My first novel, The Language of Light was the first thing I sat down to write in earnest, once I started writing as an adult. It was ten years in the making by one measure: it wasn’t the only thing I wrote in those first years of my writing career, but it did take ten years from the moment I first put pen to paper until it hit bookstore shelves. If you’d like to know about the gory details of that journey, do read “In Praise of Writing Friends.”
Long story short, The Language of Light sold “modestly” in hardcover when it was published by St. Martin’s Press, for some of the same reasons many wonderful books fail to find an audience. But when it is your own book, you can’t help but begin to doubt whether you can write. At least I couldn’t. And the doubt only grows when, in the interim, it looks as if you might never see a second novel on bookstore shelves. The truth of the matter is that every publisher who is looking at acquiring a second novel will look at the sales numbers for the first. Every bookseller, when deciding how many copies of a book to put on their shelves, looks at those same first novel numbers. “Modest sales” can be incredibly hard to overcome.
To say that I’m grateful to my now agent, Marly Rusoff, for setting aside the Language of Light sales numbers (Language had been represented by another agent) and refusing to sell The Wednesday Sisters without the promise of what she always calls the support my writing deserves … Well, even were I a better writer than I am, I don’t know that I would find the words to express the extent of the gratitude and love I feel for her. Those feelings extend to the folks at Ballantine who acquired The Wednesday Sisters: Robin Rolewicz, Libby McGuire, and Kim Hovey, with the support of Jane Von Mehren.
The way this paperback come to happen is that my lovely editor, Caitlin Alexander, asked if she might read Language, and then she had some of the other folks at Ballantine read it, and then she asked if they might bring it out in paperback–as if I might have any answer to give them other than an ear shattering YAYAYAYAY! Everyone at Ballantine has been doing an incredible job to give this first novel a second chance, too, among other things bringing it out as a Random House Reader’s Circle book. Thanks to that support, it has also been chosen by Target as an Emerging Author selection, so it will be in Target Stores starting in July as well as in bookstores starting today.
The reader who sets the paperback of The Language of Light side-by-side with the hardcover will notice some slight differences. I don’t think it will reveal too much to anyone who hasn’t yet read either to say the only substantive change is in Nelly’s relationship with Dac. The ending that appeared in hardcover was the result of a compromise early in the process of bringing the book out. The fault is my own; I proposed the hardcover ending as a solution to save me from having to argue against a third ending that I didn’t think worked, at a time when I so wanted to publish a novel. The restored ending is the original, and was the ending at the time the novel was chosen as a finalist for the Bellwether Prize.
It is a real blessing to be in such wonderful hands now, and an incredible joy to see this first novel of mine finally in paperback. Friends and readers in the San Francisco Bay area, do come to Books Inc. Palo Alto at 7 tonight; we’ll be celebrating — no reading, just celebrating — among the lovely photographs of Adrienne Defendi, whose work appears in the back of the Language paperback, in an essay on how photography inspires me. – Meg
