The Slowest Book Launch Ever
some things just take their time
Just as bookstores were closing their doors, my book quietly arrived.
It was, in the grand scheme of things, a tiny heartbreak during a time of very large ones. Still, I’d spent years making something I hoped might be helpful. There were plans. A tour. A full calendar of press and exciting readings and sharings and community projects …
… and then, everything changed.
The book arrived into a story I had not written or even imagined.
Which, as it turns out, is a very human experience.
Fast forward to last week.
I am in a room full of Bexley School District educators in Ohio. They’re all holding well-worn copies of the book. Not in a “we just bought this oh I wonder what’s inside” kind of way, but in a “we have lived with this thing” kind of way.
They were wearing shirts inspired by it.
A book club had formed around it.
A few weeks before this, I was in Utah at a conference full of educators.
Someone walks up to me with a copy of the book that almost looked like it’d been chewed on by a dog. She says it’s a book she re-reads twice a year at the beginning of each semester. We hug. I try to comprehend it all.
Pages bent. Passages underlined. Corners dented from weeks of being lugged around.
Over the years, I’ve met people who’ve carried this book into places I never anticipated:
A high-school guidance counselor in Arizona using the book each year as a text-book for his leadership class with soon-to-graduate seniors.
Two kind souls at a high-security prison in Louisiana using the book in their work with the incarcerated.
A copy sitting in the waiting room of the autoshop next to my studio.
There are even tattoos! Actual lines and illustrations from the book, now living on actual human skin ….
None of this was part of the plan. Which, I’m beginning to learn, might be the point. I wrote it as someone still very much figuring out how to be a person. This book, though, seems to have known exactly what it wanted to do and be.
It has had a life I could not have planned even if everything had gone according to plan.
I’ve had the other version before … the fast version where a video goes viral and the audience or the entire world is suddenly very LOUD with a response. You did it! We saw it! We read it! You’re a wizard, Harry!
This wasn’t that.
The path has been much different and slower and frustrating. Quiet and defiant and just … it’s own thing.
It’s felt like a message in a bottle.
I sent it out not sure who it would find
and some days wondering if it ever would find anyone.
A note thrown into the darkness and carried by currents I cannot control
and somehow, still …
finding its way to people I may never met.
Every once in a while, I get to stand in a room somewhere and realize
other explorers found it…
I once heard Steve Martin talk about how the real test for the “success” in creative work is time. He was talking about Three Amigos (a movie I love.) When it first released, it didn’t land the way any of them hoped.
The whole team felt like it was a huge misstep and would be a minor/possibly forgotten entry in each of their filmographies.
Yet … year after year, it kept finding people. A plethora of people.
(Please promise me you’ll read that line in your head with El Guapo’s voice from the movie?)
Some of the best things (I’m learning) don’t arrive all at once. They just keep quietly doing what they’re supposed to do and occassionally finding the right people. Little by little. Idea by idea. Person by person.
I do wish more things arrived loudly,
with confetti,
and immediate applause, vindication, approval, awards, and brownies.
But as we’ve long been told, the best things take time.
Last week I stood in a room of inspiring, but exhausted educators.
Six years ago I released a book.
Now, here they were, holding it.
We ate brownies (which is an important detail for you to know, because now you understand what a special room and moment this was, right?) I got to hear what the book has meant to them and hear about their students and learn about their challenges and about their wins and about their dreams and
it hit me …
the message in the bottle found its people.
Exactly where it was needed. In better ways than I could’ve imagined.
There are many days when I’ve been discouraged.
There are many days I’ve wondered if this book has really gone anywhere. Currently … thankfully … in a season of reminders that it’s been going everywhere that mattered.
I often worry that I’m not further along in my work. I make something or write something pretty much every day. Sometimes they find their way to people. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes they do find their way to people and there is little to no response. I keep making and writing and trying to show up, though.
I’m learning something very real and I want you to know it, too:
You are not behind.
You do not have to go viral
to change someone’s life.
You just have to be the kind of note
that keeps finding its way into someone’s hands
right when they need it.
The kind of person who keeps finding people just when they need it.
And if you’ve never heard of Becoming Better Grownups … that’s okay. It seems to prefer introductions that take their time.
Some books don’t go out into the world.
They wait.
And then, one day, they start showing up as people.
And maybe that’s how it was always meant to work.
If you want to read the book, it’s available through most any of your favorite booksellers. It’d be a great opportunity to support your local bookselling friends.
The audiobook is read by me, features music by Sleeping At Last, and includes cameo guest moments from my wife and kids.
If you’re the kind of person who gathers people around a table (or classroom or couch) to talk about meaningful things, there’s book club guides and other resources here.
please feel free to forward this email along to someone you think is awesome.
This is a beautiful one Brad. As someone whose book came out two weeks ago, I'm in that post-fanfare and press moment where I sit quietly at my desk and say, "Wonder what's going on with the book out there?" But I know it's doing it's thing, as you noted, making its way into the hands that need it, and that these things take time. Thank you for doing the work you do.
As someone writing a book with a little voice that keeps whispering, “will anyone even read this??” I could cry over this post. The timing. Timing! So unpredictable, but perfect in all its unexplainable ways. Thank you, Brad.