Flashback Fridays #6

In this week’s look to the past, I focus on the moment I received my first novel in hand. True to the nature of my life, it had a bumpy road getting there (it was a premonition of my future struggles with Amazon), but when it finally arrived, it was something special.

Finishing a book is a triumph, but when it becomes a physical object, it possesses a magic that is hard to convey. Most of my sales come from ebooks, and they are certainly convenient, but there will always be something special about a real, paper book. The smell, the feel of the sheets, the weight- it is a visceral experience, not just a mental one. I fear that at some point, future generations may not know what I’m talking about. Some of my books have not sold a single paperback.

The cover to The Island of Stone has changed four times since, as my skill improved (see the picture above), and I have written many more books over the ensuing years, but that first paperback copy still occupies a special place in my bookcase and heart.

I stopped ordering copies of my books some time ago because I’m not so nervous about how they will turn out, and we are currently trying to downsize for the future. I also have a box of 25 copies of Koen in my basement from Grendel Press that contain a formatting error, and I am not sure what to do with them. But now that I read this post, I may reconsider placing an order. With all the recent changes in my covers, it might be nice to see them all in a line as a trophy of how far I’ve come.

Cheers!