"Guess what?" Allan at Books of Wonder said as he excitedly grabbed my hand yesterday."What?" What could he be so excited about?
"I just crunched the numbers this morning, and Edges was our #2 seller this week!"
It took a while for that to sink in while I signed some more stock for the store. Not too shabby for a debut novel, and certainly not what I expected. I'm thinking of Edges as the little-book-that-could: chugga chugga, chugga chugga. How wonderful to have an independent bookstore champion it!
I stayed at the café, waiting for my long-time friend and writer Benjamin (author of wonderful historical fiction novel Lillian Leowe) to go down to the Pen Parentis holiday party with me where I would be reading. I got an email from my publicist that she was finally able to find a bookseller who would be able to sell copies of Edges at the Roundhouse Theater on December 19th, when I will be attending a performance of A Wrinkle in Time and giving a talk-back. Yahoo! (Roundhouse had approached me about this marketing strategy last week, and I figured it was too good of an offer to pass up. However, we were having difficulties finding a bookseller because it is the week before Christmas - AND stores in DC don't seem to be stocking it yet. So this news was definitely a coup!)
AND the husband sent me a link he found to the Christian Scientist Monitor in which I am mentioned in a lovely article that made me cry. (If you read my blog regularly, you'll know why!)
Benjamin and I had a lovely visit, and braved the cold to go down to the Libertine Library on Gold Street downtown. It was an intimate evening in a beautiful space, where I got to share the stage with another writer/parent/friend John Reed. And since there were no kids in the audience, I got to read a different section of the novel. Something more - dare I say it? Edgy.
So I'm feeling good because I feel like there's some real energy behind Edges - besides me just trying desperately to flap my wings. And today I'm being taken out for a celebratory lunch by Judy Blundell and Katie Davis - no, not too shabby at all!
