By Julie Vick
The road to having your first book come out is filled with ups and downs. It's like being on an amusement park elevator ride where each new door might open to display either a scene of your friends presenting you with a cake decorated like your book cover or a stranger dressed in a hockey mask handing you a breakdown of your latest sales rankings by the hour. Achieving a lifelong dream is gratifying, but can also come with a lot of expectations, some of which don't live up to reality. But one of the bright spots in my publishing journey has been libraries.
My local library was a part of my publishing journey from the start. I checked out books to help guide me in writing my book proposal and competitive titles to get a sense of what was already on the market.
I spent a good chunk of time writing the proposal that eventually led to me getting a literary agent and a book deal at one of the cubicle tables that line the window walls on the second floor of the library. From my spot at a small desk, I could look down on the town's local pavilion that hosts a bustling street fair in the summer and an ice-skating rink in the winter. The library provided a quiet space where I could work without worrying about trying to buy a coffee every hour or being distracted by a nearby table's café conversation about how best to get their cat to take a pill.
I also spent some time in one of the library's conference rooms with a local writing group that met to quietly co-write together each week. If I hadn't gotten a book deal in the spring of 2020, at a time when I didn't have childcare and my local library was closed to customers (except for book orders they would leave on a table outside in discreet paper bags), I probably would have written a good portion of the book there too.
Once my book came out, I found it hard not to constantly check the numbers that were available to me about it. Some authors obsessively check and read their reviews, but I knew that could be fraught, so I sought out other statistics. Amazon's Author Central website allowed me to check the hourly sales ranking and weekly sales numbers, so I initially clocked a lot of time there. (If the people at Amazon's author central are keeping track of how many times authors refresh their stats page, I am probably near the top of the leaderboard.)
Somewhere during my searching the internet for info about my book, I stumbled upon WorldCat, which allows you to search which libraries have your book. I was excited to see that several libraries had it and around the publication date the number of library copies steadily rose each week. On the site, I could discover fun facts like the knowledge that the National Library Board, Singapore had 11 copies of it and several people had checked it out (at the time I am writing this, 3 people currently have it borrowed). Since I don't know anyone in Singapore, this meant strangers had discovered and checked out my book.
There was something about seeing my book checked out at libraries that felt gratifying in a way that the other numbers I'd been searching for hadn't. My book, Babies Don't Make Small Talk (So Why Should I?) is a humorous advice book for introverted parents and my hope was to reach introverted new parents to make them laugh and hopefully feel less alone. While there can be financial obstacles to purchasing books, checking out a book from a library feels different—it's less of a commitment and hopefully gives readers a chance to try out something they might not have otherwise.
When my mom sent me a picture of my book sitting on the new shelf of the local library in the town I grew up in, it felt satisfying to see it on display. And when friends send me pictures of my book that they have spotted at their local libraries, it always makes me smile.
There are also financial benefits to authors when people borrow from libraries. After all, the library buys a copy (or sometimes more than one) and having a local library patron request a copy of a book in a library that doesn't already have it gives it a chance to reach a new audience. As a reader, I buy books but also check out plenty from the library, and there are some books that I would probably only read if my library has them.
As became evident in the recent Penguin Random House antitrust trial, even publishers admit that trying to predict a book's sales success is difficult. And what counts as success feels hard to pin down as most authors probably have some sort of hopes in terms of sales numbers or reviews or press in certain publications.
But in the elevator amusement park ride that was releasing a debut book into the world, I would be happy to see the doors slide open to a scene of a patron finding my book on a library's shelves and walking over to the desk to check it out.
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Julie Vick is the author of Babies Don't Make Small Talk (So Why Should I?), a humorous advice book for introverted parents navigating the early years of parenthood. She has written for New Yorker Daily Shouts, Parents magazine, Real Simple, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency; and most importantly, one of her tweets once appeared in In Touch Weekly. She writes a Substack newsletter about humor and writing called Humor Me.
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