Selling a Book, Selling a House
Thursday, May 28, was pub day for my novel, The Distance from Four Points. Friday, May 29, was closing day for the house that inspired the house at the heart of the book. This is the kind of weird synchronicity that happens when you spend years immersed in a fictional world. Pieces of it start popping up in real life. Someone will speak, and you hear it as though your character is saying it. Something will happen that mirrors a moment in the plot, or that illuminates some problem in the storytelling. This mirroring happened to me intensely while writing The Distance from Four Points. It started the moment we joined up with our friends to renovate and flip a beautiful historic house in my hometown.
In 2016, while researching my novel, I had a realtor take me into blighted residential properties in my hometown. Most seemed uninhabitable. On two occasions, the door to the house fell off its hinges when the realtor went to unlock it. But one house captured my heart. Three stories, red brick, with a turret missing its peak. There was a tunnel in the basement. The house had been split into a triplex decades ago, and had been neglected for years. The smell was physical, the energy distressing. But a few months later, a friend bought that house and invited me to partner with her to restore it. For the next two years, we brought it back to life. Our goal was to flip it, but we couldn’t find a buyer. We rented it out, and I became a landlord just like the protagonist of my novel.
The house was the bane of my existence, but I loved it. Every time I visited my hometown, if there wasn’t a tenant, I’d go into the house and walk around every room. In my favorite room--second floor, in the turret--I’d lay on the floor and just breathe the house in. When I did this one day in the attic, I could almost feel the house breathing too, as a breeze wafted through a closed window. The house was never meant to be mine, but it felt like home. I knew every corner. There was so much turmoil involved in the fixing and renting and attempting to sell, but inside the house, there was peace.
Now that the house is sold, my days of lying on the floor in that house are over. I won’t see the house again or walk through the rooms. I don’t know what the new owners will do--how they’ll change the house or yard, make it better or worse, take care of it or not--but there’s nothing to do now but let it go.
It’s funny how the process of fixing and selling this house has offered me the perfect metaphor for how it feels to usher my novel into the world. Because publishing a novel is a lot like selling a house you love.
A novel is a world you build, a house you live in for years. You’re familiar with every room, every detail. You have the only key to the door. Sometimes you go in and move all the furniture; sometimes you hang pictures on the wall; sometimes you just lie on the floor and breathe. Sometimes the roof leaks and you curse that place. Sometimes you find a cricket and consider it good luck. Sometimes you’re in a familiar room at an unusual time of day and the way the sun comes through the window surprises you, makes the whole place look different. It’s yours. It’s home. Things happen to you outside its walls but you always return and feel welcome. You sit down at your desk, or open your laptop at Starbucks, and you’re back.
I worked on Four Points for seven years. Not constantly--there were some very long breaks where I worked on other things. But it was seven years from first idea to publication day. And during that time, the world of Four Points was my home. I could wander around whenever I wanted. It belonged only to me. I was the only one with the key to the door.
Now I’m sharing the world of Four Points with all of you. Where my novel goes, who it reaches, if you like it, if you don’t--it’s out of my hands. Just as the beautiful restored home is forever closed to me. No more wandering around the rooms. No more lying on the floor, dreaming. A new family has the key now. As for all of you--you have my book-home.
Book Talk!
If you’d like to buy The Distance from Four Points, consider purchasing from Octavia Books, a New Orleans-based indie bookstore. They have books in stock and will ship anywhere. (Amazon is out of stock, so you might have to wait longer…)
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Read the novel already? The single biggest way you can support me and my new book is to leave an Amazon review. (Goodreads, too, if you use it.) It can be as short as a single sentence. It’s the quantity of reviews that make a huge difference. My goal is 50 reviews! Please help me get there!
If you’d like to watch my virtual launch event, you can access it here. If you’d like to listen to a playlist I made for Four Points, check it out here.