in the style of the old-school
businessmen who started in the stockroom after getting out of high school and
worked their way to the top over decades. In today’s business world, those
folks would be passed over for an MBA who would probably make a hash of the
job, but that’s another blog.
Authors Who Start in the Stockroom
The
equivalent for an author is slowly building an audience until you hit a tipping
point where your books start getting noticed. Most authors begin with a first
book that sells a few thousand copies. With luck their second book sells a few
thousand more and the third a few thousand more than that. Maybe on the fourth
or fifth book, they crack the best-seller list, triggering some more sales for
the earlier books and leading to a bigger audience for the next one.
In other
words, what’s your hurry?
When my book
was first published, I moved a lot of copies as free promotional e-books. Then
I started wondering why the people who were buying it weren’t reviewing it. In
the past couple of months the reviews, generally positive, have been coming in,
and people scanning the mystery section at Amazon can see that a dozen people
have read and reviewed the book.
That gives
it some credibility with readers who haven’t heard of me (which is nearly all
of them), but it doesn’t mean they’re suddenly going to buy the book. A lot of
them will check it out several times over a period of months before deciding to
plunk down their $2.99. Like everything else, it takes time.
