It is often during the worst of times that we see the best of humanity—awakening within the most ordinary of us that which is most sublime. I do not believe that it is the circumstance that produces such greatness any more than it is the canvas that makes the artist. Adversity merely presents the surface on which we render our souls’ most exacting likeness.It is in the darkest skies that stars are best seen.
THE LETTER
FOR THE NEXT EIGHT WEEKS I established a book tour routine. I would fly into a city, rent a car and reserve a room at the cheapest hotel near the airport. Then I would do one or two signings and, if lucky, an interview with a local radio station.
I would also stop at nearly every bookstore I drove past. I would go all day, to the point of exhaustion, sometimes parking along the side of the road to nap in the car. I was stopped twice by police for nothing more than looking suspicious. One Dallas patrolman pulled me over because my license plate registration sticker was askew. I pointed out to him that I was driving a rental car, a fact that did not interest him in the least. As he inspected my car I put my hands in my pockets.
“What’s in your pocket?” he asked.
“Nothing. I was just putting my hands in my pockets.”
“What’s in your pocket?” he repeated, his hand now hovering near his gun.
“Nothing. My keys. That’s it. Really.”
“Raise your hands slowly and put them on top of the car,” he shouted, his voice slightly quivering.
I did as he said. He cautiously approached me, then frisked me for weapons. Finding nothing but keys, he reprimanded me for the way the rental company had positioned the car’s registration sticker, then left. I wondered if all Texas patrolmen were so pleasant.
I often wondered the same of the bookstores. With a few notable exceptions, the bookstores I visited offered little or no encouragement. Sometimes they couldn’t even muster common courtesy. At one book signing in San Diego, the manager acted annoyed by my presence. When I arrived, she hastily grabbed a chair and a stack of my books, both of which she placed in the middle of the store next to a table crowded with other authors’ books. People had to squeeze by me all night. I sold only one copy.
As humiliating as those early days were, I had more to worry about than ego. Keri and I had put all our money and our business on the line. And things weren’t going well.
A bookstore owner had warned me that even though things had gone well locally, I could not succeed nationally. I soon learned why. It’s one thing to get a chain of bookstores to buy your book, it’s something else to get the stores to sell it.
As I traveled the country from rental car to Motel 6, I found that outside Utah, not a single bookstore I visited recognized or cared about my book. In many cases they had not even bothered to take my book out of their back room. While it seemed inexcusable to me, it was understandable. Around Christmastime the back rooms of bookstores become cardboard jungles, with boxes of books stacked to the ceiling. With fifty to a hundred thousand different titles, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd.
Here and there a ray of hope broke through my gathering clouds of anxiety. Bookstores in Utah and Idaho were selling The Christmas Box at even higher levels than the year before. One book catalogue, from the Chinaberry company, reported that The Christmas Box was their bestselling item, and a newspaper article in Fort Wayne, Indiana, said that my book had taken their community by storm and become the number-one-selling book in the city. But these were the exceptions, not the rule, and in most places my books were still sitting in unopened boxes. By mid-November I realized just how serious the situation was. If circumstances did not change dramatically I could expect massive returns and would end up with a warehouse full of my unsold books.
And huge debts. Even though we had managed to ship out a lot of books, it meant little. The book industry operates on consignment. If a book does not sell, it is returned to the publisher for credit. Moreover, bookstores would never reorder the book, as their computers would pull up the book’s history and report that it didn’t sell. It didn’t matter that the book was buried somewhere in their back room.
The only thing that could save me was sales. Lots of them.
In addition to my book worries, I had other fears. After years of infertility treatments, Keri was now seven months pregnant with our third child and having a difficult pregnancy. Her doctor had put her on strict bed rest until the baby was ready to be delivered. In dark thoughts I feared a terrible irony—I was speaking daily with people who had lost children through stillbirth or miscarriage, and we were now facing the possibility of losing ours.
Despite the gravity of our situation, the doctor had reassured us that with bed rest Keri and the baby would be fine. And we still had cause to be hopeful about the book. People magazine had shown interest in my story and had already sent a photographer out to Salt Lake City for a photo shoot with my family. The photographer had spent a half day shooting pictures of me with my daughters sleigh riding.
I had also landed one national TV appearance. Or at least a national cable appearance—a full fifteen-minute segment with live call-ins on What’s New at America’s Talking.
As the days ticked off toward Christmas our anxiety grew. I had been initially told that the People article would run the week after Thanksgiving, but it didn’t. Then another week passed without it. I began to realize that my story might not run. That left us just one hope, the cable TV show. Without it all would be lost.
