Three Questions

There are two questions that confront an author more than any others. They follow a sequential order and both are, at times, equally difficult to answer. Because they're seemingly simply questions, those asking them always seem surprised when you don't have an answer for them.

The first question comes in variable forms but basically boils down to: When can I buy your book?

With some publishers that might be an easy answer, but it wasn't with mine. I didn't have a firm answer until the day I happened to find it being sold online.

The second question, I suppose, follows logically from the first. Not long after you've finally been able to give an answer to the first, you start getting a second question that you just can't answer, and that is: How many books have you sold?

Again, it's a six-word question, which, on its face, seems to be a simple one but is, in reality, fairly complex. Think, for a moment, about the ways that books are sold. It's not like they're all being sold in one place. Far from it. They're distributed throughout the world in brick-and-mortar bookstores and by online retailers. Even in this computer age, all of that information takes time to get back to the publisher and from the publisher to the author, and business cycles play a role in how long it takes to spread that information.

The one thing that the author has complete control over are the books he sells out of his own hands. In my 2005: Year in Review, I reported that I'd sold 104 copies by hand. I've since added three more to that total, bringing the number to 107. At the time I wrote the Year in Review, I mentioned that I'd soon be getting a report from my publisher that would give me a better idea of how many copies of Lost in the Ivy were sold in the first six months. That report arrived in the mail last week.

Now I can finally give an answer to that second question. In the first six months since its release, roughly 366 copies of Lost in the Ivy were sold. That includes the 107 copies I sold by hand.

Nobody will go "Wow!" when you tell them that you sold 366 copies of your book. But if you think about it, that's two copies that were sold each day of that six-month period. Certainly I didn't break any sales records, but I think I did fairly well.

If I could sustain those kind of sales over a two-year period, I'd be doing really well. Unfortunately, judging by the plummeting Amazon sales ranking, sales seem to have bottomed out.

Truth be told, I've even lost interest myself. You find some authors out there that just don't quit. They'll keep plugging that same book tirelessly day after day, year after year. I'm not one of those. I'm ready to move on. There are other things that I want to focus on.

As my first book, Lost in the Ivy will always hold a special place in my heart. It's opened new and exciting doors for me. Over the last year, however, it has, in many ways, consumed my life. I've answered many questions about it. There was just one more that I wanted to answer, and now I've done that.

There's a third question that follows in the sequential order. I already know what it will be: When will the next book be done?

That's a seven-word question, and it's even more difficult to answer than the first two. I'll answer it the same way I always answered the others: I wish I had an answer.