Gathering the Books

One of the things I have discovered about publishing is that sometimes the stories surrounding the book become stories of their own.

With my signing at Page 1 Books coming up on June 28, I realized I needed inventory. I ordered twenty copies of Anywhere But Here from IngramSpark and settled in to wait.

Then I started worrying.

What if they didn’t arrive in time?

Writers are good at imagining possibilities. Sometimes that is a blessing and sometimes it means creating problems that don’t actually exist. So, just to be safe, I ordered another twenty-five copies from Amazon. My reasoning was simple enough. Surely one order or the other would get here before the signing.

Tuesday afternoon, the IngramSpark order arrived.

One box.

Twenty books.

Everything neat and simple.

Problem solved.

Or so I thought.

Thursday morning, a package arrived containing one book.

Just one.

I laughed and figured the rest would show up later.

A little while after that, another box appeared containing fourteen books. It was a perfectly good-sized box, large enough that it easily could have held all twenty-five copies, but apparently somebody somewhere had other plans.

By six o’clock that evening, ten more packages had arrived.

Not one box.

Ten packages.

Each containing a single book.

By then I was beginning to wonder what my UPS driver thought I had gotten myself into.

And just to add a little mystery to the whole adventure, one rogue book showed up that wasn’t mine at all.

By the end of the day, I had books everywhere.

Twenty copies from IngramSpark.

Twenty-five from Amazon.

And the three copies I already had.

Forty-seven books.

Forty-seven copies of a story that, not all that long ago, existed only in my imagination.

Standing there looking at them all, I found myself smiling.

Not because of the boxes.

Not because of the ridiculous shipping adventure.

But because of what they represented.

Page 1 Books has been part of my life for decades. Since moving to Albuquerque at nineteen, I have spent countless hours wandering those shelves. Like so many readers, I have gone there searching for stories, for inspiration, and sometimes simply for a quiet place to breathe.

I never imagined that one day I would be sitting there as the author.

Yet in just a couple of weeks, that’s exactly what will happen.

Forty-seven books.

Years of writing.

Countless revisions.

A lot of coffee.

A lot of self-doubt.

A lot of hope.

And somehow, a table at Page 1 Books.

Even now, that still feels a little unbelievable.

And honestly, I hope it never stops feeling that way.

— Shawn Marie Graybeal Sellers

Some places you never fully leave. Some people never stop being home.