full fathom five

Precious first readers

As a new author, I was on tenterhooks about how my book would be received.  What was most important was that the book keep readers turning pages. 

One of the first readers DID turn pages, and it's a wonderful feeling.

And e-mail from another reader:   

Hi Mary Lee,

Yes....I was up till midnight (and I very seldom stay up that late!) because I HAD to finish your book!  I read it in one day. I simply couldn't put it down.

Another one called me to say that she was in the middle of the new biography of John Quincy Adams, so opened my book just to look at the design before putting it on her to-read stack.  She said she made the mistake of reading the first few lines, and got stuck reading it for the next day and a half.  She's gone back to finish the John Adams, but says she wants to read FFF again. 

And now Cowtown Patty has written a wonderful Memorial Day post citing the book and even plans to research and write to life a cousin of hers who died young as a result of having been in a Japanese prison camp in WWII.  My dad would have been so happy to know that his story inspires this kind of investigation.  There were so many unheralded victims of WWII, and the POW's were particularly invisible because after the war our government didn't want them to tell their harrowing stories for fear of offending our new allies.  So the ex-POWs were told to stay mum, and carried their scars around inside of them for decades.  Patty's cousin apparently died without anyone in the family knowing his story.  Patty will do the world a favor to dig for this man's story and bring what might be an amazing legacy to light.  We just don't know until we try.  At the very least, she'll be - in the most literal and personal sense - making history.               

Forthcoming Book

At last, I can announce what's been going on behind the scenes here for about a year and a half: the acceptance and publication of my memoir uncovering the fate and character of my submarine-commander father, lost in WWII before I was born.   I couldn't let myself talk about it till now, for fear of over-exposure.  Even now, I've had to hold myself back from republishing the whole book in the excerpts at the sidebar!  To breathe a word about it opens the floodgates. 

The official publication date is April 29, but you can order it now from Amazon at a substantial pre-publication discount.  Meanwhile, I'm scheduling book talks, compiling mailing lists, and doing all the other marketing tasks that writers are now expected to do to promote their books.  This requires a full 180-degree Janus-like turn from a writer's to marketer's stance.  EEEEK!  or IIIIIIck!   The Maine Writers and Publisher's Alliance has written in their newsletter over and over again words I've always ignored until this past year: "Your real work doesn't begin till after you've written and placed your book with a publisher."  That's when you start marketing.   And I'm here to say, now that I've gone through it, starting a year before your book will be published is not soon enough.  It's one of those inchoate jobs that expands to fill any time you have.

     But I'm not complaining.  I know that this is just temporary, the arrangements to what I really have been wanting to do ever since I started this project way back in 1999: to shout it from the rooftops!  In a few weeks, I'll be able to do just that.  And as of today, blog about it here.