My
novel, Skeleton Run, deals with a secret about a tragic
accident that is revealed some twenty years later and threatens the
lives of those responsible for it. Al, you’d asked me if I had an
episode in my life that came back to haunt me which gave me the idea
for the story. I immediately thought of something that happened to
me five years ago that re-emerged this year. No, it wasn’t tragic –
in fact, it made me laugh out loud – and it wasn’t the stimulus
for my novel. But it does have a message-in-a-bottle quality to it
that I think, in a way, has a moral in it applicable to writers.
I had
self-published a novel five years ago. I was excited about it, of
course, and eagerly started lining up book-signings around my town in
North Carolina. At my first one, I sold twenty books and thought that
was great. A similar result occurred at my second signing, and I
could see literary success just around the corner. Alas, that was the
pinnacle of my rise to fame and fortune with that book, and being
clueless about aggressive marketing techniques, I figured I needed to
write a more-appealing novel that would attract a real publisher. So,
I essentially forgot about that early venture and went to work
writing new stuff.
Five
years later, my wife drags me to her high school reunion in New
Jersey, and there I meet her old friends. So I’m talking with one
of her best buds from those days, and we share info about each other.
I tell her I had retired from a surgical career and am now a novel
writer. She’s intrigued with that, because, she tells me, she loves
to read, and she wants to check out my books.
Two
weeks after returning to North Carolina, I get an e-mail from this
woman, who tells me she has ordered all of my books from Amazon, but
the cost of one of them made her pause. I had to chuckle at that; the
book to which she referred was that self-published novel. I had taken
it out of circulation to revise it for my new publisher, but it was
still shown as available – at an outrageous price. I tell her not
to buy it, that I could send her a copy I still had lying around, or
she could wait for the new version.
A
month later, she e-mails me saying she had read all my other books
and went ahead and ordered that old one. And it was an autographed
copy! How could that be? I wonder. But it was made out to “Gloria,”
which wasn’t this friend’s name. Gloria happens to be the name of
my mother-in-law, who I know never read the book. What the hell is
going on?
She
sends me a photo of the inscription, and sure enough, it’s my
writing. And then it hits me. Someone from one of those book-signings
five years earlier had bought the book, read it, then sold it used to
Amazon. Obviously, this Gloria didn’t feel it had collector’s
value!
So the
moral of this story to authors? You can’t run from the past! Those
early experiments never go away.
John's newest novel, Skeleton Run is available (at a reasonable price) from Amazon US (paper or ebook), Amazon UK (paper or ebook), or Barnes & Noble.
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